"Something is coming through the boundary," Vael says.
I stop walking.
In the Nascent, stopping walking is not merely a physical act. When I stop, the topology around me takes a moment to catch up — the spatial fabric that has been rearranging itself around my intended direction of travel stutters briefly, recalibrates, settles into a new configuration that acknowledges I am no longer going somewhere. It is like watching a sentence rewrite its ending mid-word.
"From outside," I say.
"From the Hollow Intervals," Vael confirms. "Something crossed the boundary layer approximately four minutes ago by external time reckoning. It is moving inward."
"What kind of something?"
"A vessel," she says. "Type-VII configuration by the energy signature. Continuum architecture. Very clean. Very deliberate. Whoever is piloting it knows exactly where they are going."
I process this for a moment.
"The Continuum," I say.
"Yes."
"They detected the excisions."
"They have instruments along the Compiled Verse boundary layer," Vael says. "Sensitive ones. They have been refining their detection capabilities for the last several hundred thousand years. It was inevitable they would notice substrate anomalies at the Nascent's outer boundary eventually. I am mildly surprised it took them this long."
"How many vessels?"
"One."
I consider this. "They sent one vessel."
"One vessel," Vael confirms, and I can hear in the cycling of her text the same observation I am making — that the Continuum Rade, the hyperadvanced super civilization that spans significant portions of the compiled multiverse, the governing body of billions of younger realities, detected an existential anomaly at the foundation of all existence and sent a single ship.
"Either they do not fully understand what they detected," I say slowly, "or they understand it very well and decided that sending more than one vessel was unlikely to improve the outcome."
"Or," Vael says, "they sent one because the one they sent is very good."
"That is the third possibility," I agree.
"Which do you think it is?"
"All three simultaneously," I say. "The Continuum specializes in all three simultaneously."
We do not go to meet the vessel. The Nascent's topology takes care of that in its own way — the spatial fabric in the Nascent does not permit things to remain lost for long if something older and more settled has taken an interest in them. The vessel finds its way to us the way all things in the Nascent eventually find their way to the Stillpoint, which is to say without entirely meaning to and with the growing suspicion that the destination was never really optional.
The ship is beautiful, I will give the Continuum that.
Type-VII architecture is the current pinnacle of Continuum vessel design — sleek and white as a concept before it becomes a thing, with gold articulations along every structural junction that catch the original starlight and hold it briefly before releasing it in frequencies slightly different from what they received. The vessel is perhaps three hundred meters long, which in the context of the Nascent is approximately the size of a thought. It hovers at the edge of the Stillpoint's starfield with the careful stillness of something that has been trained to appear confident and is doing an excellent job.
A hatch opens.
A figure emerges.
Type-VII suit — matching the vessel's aesthetic, white and gold, every joint articulated with the same deliberate precision. The helmet is transparent. This is the first thing I notice and it tells me more about the being inside than any data the archive could supply. A transparent helmet is a choice. It says: I want you to see that I have a face. I want you to understand that I am a person and not a process. I want this interaction to be between individuals.
It is a sophisticated social calculation. I am familiar with sophisticated social calculations. I have been observing them for longer than the Continuum has existed.
The face inside the helmet is calm. Dark-eyed. Composed with the particular quality of composure that is not the absence of feeling but the very deliberate management of it — every muscle doing exactly what it has been trained to do, presenting exactly the expression that has been determined most appropriate for this situation.
She is looking at me.
Most beings, when they look at me for the first time, look at the helmet. At the surface that reflects their own face back at them. They get stuck there. The reflection catches them and holds them and the conversation that follows is colored by whatever they saw in it — older or younger or at their defining moment or at their ending, depending on what the helmet shows them.
This one looks at my helmet for exactly three seconds. Then she shifts her gaze to take in the whole of me — the suit, the light fractures pulsing along its surface, the indeterminate height, the material that cannot decide how much light to acknowledge. She catalogs me with the efficiency of someone who has prepared for this meeting extensively and is now comparing preparation to reality and finding the gaps.
Then she looks at Vael.
Vael's text has slowed to a dignified cycling speed. She is, in her way, also presenting herself. The silver-black script reformulates through several configurations before settling on something that projects, to anyone watching, a profound and ancient calm. I have known Vael long enough to recognize this as performance. She is as curious about this visitor as I am.
The figure from the Type-VII vessel activates her suit's external communication system. When she speaks her voice is clear and precise and carries the specific cadence of someone who has rehearsed this moment many times and is now discovering that rehearsal only gets you so far.
