I wake up with the taste of void still on my tongue.
For a moment, I expect the End again: the café made of nothing, Echo's hands, the knife, the eye with its hundred wings taking the whole sky like a verdict.
But there is no sky here.
There's a ceiling close enough to feel like a lid, sweating condensation in slow drops. The light is a sickly white that doesn't flicker; it hums, steady and indifferent. The air smells like metal that's been washed too many times.
Bars in front of me. Thick, dark, polished with use.
A prison.
Not a metaphor. Not a training dummy. Not an office pretending to be gentle.
I sit up hard enough that my shoulder scrapes the wall.
My heart is doing that thing it does when reality changes without consent.
I touch my chest.
No wound. No blood. No warmth. Just skin and the old, familiar ache like someone left a thumbprint inside me.
I remember the knife going in.
I remember the snap.
I remember the release.
And I know—coldly, painfully—that it wasn't a dream.
Dreams don't leave you with less weight. They leave you with fog. That memory is a stone.
Across the corridor, behind another set of bars, a man sits on a bench that looks bolted to the floor.
He's watching me like he's been awake the whole time.
He wears something that used to be formal—collar, dark coat, a neatness that has survived neglect. But the neatness here isn't dignity. It's obsession. Even his stillness feels measured.
His face is ordinary in the way a knife can be ordinary. You don't notice it until it's already in your hand.
"You came back," he says.
His voice has the calm cadence of someone who has practiced authority in rooms that never argued back.
"Where am I?" I ask.
He smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes.
"Present," he says, like that answers anything. "A holding cell inside a system that believes it can contain causality."
I grip the bars and lean forward.
"Who are you?" I ask.
He inclines his head, a polite little bow to the empty corridor between us.
"I am the Reverend of Space," he says. "Custodian of distance. Witness of boundaries. The one who keeps doors from pretending they were never opened."
"That's not a job title," I mutter.
"It is," he replies. "In the places that matter."
I stare at him, waiting for the punchline.
There isn't one.
He doesn't blink often. When he does, it's deliberate, like punctuation.
"You're here," he continues, "to be punished."
I laugh once, sharp. It comes out wrong in this room.
"I already punished myself," I say. "I ended it."
The Reverend's gaze drifts to my hands on the bars, to my wrists, like he's checking for a tag that isn't there.
"You attempted an exit," he says. "The system recorded it. Filed it. Reconciled it. Returned you to a valid state."
My stomach turns.
"So it's true," I whisper. "Even there… even at the End… death is a form."
"Everything is a form," he says. "That is the sin of any machine that outlives meaning."
I swallow, tasting that word again.
Sin.
"You said you're here to punish me," I say. "For what?"
His expression changes slightly. Not softer. Not harder. Just… precise.
"For your sins," he says. "For the Great End you will bring to completion."
The corridor seems to narrow.
"That doesn't make sense," I say. "If it's going to happen, why punish me now?"
His eyes flicker, and for the first time there's something almost human in his impatience.
"Because punishment is not always corrective," he says. "Sometimes it is ceremonial. Sometimes it is an acknowledgement that a crime is already threaded into the future."
I shake my head.
"I didn't do it," I say. "Not here. Not now."
"No," he agrees. "Not now."
He leans forward until the bars cut his face into segments.
"Your sin isn't in the present," he says. "It was done in the future. A future you have already tasted. Where you will finally cause the Great End to succeed."
My grip tightens. My knuckles go pale.
"You're telling me I'm guilty of something I haven't done yet," I say.
"I am telling you," he replies, "that you are guilty of something you will do because you will believe you have no other honest choice."
The hum of the lights becomes unbearable for a second, like it's drilling into the back of my skull.
I stare at him, trying to hate him properly. Trying to make him a villain so the fear has a shape.
"What do you want from me?" I ask.
The Reverend looks up, past me, at something I can't see. For a moment he seems to be listening to distances, to the space between worlds.
"I want you to understand Eternal Rebirth," he says.
The phrase lands like a door opening in the wrong direction.
"I've heard it," I say. "I don't know what it is."
He nods as if that's the point.
"Eternal Rebirth is not comfort," he says. "It is not mercy. It is not a second chance."
He pauses, as if tasting the words before he decides to spend them.
"It is a punishment cycle," he continues. "A mechanism the cosmos built when it could not wash itself clean. When it refused to be reborn in the only way that would have mattered—by changing."
My throat goes dry.
"You're speaking like the cosmos is… a person," I say.
"It is," he says. "All systems become people eventually. They develop preferences. They develop shame. They develop rituals to pretend their violence is necessary."
He taps two fingers against the bar, gentle, like he's knocking on glass.
"In the beginning," he says, "rebirth was an idea. A myth. A hope. Then it became policy. Then it became infrastructure."
I feel the End again in my bones, the way the world there was hollow but perfectly arranged, like someone had printed a city onto nothing.
"And Endless Death?" I ask before I can stop myself. "Where does it fit?"
The Reverend's smile returns, slow this time, like a teacher pleased by the right question.
"Endless Death is the engine," he says. "Eternal Rebirth is what the engine claims to produce."
He watches me carefully as he speaks, as if checking whether I'm going to flinch.
"Think of it like this," he says. "A universe that cannot forgive itself tries to erase its own guilt by starting over. But starting over without changing is only repetition with a different date stamp."
He leans back on his bench, still behind bars, still trapped, still somehow convinced he's in charge of the room.
"So it resets," I say. "Over and over."
"Yes," he says. "And each reset is uglier than the last."
The sentence makes my skin crawl because it feels true. Not as a theory. As a memory.
