The first days of the treaty were a study in surreal bureaucracy. I was a sovereign power under house arrest, a natural disaster with a library card. The Tower of Weeping Stone, once a place of dusty exile, became a fortress-laboratory under dual occupancy. The lower floors remained Vane's domain of decaying specimens and gloomy theory. The upper floor and the sub-basement were ceded to me, reshaped into the "Chamber of Arrested States."
Headmaster Caelum's "periodic metaphysical scans" arrived like clockwork every third day. They were not performed by him personally, but by a rotating trio of senior faculty—an Angelic master of purification, a Draf rune-smith, and a human psychic auditor. They were polite, professional, and palpably terrified.
The process was an intricate violation. They would set up humming arrays of crystals and silver wire, creating a resonant field designed to map the contours of my existence. To them, I was not a body, but a wound in reality's fabric. Their scans sought to measure the depth, the stability, the "leakage" of my personal law into the surrounding world.
I did not resist. I allowed the probing energies to touch the surface of my stillness. But I controlled the interface. Using principles derived from the Stasis-Beetle graft and the null-seed's own perfect coherence, I constructed a "Metaphysical Damper"—a permanent, passive field around my core that only allowed non-threatening, surface-level data to be read. The scans reported a stable, if bizarre, entropic entity, contained and non-expanding. They saw the calm surface of my silent lake, not the impossible depths where a dead god's potential slept.
Vane observed these sessions with rapt attention, taking notes on how I manipulated the scan-data, a perverse form of collaborative espionage against our mutual overseer.
Resources began to flow, trickling through Vane's approved requisitions. No longer did I need to steal Corestones or Silent Wind Essence. I requested them, with detailed, soul-crushingly dry justifications.
*"Request: 10 grams of Chrono-Sand (VAU-512). Justification: For calibration of temporal resistance in localized stasis fields, to determine entropy's relationship with the fourth-dimensional axis. Expected outcome: Refined predictive models for degenerative event horizons."*
It was approved.
"Request: Access to the restricted text: 'The Symphony of Unmaking: A Treatise on Psionic Resonance in Dying Stars.' Justification: To cross-reference macroscopic entropic events with micro-scale personal integration, seeking universal constants of decay."
After a week's deliberation, it was approved, delivered under guard by two stone-faced sentinel-constructs.
My research shifted from theft and tool-making to fundamental theory. I was no longer trying to survive the next moment; I was trying to understand the grammar of endings. I spent days in the Chamber of Arrested States, using the Chrono-Sand to create tiny, temporary bubbles of slowed time, observing how magic, light, and thought behaved as they approached cessation. I dissected the principles of the Vault's wards, not to break them, but to understand their failure modes with a theoretician's dispassion.
I also began a new, deeply personal project: Mapping the Echo.
The void-datum was gone, consumed. But the memory of the first God-Touched fragment's scream, and the resonant signature of the dormant seed, were still archived in my mind. They were not active powers; they were historical records, sensory imprints of two different kinds of divine absence. By studying these "echoes," I hoped to triangulate the nature of the Creator God's failure, and by extension, the nature of the Void that was his failed creation.
It was archaeology of the apocalypse.
One afternoon, as I was calibrating a sand-timer filled with arrested seconds, Vane shuffled in, carrying a sealed scroll case stamped with the Headmaster's personal sigil—a stylized mountain peak wrapped in a coil of light.
"A… development," he said, his voice even drier than usual. He offered me the case.
I broke the seal. The parchment inside was not a resource approval or a scan schedule. It was an invitation. Or rather, a summons disguised as one.
To the Entity designated 'Stillness,' under the custodianship of Professor Dorian Vane,
Your unique perceptual capabilities may be of use in a matter of academic security. An anomaly has been detected in the Deep Archives, Section Omega. The nature of the anomaly is perceptual decay—a localized erosion of informational integrity in stored memories and historical records. Standard diagnostic and purification protocols have proven ineffective. You are requested, under escort, to examine the site and provide analysis. This is not a command, but a… consultation. Your cooperation would be noted favorably in ongoing treaty assessments.
— Headmaster Arcturus Caelum
I looked up at Vane. "A test."
"Obviously," he rasped. "He wants to see what you do. How you interact with a problem. Whether your 'understanding of endings' has practical, controllable application. Or if you are simply a bomb waiting to go off."
"And Section Omega?"
"Where they keep the dangerous knowledge," Vane said. "Not artifacts, but ideas. Forbidden histories, true names of dormant evils, transcripts of prophecies that drove listeners mad. The kind of information that corrupts by being known. If something is eroding those memories… it's a threat he cannot easily contain."