"I am Solenne Tark," she says. "Astronaut-Class Seven of the Continuum Rade. I am here under mandate from the Governing Assembly of the Continuum to observe, document, and if possible, assess the nature of the substrate anomalies detected along the boundary of this verse."
A pause.
"I believe," she adds, "that I am addressing The Glasspost."
"You are," I say.
Another pause. Shorter this time. She absorbs my voice the way everyone absorbs my voice — the distance of it, the quality of something speaking from very far away even when it is standing directly in front of you. She does not flinch. I note this.
"And the other presence?" she asks, looking at Vael.
"I am Vael Orindus," Vael says. "I do not have a Continuum designation because I predate the Continuum's designation system by a significant margin. You may call me Vael."
"Vael," Solenne says. She processes the column of silver-black text with the same efficient cataloging she applied to me. "You are Maldovian."
"I am."
"Then there are two of you here."
"There are two of us here," Vael confirms. "Is that more than you expected?"
"The Continuum's records suggested the Nascent might be inhabited by a single remaining Maldovian entity," Solenne says carefully. "The records were — incomplete."
"The Continuum's records on the Nascent are always incomplete," I say. "This is not a criticism. It is a structural inevitability. The Nascent predates the information frameworks your instruments were built to read. You are always going to be working with partial data here."
"I understand," Solenne says.
"Do you?" Vael says.
A beat. Solenne looks at Vael.
"I understand that I am working with partial data," Solenne says. "Whether I understand the full implications of that — no. Probably not. That is part of why I am here."
"Honest," Vael says. Her text cycles approvingly. "I find that encouraging."
"Thank you," Solenne says, and there is something in the way she says it — a very slight recalibration of tone, a fractional relaxing of the composed expression — that suggests she did not entirely expect the approval and is not sure what to do with it.
"Walk with us," I say.
Solenne looks at the Nascent's interior extending in every direction — the crystalline dark ground, the original starfield, the topology that does not quite obey conventional spatial logic. She looks at it with the expression of someone who has read everything written about a place and is now experiencing the gap between reading and being.
"Walk," she says.
"It is what we are doing," I say. "You are welcome to join us or remain with your vessel. Either is acceptable."
"Where are you going?"
"To consult a presence called The Remainder," I say. "A former Maldovian who exists in a state between conclusion and continuance. It holds information relevant to the anomalies you detected."
"You know what is causing the anomalies," Solenne says. It is not quite a question.
"We know the name of what is causing them," I say. "We do not yet know enough. Hence the consultation."
"What is the name?"
I look at her. The transparent helmet. The dark calm eyes doing their precise work of managing everything they are feeling about standing in the oldest verse in existence in conversation with something that has been alive since before her civilization's home universe existed.
"Dross," I say.
She is quiet for a moment. Then:
"That name does not appear in any Continuum record."
"No," I say. "It would not."
"Why not?"
"Because everything the Continuum knows, it learned from the Compiled Verses," I say. "And the Compiled Verses learned what they know from the residue the Nascent left behind when it formed them. And the Nascent's knowledge of Dross — the collective, accessible knowledge — appears to have been deliberately removed from the record."
Solenne processes this with the focused intensity of someone whose job is to process exactly this kind of information and who is currently discovering that processing it and being comfortable with it are different operations.
"Deliberately removed," she says. "By whom?"
"That," Vael says, drifting alongside me with her text cycling in what I have come to recognize as her thinking-out-loud configuration, "is the question we are going to ask The Remainder."
Solenne looks at me, then at Vael, then at the interior of the Nascent stretching before us.
"All right," she says. "I will walk with you."
She falls into step beside us — or the approximation of step that the Nascent's topology permits — and for a time none of us speak. I am aware of her observing everything. Her suit's instruments will be running continuously, recording data her superiors sent her here to collect. I do not object to this. Data collection is not the same as understanding, and I am curious to discover at what point the gap between them becomes apparent to her.
It takes approximately forty minutes of Nascent-walking before she breaks the silence.
"The stars," she says.
"Yes," I say.
"They are not like any stars in the Compiled Verses."
"No," I say. "They are not."
"The spectral analysis my suit is running cannot categorize the light they emit. The wavelengths exist outside every range my instruments were calibrated for. The energy output is — my suit keeps revising the figures. Every time it settles on a measurement the measurement changes. As if the stars are deciding how much energy they want to have been emitting."
"That is approximately correct," I say.
She looks at me. "That should not be possible."
