The Tesseted Expanse was never meant to be walked.

  It was not nd. It was not dream. It was a wound.

  A geography of contradiction—where logic had colpsed in on itself so many times that even the wind forgot its direction.

  Askariel emerged from the corridor of fme.

  Behind him, Ais stepped out cautiously, her bdes humming. She reached down, picked up a stone—then blinked as it became a feather in her hand.

  “Yeah… we’re here.”

  The Tesseted Expanse stretched out in impossible shapes: a desert where some shadows moved opposite their objects, mountains that rotated in the sky like teeth, rivers that forgot they were rivers halfway through their course.

  The ground beneath them didn’t feel solid.

  It felt like a thought trying to make sense of itself.

  Askariel knelt, touching the fragmented soil.

  The cube pulsed.

  And somewhere—at the center of this chaos— the Null Prophet was speaking.

  Not in sound. Not in light. But in order.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  They moved through the shifting ndscape, guided by ripples in the logic-stream. Every few steps, the world tried to stabilize— a tree sprouting and dying in seconds, a word forming in the air, then crumbling to silence.

  They saw other travelers. Most were frozen mid-movement—caught in recursive loops.

  One woman ughed forever in perfect rhythm, tears never falling. A man walked in a circle so slowly, his feet no longer touched the ground.

  These were victims of failed memory corrections—lives caught between what they were and what they were rewritten to be.

  Then they saw it.

  A tower.

  Impossible geometry. Bck and white spirals folding inwards.

  It wasn’t built.

  It was decred.

  And at its peak, draped in yered robes of static and scripture— stood the Null Prophet.

  Its face was an absence.

  A pce where identity had been overwritten so many times that no new version could take hold.Its voice came in pulses, not speech.

  Every pulse:A command.A probability.A narrowing of potential.

  Askariel could feel it: the Expanse was stabilizing. Not by healing.

  But by being forced into Thanatarchic logic.

  Ais whispered, “If it finishes its sermon, this pce becomes just another part of the script.”

  Askariel stepped forward, fire smoldering in his wake.“No.”“It becomes another prison.”

  He raised his hand.The cube shone—briefly shifting between forgotten nguages, aligning with the Expanse’s fracture lines.

  “Null Prophet!” Askariel shouted.“I see your script. I see your structure. I see your lies made logical.”

  “You wear prophecy like a chain.But prophecy without freedom is just obedience wearing makeup.”

  The Null Prophet turned.

  The air rippled.

  And suddenly—Askariel was not alone.

  He saw… himself.

  But not as he was.

  A version twisted by regret. Clothed in ash, kneeling before the Architect of Correction. Face hollow, voice a whisper.

  “I tried,” the broken Askariel said.“I gave them fire. And the world burned… too far.”

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  The Null Prophet pulsed:

  “Here is your future.The one where you loved them too much.Where you believed they could survive the truth.Where your fire consumed more than it saved.”

  The cube began to shake violently.

  This was no mere vision.

  This was a weaponized version of potential. A paradox made manifest. A future being forced into the present—to overwrite Askariel with his worst self.

  Ais stepped in front of him.“You don’t get to rewrite him,” she said.“Not while I remember who he really is.”

  She threw a bde.

  It passed through the broken Askariel— but the vision faltered.

  Because in that moment, memory resisted probability.

  Askariel stepped forward.

  The cube quieted. His fme steadied.

  And he said:

  “I will burn futures that pretend to be fate.”“I will unwrite prophecy by living the truth.”“You are not a prophet. You are a threat vector pretending to be meaning.”

  He reached into the cube.

  Not for a weapon. But for a sentence.

  One he hadn’t dared speak since he became Askariel.

  A phrase too dangerous to say before the world was ready.

  But now—it was ready.

  And the Expanse leaned in to hear it.

  “There is no singur truth.Only memory we refuse to let die.”

  The Null Prophet shuddered. The tower fractured. The world… breathed.

  And the Expanse rebelled.

  Rivers rewound. Skies cracked and rewrote themselves into stars. The looped people awoke, gasping as reality reasserted their possibility.

  The Null Prophet fled into silence, folding into itself like a corrupted sentence.

  It would return.

  But not today.

  Not here.

  Ais turned to him.

  “Did we win?”

  Askariel looked at the sky.

  “No.”

  “We just convinced the world to say ‘maybe’ again.”