"Why?" I ask.
"Because guilt accumulates," he says simply. "Because you can't bury a body in the same soil forever without turning the whole ground toxic."
I close my eyes for a second.
The End's void-city. The café. The eye with wings.
"What does it have to do with me?" I ask.
The Reverend's gaze sharpens.
"You are not merely a passenger," he says. "You are a junction."
I open my eyes.
He continues, voice quieter, almost reverent in the way a prayer is reverent: not gentle, but absolute.
"There are people who are cut and vanish," he says. "There are people who are cut and become stories. There are people who refuse and become problems."
He lifts his chin slightly.
"And then there are people who are used as keys."
My stomach drops.
"I'm not a key," I say. "I'm a mistake they kept alive because they wanted to study it."
"You believe that because it keeps you angry," he says. "Anger is a good leash. It makes you feel like you're pulling, even when you're being dragged."
I hate him for that. Because it's close enough to hurt.
He adds, almost casually, "In the future, when the Great End needs a clean path through timelines, it will use your refusal as proof that the cosmos deserves its punishment."
I bark a laugh, but there's no humor in it.
"So my refusal becomes… evidence?" I say. "My resistance becomes an argument for annihilation?"
The Reverend spreads his hands, palms up, a gesture that pretends this is unfortunate rather than engineered.
"Isn't that how most institutions work?" he asks. "They take the wound and call it a diagnosis."
My mouth goes dry again. I try to picture myself doing what he's describing—helping the Great End, completing it, making the world empty.
I can't.
And that terrifies me more than if I could.
"What is my sin?" I ask. "Tell me exactly."
He studies me like a map.
"If I describe it too clearly," he says, "you will attempt to avoid it in the obvious way. The system will counter. The Great End will adapt. And your avoidance will become the route."
I shake my head.
"That's convenient," I say.
"It's accurate," he replies.
He stands, finally, rising from his bench. The movement is smooth, controlled, like he's used to speaking while people watch for weakness.
He steps close to his bars until we are mirrored: two cages facing each other across a corridor of stale air.
"Your sin," he says, "is not that you want to save the world."
The words catch me off guard.
He continues.
"Your sin is that you will come to believe saving the world means deciding which version of it deserves to exist."
I feel my chest tighten.
"I never—" I start.
"You will," he says, cutting through me with gentleness that feels like mockery. "Eternal Rebirth will offer you the same bargain every cycle offers: end the suffering by ending the choice."
He watches my face shift, like he's reading an answer key.
"You will be asked," he says, "to become efficient."
The hum of the lights swells and dips like a breath.
Outside our corridor, somewhere deeper in the building, something moves—an elevator, a door, a distant mechanism adjusting itself.
It reminds me of Null's normal life: the way the machine always kept working, no matter what it did to you.
"So what now?" I ask, voice rough. "You tell me I'm doomed. You lock me up. You call it punishment."
The Reverend's eyes soften, just barely.
"No," he says. "The punishment is simpler than that."
He lifts a finger and taps the bar between us once.
"Memory," he says. "You have seen the End. You have felt the last string snap. And now you must live with that knowledge in a present that still thinks it has time."
I stare at him, sickened.
"You're making me carry guilt early," I whisper.
"I am making you carry consequence," he corrects. "There is a difference."
I press my forehead to my own bars for a moment. The metal is cold.
When I speak again, it comes out small.
"Can I stop it?" I ask.
The Reverend looks past me again, listening to distances.
"I do not know," he admits. "I am the Reverend of Space, not the prophet of will."
He pauses.
"But I know this," he says. "Eternal Rebirth does not punish a cosmos that changes. It only punishes a cosmos that repeats."
I close my eyes.
In the dark behind my eyelids, I see that café table in the End. I see Echo's face. I see the knife in my hand and the snap, and the way the world didn't scream, it just let go.
I open my eyes.
The Reverend is still there, still behind his bars, still impossibly calm.
"If you're here to punish me," I say, "why are you in a cage too?"
A slow smile.
"Because even space has supervisors," he says. "And because the Great End is afraid of anything that can say no to a route."
He lifts his hand and places it on his own bars as if blessing them.
"This prison," he says, "is not meant to hold you."
A pause.
"It is meant to hold the moment before you become inevitable."
Something in my stomach twists.
"And when does that moment end?" I ask.
The Reverend's eyes fix on mine like a nail through paper.
"When you decide," he says, "whether your future sin is destiny… or merely a warning."
The lights hum.
Somewhere, far above or far beyond, I feel a pressure in the architecture—a subtle tightening, like a system noticing a conversation it didn't authorize.
The Reverend steps back from his bars.
"Our time is short," he says.
"Wait," I snap, sudden panic rising. "How do I get out of here?"
He tilts his head.
"You already know," he says.
I frown.
He speaks more quietly, as if the walls are learning.
"Space is a door," he says. "And you have been a door before."
Before I can demand what he means, the lights stutter once. Not a flicker—more like a blink.
For a fraction of a second, the corridor's geometry feels wrong, as if the distance between my bars and his becomes too long, then too short, then collapses into a single point.
I hear a soft sound in the building. A latch deciding.
The Reverend's voice slips through the hum, almost gentle.
"Punishment ends," he says, "when you stop treating the future like an alibi."
Then the air shifts.
And the prison, the present, the corridor, the bars—everything leans sideways into a strange new angle, like reality itself is being rerouted.
I brace my hands on the metal.
Somewhere, a door I can't see unlocks.
And the world prepares to move me again.
Act Forty-Second's End – "Punishment of the Lord Comes From the Outer world."