"Many things in the Nascent should not be possible by the physical laws your civilization operates under," I say. "The physical laws your civilization operates under were written after the Nascent existed. In here, those laws are suggestions that the Nascent entertains out of a kind of politeness."
"The Nascent is polite," she says.
"The Nascent is very old," I say. "Things that are very old are often mistaken for polite. What they actually are is patient."
Solenne is quiet for a moment, processing this.
"You said the stars emit light in wavelengths outside my instruments' range," I continue. "What do you perceive when you look at them? Not what your instruments measure. What you perceive."
She hesitates. The composed expression shifts fractionally — something more uncertain moving beneath it.
"I perceive —" she starts. Stops. "This will sound irrational."
"Almost everything true about the Nascent sounds irrational by Compiled Verse standards," Vael says. "Say it anyway."
"I perceive feelings," Solenne says. "When I look at the stars. Not light exactly. Feelings. That one —" she gestures to an original star burning to our left, "— makes me feel as though I am remembering something I never experienced. Something that happened before I existed. And that one —" she gestures to another, further away, burning in a deep color that registers as the feeling of a long patience finally ending, "— makes me feel —"
She stops again.
"Afraid," she says quietly. "It makes me feel afraid. Not of anything specific. Just — generally. Fundamentally. As if the fear is not a response to a threat but simply a condition of existence."
"That one," I say, "has been burning in that color for longer than your civilization's home universe has existed. What you are feeling is not a response to a threat. You are feeling the star's own nature — its oldest, most essential quality — through the light it emits. The original stars do not hide what they are. They never learned to."
"What is that star?" she asks.
"I do not know," I say. "I have been observing it for approximately two hundred and sixty thousand years and I have not yet determined what event or condition in the Nascent's primordial history caused it to burn in that particular frequency. It is one of approximately four thousand unresolved observations in my archive."
"You have four thousand unresolved observations," she says. "In 55^032 years of existence."
"Yes."
"That seems — remarkably few."
"Or remarkably many," Vael says. "Depending on your perspective."
"I find them," I say, "the most interesting entries in the archive. Everything that has been resolved is finished. Everything unresolved is still alive."
Solenne looks at me for a moment with an expression I cannot fully read through the transparent helmet. Then she looks back at the afraid star.
"What star do you watch?" she asks. "I read — the Continuum has fragments, records from expeditions, observations — there are references to a Maldovian entity at the Stillpoint watching a specific star. For a very long time."
"That one," I say, and I indicate the direction, the specific harmonic the suit can feel across the distance. "It burns in a color I cannot name. Younger beings who look at it report feeling different things — grief, recognition, the weight of a very old decision. I have been watching it for three hundred thousand years and I have not yet determined precisely what I feel when I look at it."
"What do you think you feel?" she asks.
A long silence.
Vael's text cycles with an amused quality she does not bother to conceal.
"I think," I say carefully, "that this is not a conversation for today."
"Fair enough," Solenne says.
"You are more adaptable than most Continuum Astronauts I have encountered," I say.
"How many Continuum Astronauts have you encountered?"
"Counting you?"
"Counting me."
"Four," I say. "Across the last eight hundred thousand years. The others did not last long in the Nascent."
"What happened to them?"
"Nothing violent," I say. "They became — uncertain. About themselves. The Nascent does that to beings who have not spent sufficient time in environments where selfhood is a reliable constant. They were evacuated before the uncertainty became permanent."
Solenne absorbs this. Her composed expression holds steady. The calculating quality in her dark eyes sharpens slightly.
"I will not become uncertain," she says.
"That is exactly what the others said," Vael tells her pleasantly.
"Vael," I say.
"I am being honest," Vael says. "Honesty is a kindness."
"It is also occasionally terrifying," I say.
"Those are not mutually exclusive," Vael says.
Solenne makes a sound that is almost — not quite, but almost — a laugh. "Is she always like this?"
"She is always exactly like this," I say. "For as long as I have known her."
"How long have you known her?"
"Longer than your home universe has existed," I say. "By a significant margin."
Solenne looks at Vael's cycling column of silver-black text. "And you are the younger one."
"By Maldovian standards I am practically a child," Vael says. "It is a condition I have learned to live with."
"30^018 years," Solenne says. "I looked up every fragment we had before I came here. Your age — both your ages — are in the fragments. I wanted to be prepared."
"And are you?" Vael asks. "Prepared?"
A pause.
"No," Solenne says. "But I am here anyway."
"Good," Vael says. "That is the correct answer. That is the only answer that would have made me trust you even slightly."