So. The sovereign was asking the plague to diagnose a sickness. It was a logical, ruthless move. Use the anomaly to study another anomaly.
"I will go," I said.
The escort arrived at dusk: the same three faculty who performed the scans, their apprehension now mingled with a grim sense of duty. We descended deep into the mountain, far below even the Vault, into tunnels so old the stone was seamless, worn smooth by time and powerful preservation magics that now smelled faintly of rot.
Section Omega was not a room. It was a concept given space. A vast, circular chamber whose walls were not stone, but solidified silence—a permanent quiet field meant to prevent the information within from "whispering" to the outside world. In the center of the chamber, floating in anti-gravitational fields, were hundreds of crystal orbs, each containing a shimmering, captured thought, a memory, a string of dangerous truth.
And in one corner of the chamber, the silence was sick.
A sphere about two meters in diameter hung in the air, its surface a milky, swirling grey instead of clear crystal. Around it, the solidified silence of the walls was decaying. Not crumbling, but becoming… vague. The absolute quiet was softening into a dampened murmur. The very definition of the space was losing coherence. It was a hole in the chamber's conceptual integrity, and it was spreading.
"This began three days ago," the Angelic faculty member, named Lethe, said, her voice hushed with reverence and fear. "The orb contains the transcribed last words of the Lich-King Vorlag, a psychic curse meant to unravel the listener's sanity. The preservation spells are intact, but the information inside is… fermenting. It is producing a byproduct of entropic noise that is degrading the chamber's foundational wards."
I approached the sphere. My new senses, attuned to decay and silence, saw it clearly. This wasn't magical corrosion. It was informational entropy. The curse wasn't trying to escape; it was dissolving, and its dissolution was a toxic process that broke down the structures around it. It was the memory of a scream, rotting, and its rot was contagious.
The old me would have been fascinated. The new me saw a simple equation. The noise was a form of energetic chaos. My stillness was the antidote to chaos.
"I can contain it," I stated, not asking for permission.
The escorts exchanged wary glances. "How?" asked the Draf rune-smith, Gorim.
"By imposing a deeper silence," I said. "Not on the orb. On the process of its decay. I will freeze the dissolution at its current state, arrest the entropic output."
"Will that not simply preserve the corruption?" Lethe questioned.
"It will quarantine it. The corrupted data will remain, but it will cease to be active. It will become a static flaw, like a fly in amber, rather than a spreading infection. You can then devise a method to safely excise the entire orb."
They deliberated in hushed tones. This was the heart of the test. Could I use my power with precision? With control? Or would I simply annihilate the orb and possibly damage the other priceless, dangerous memories around it?
Finally, Gorim nodded. "Proceed. Minimal intervention."
I didn't use the Stillness Engine. That was a sledgehammer. I extended my hand, focusing my will. I didn't target the orb or the decaying wards. I targeted the space between them—the medium through which the entropic noise was propagating.
I imposed a new rule: This space shall not transmit decay.
It was a subtle, surgical application. A law of non-interference for a specific type of energetic transfer.
The effect was immediate and invisible. The milky swirling in the orb didn't stop, but it ceased to influence its surroundings. The decay of the silent walls halted, the vague murmur freezing into a permanent, stable hush. The spread was stopped. The infection was contained in a bubble of perfect informational quarantine.
I held the effect for a full minute, letting the escorts scan, verify, their instruments chirping with confirmations of stabilized energy readings. Then, I released it. The imposed rule remained as a faint, permanent scar in the local laws—a testament to my work.
The orb still swirled with corrupted thought, but it was now harmless, isolated.
Lethe let out a slow breath. "It is… contained. As you said. The decay process is arrested." She looked at me, her luminous eyes holding a new, complicated emotion—not trust, but a kind of awed respect for a tool of terrible, precise utility.
Gorim grunted, a sound of professional approval. "Clean work. No collateral damage."
We returned to the surface in silence. The escorts reported directly to the Headmaster. I returned to the Tower of Weeping Stone.
The next day, my approved resource quotas were increased by fifteen percent. A note accompanied the updated ledger, written in Caelum's crisp, formal script:
'Consultation fee. Further such services may be requested. Continue your research.'
No thanks. No acknowledgment of personhood. A transaction. A payment for services rendered.
I was no longer just a sanctioned heretic. I was a contracted specialist. The plague had been hired to cure a disease. The treaty had just been monetized. My value was no longer just in my containment, but in my application. The path forward was no longer just about understanding the end, but about being the one who could, when necessary, enforce a very specific, very quiet version of it.