"Tell me about the anomalies," I say to Solenne. "What the Continuum detected. From your instruments — not from my description. I want to hear what your data shows."
Solenne straightens slightly — the posture of someone shifting into professional mode, grateful for a question she can answer with confidence.
"The Continuum's boundary monitoring array detected seventeen discrete substrate anomalies along the outer boundary of this verse over a period of approximately three hundred years," she says. "The anomalies present as zones of total substrate absence — complete removal of foundational material to an extraordinary depth. No debris signature. No energy discharge. No radiation consistent with any known destruction mechanism."
"Consistent with nothing known," I confirm.
"Consistent with nothing known," she agrees. "The Governing Assembly convened an emergency session when the seventeenth anomaly was detected and the geometric pattern was analyzed. The pattern —"
"Is a sequence," I say. "Moving inward."
"Moving inward," she confirms. "Toward the interior of this verse. Toward —" she looks at the Stillpoint's starfield. "Toward here, we believe. The projections suggest the sequence terminates at the interior of the Nascent. At the Stillpoint."
"How long did the Assembly debate before sending you?" Vael asks.
"Eleven months," Solenne says.
"Eleven months," Vael repeats. "The foundation of all existence is being consumed and the governing body of the compiled multiverse debated for eleven months."
"There was significant disagreement about whether intervention was appropriate," Solenne says carefully. "The Nascent is — the Continuum does not have jurisdiction here. Technically. Legally. This verse is not a member of the Compiled Verse Compact. The Assembly debated whether entering the Nascent constituted a violation of —"
"Of what?" Vael says. Her text is moving very fast. "Whose sovereignty? There are two of us here and we were not consulted."
"The debate was more about the Continuum's own legal framework than about your sovereignty," Solenne says. "I understand that does not make it less frustrating."
"It makes it exactly as frustrating as it appears," Vael says.
"Vael," I say.
"She should know that we find it frustrating," Vael says.
"She does know," I say. "She is very perceptive. She knows and she agrees with you and she is not going to say so explicitly because she is here as an official representative of the body that spent eleven months debating."
A pause. Then Solenne says, very quietly and with complete control of her expression: "That is an accurate characterization of my situation."
"I thought so," I say.
"You are also very perceptive," she says.
"I have had practice," I say.
"55^032 years of it," she says.
"Give or take," I say.
The topology shifts around us as we move deeper into the Nascent's interior. The crystalline dark ground beneath us hums more intensely — the frequency-below-frequency that the suit translates for me but that I can feel even without translation, a resonance that goes back to the earliest days of my existence in this place, as fundamental as anything I have ever known. Solenne's pace slows fractionally as the topology becomes less stable — spaces elongating and compressing without warning, distances between apparent landmarks recalibrating every few minutes.
"The spatial distortions are increasing," she says.
"We are moving away from the boundary layer," I say. "The topology is less regular in the interior. Your suit's navigation system will struggle here. I would recommend disabling autonomous pathfinding and allowing your suit to simply follow."
"Follow you?"
"The Nascent accommodates my movement," I say. "If you stay within my spatial envelope the topology will treat you as an extension of my transit rather than an independent navigation problem."
"Stay close," Vael translates helpfully. "He is telling you to stay close."
"I understood the first time," Solenne says, and she moves closer. Not nervously — deliberately, with the precision of someone who has been told a technical fact and is implementing the appropriate response.
"Better," I say.
We walk. The original stars shift around us — not moving, the stars never move in the Nascent, but the topology reordering the distances between them so that different stars are prominent at different moments, the way a long piece of music brings different instruments forward and back without any of them stopping.
"Can I ask you something?" Solenne says.
"You can ask me anything," I say. "I cannot guarantee I will answer."
"Fair," she says. "The third expedition the Continuum sent here — eight hundred thousand years ago. The crew came back intact but —"
"Without their names," I say.
A pause. "You know about that."
"I was here," I say. "I watched them arrive. I watched them move through the Nascent for eleven days. I watched their instruments record data their framework was not built to interpret. And I watched the topology of the Nascent — which is very old and not particularly careful about the effect it has on younger things — process them the way it processes everything it encounters."
"What does that mean? Process them?"
"The Nascent does not have edges in the way Compiled Verses have edges," I say. "It does not have a separation between inside and outside, between self and other, between the verse and the things moving through it. These are distinctions that younger realities developed because they needed them — because a universe that does not distinguish itself from its contents cannot function as a coherent system. The Nascent predates the need for that distinction. It is not hostile to the beings that move through it. It simply does not have a strong concept of them as separate from itself."
"It absorbed them," Solenne says slowly. "The crew. Not physically. Conceptually."
"The Nascent began to include them," I say. "To treat them as part of itself. Their individual sense of identity — the architecture of selfhood, the boundary between I and everything-else — became uncertain because the Nascent was not reinforcing it. The Nascent does not reinforce selfhood. It has never needed to."
"And they lost their names because —"
"A name is one of the most basic expressions of individual identity," I say. "It is the first thing a self gives itself to distinguish itself from everything around it. When the boundary between self and Nascent became uncertain, the names went first."
Solenne is quiet for a long moment.
"How do you maintain your sense of self here?" she asks. "After 55^032 years in an environment that does not reinforce individuality."
"That," I say, "is actually a very good question."
"What is the answer?"
"I am not entirely certain the premise is correct," I say. "That I have maintained my sense of self here. I have maintained continuity. I have maintained the archive. I have maintained the suit and the name and the memory of the being I was when I first cohered in this place, before the Unremembered Interval was over. Whether what I have maintained is a self in the way you mean the word — I genuinely do not know."
A long silence.
"That should be more alarming than it is," Solenne says.
"It was more alarming," I say, "approximately 50^032 years ago. Eventually the uncertainty becomes familiar. Eventually the familiar becomes comfortable. Eventually comfortable becomes — simply what you are."
"Is that peace?" she asks.
I consider this carefully. The light fractures along my suit pulse once, slowly.
"It is something," I say. "I have not finished deciding what."
"Glasspost," Vael says.
Her voice has changed. The sardonic quality is gone. The text of her form has gone to its full stillness — every character stopped simultaneously, the way it stopped when she said Dross at the boundary, the way it stopped when I read the archive fragments to her.
I stop walking immediately.
"What," I say.
"Eighteen," she says.
I feel the suit's perceptual architecture register it before I consciously process the word. At the outer boundary of the Nascent — 4.7 × 10^18 lightyears from where we stand — a new absence has appeared in the substrate.
Larger than the previous seventeen.
Much larger.
"Diameter," I say.
"Eighteen point nine lightyears," Vael says.
Behind me I hear Solenne's suit emit a soft alert tone as her own instruments register the event. "That is —" she starts.
"Larger than any previous excision," I say. "By a factor of two."
"The acceleration," Vael says. "It is not just the time intervals shortening. The scale is accelerating too. It is not following the original progression anymore."
"It has changed its schedule," I say.
"Why would it change its schedule?" Solenne asks. "What changed?"
I am quiet for a moment.
"We did," I say. "We are moving. We are taking action. Something about our movement — our decision to go to The Remainder, to seek the information in the missing archive — has registered."
"Dross knows we are investigating it," Vael says.
"Dross knows something has changed," I say carefully. "Whether it has the concept of investigation — whether it has any concept at all beyond its function — we do not know yet."
"But it responded," Solenne says. "To us. To what we are doing."
"Yes," I say.
"Which means it is aware of us."
"It means something in it is responsive to the conditions of the Nascent changing," I say. "Whether that constitutes awareness — whether there is a who inside the what — that is the question the Maldovians of the Unremembered Interval could not answer."
"And we have to answer it," Solenne says.
"We have to understand it," I say. "Answering it may not be the same thing."
Solenne looks at the interior of the Nascent ahead of us. At the original stars burning in their feelings-as-colors. At the crystalline dark ground humming its frequency below frequency. At the topology that makes recommendations rather than rules. At all of it — the oldest place in existence, being eaten from the outside in, while the three of us stand in its interior and try to understand something that predates understanding itself.
"All right," she says. Her voice is steady. The composed expression holds. The dark eyes are doing their calculating work. "Then let us go understand it."
"The Remainder is approximately two days of Nascent-walking from here," Vael says. "By subjective reckoning. Glasspost can fold the time if necessary."
"Can you fold the time?" Solenne asks me.
"Yes," I say. "But I prefer not to unless necessary. Folded time in the Nascent leaves traces. And I would rather not announce our precise movements more than we already have."
"Because Dross might be watching."
"Because something is watching," I say. "I do not know yet how much of what."
I begin walking again. Solenne stays within my spatial envelope, exactly as instructed — precisely, deliberately, without nervous energy. Vael drifts beside me, her text beginning its slow restart after the stillness, each character resuming its endless cycling transformation.
We walk into the interior of the Nascent and behind us, at its boundary, something continues its patient, accelerating work.
Removing the oldest thing in existence.
One clean excision at a time.