Xel'Varn screwed the latest experiment into the projector. Instantly, a video feed bloomed into the air, flickering just above the control dais.
A spherical world rotated slowly within the projection—lush green continents, oceans churning, a faint atmospheric shimmer. But the image wobbled—not from any technical fault. No, it was thinking. The feed wasn't just a passive display; it was a live link to an active simulation.
"Subject G-3324 responding with non-compliant thought patterns," the feed intoned.
Xel'Varn squinted. The species inside—bipeds, carbon-based, painfully emotional—had begun deviating from their narrative arc. Again.
He tapped a claw against the glass interface. The AI chimed politely.
"Query?"
"Replay the moment of deviation," he said. "Zoom in on Sector 14, upper Western Plate."
The projection rippled and surged forward. Inside, a girl—not even into her second decade by human reckoning—was sketching symbols onto a wall. Symbols that weren't part of the seed design. Worse: she was recognizing the structure. She was drawing the Watchers.
"Impossible," Xel'Varn muttered. "No observational leakage. No cracks in the containment."
But there they were: spiral glyphs echoing the Collector's own registry marks.
He reached toward the override node—
And paused.
Because—just for a moment—the girl in the simulation looked up. Straight through the lens. As if she could see him.
And smiled.
Shrieking and hiding behind the floating chairs the Watchers used, they peeked out with glimmering obsidian eyes and twitching translucent tendrils. Their forms shimmered in and out of visible geometry, like half-finished thoughts.
"We can't let this anomaly go any further!" hissed Lii'Tch, one of the senior observers, coiling tighter around her perch. "This is the third deviation in this experiment. Three! That violates breach protocol Kesh-Thon-Eclipse. We must shut it down!"
A wave of murmurs—chirps, rustles, and flanging clicks of thought-pulses—filled the chamber.
Then came a lower voice. Smooth. Confident. Curious.
Xarthuun the Cold-Bound, no longer reclining, unspooled lazily from a resting coil near the central aperture. His form stretched from fluid lines into something massive and vaguely humanoid. Segments hardened and softened in sequence, like sculpted plasma breathing.
"No, no," he crooned, now fully coalesced into an angular silhouette draped in psionic flickers. "Let it continue. The biped has come this far. It's getting… entertaining. A curiosity. A game piece."
Another Watcher, tall and draped in star-threaded bio-silk, tapped a flickering limb against the glass projection. "Entertainment? What if it spreads? If it's breached the veil between script and sense, what's to stop it from escalating?"
Xarthuun's form swelled slightly, amused. "Then let it. I've grown weary of the static ones. If this thing has teeth… let it bite."
The chamber fell quiet.
Then the projection shimmered again.
The girl was no longer drawing.
She was writing.
In Watcher code.
Right across the walls of her dimension.
One word blinked into view on the main console, translated crudely for their understanding:
"I see you."
Xarthuun shimmered into full presence, folding out from layered dimensions like silk unspooling in reverse. His mass warped and buckled before stabilizing into a loose giant of blacklight and shifting fractals. Tendrils drifted lazily through the gravity-neutral mist of the chamber core, tracing gentle spirals across the containment shell. He handled it like a sacred Zoeg node—as if it held not just a world, but a temptation.
"Ohhh, do you now, little one?" he purred, voice vibrating through the bones of the chamber. "You see us. How curious… such a small little creature, squishy and finite, yet somehow able to peer through the Veil."
He tilted his cluster of luminous thought-filaments toward the others, a grin forming—not on a face, but across a shifting band of phosphorescent runes.
"Us, of all things. Now isn't that… interesting."
Lii'Tch spat static. "It must be shut down! This is not evolution—it's infection. Contamination!"
"Or revelation," Xarthuun murmured, pressing a tendril softly to the orb. Inside, the girl now stood in the center of a drawn sigil, eyes glazed in half-trance. A storm brewed overhead—both literal and metaphysical.
"She is tuning in," he continued. "She hears us not as voices, but as rhythm. Instinct. Echo. She resonates."
Another Watcher jittered into partial coherence. "Containment breach will invalidate the entire shelf. Hundreds of simulations. Do you want that consequence in your neural vault, Xarthuun?"
Xarthuun didn't reply immediately. He leaned closer to the orb.
Inside, the girl looked up again.
This time, she whispered a word.
The sound crossed planes.
Xarthuun heard it.
So did the chamber.
She said:
"Xarthuun."
Xarthuun's laughter rolled out like a tidal collapse across dimensions.
It wasn't sound.
It was pressure.
It rippled through atomic bonds. Trees on Earth bent slightly with no wind. Animals shivered and turned their heads skyward. In other worlds, skies split just a little, and priests fell to their knees, frothing prophecies.
The lower forms—those bound by physics—felt only an odd breeze, or a subtle chill down their spine.
But the higher forms—archons, trans-thought intelligences, inner-plane nomads—felt dread. The kind that reeked of change. The kind that whispered: Xarthuun is interested.
The chamber lights dimmed—not from malfunction, but from reverence.
"Ahahaha! You can speak!!" Xarthuun boomed, spinning slowly, mad with delight. "Marvellous. Simply magnificent!"
He pressed his tendrils tighter to the orb, making the sigils inside flicker.
"Little creature," he said, now almost whispering, "who gave you that name?"
The chamber erupted into chaos.
Watchers blinked in and out of existence mid-panic. Emergency protocols flared across subspace. Several junior observers began the ritual for Data Destruction, just in case. Others pleaded in the old tongues, begging the Fracture Council to intervene.
But no one dared interrupt Xarthuun.
Because they all saw it.
He was no longer fluctuating. No longer drifting.
His great swirling gaze had condensed into fixed mass.
He was focused.
He was choosing.
Inside the orb, the girl stood with eyes glazed over, blood from her nose trailing into the sigils she'd carved.
She looked up again and said, calm and clear:
"My name is Alice."
The orb pulsed.
So did Xarthuun.
He hissed, amused. "A name with no power."
Then, louder—deeper—etched into every surface of the chamber like heat branding the walls of the multiverse:
"I name her. I claim her."
"From this moment onward… she is mine."
Xel'Varn screwed the latest experiment into the projector. Instantly, a video feed bloomed into the air, flickering just above the control dais.
A spherical world rotated slowly within the projection—lush green continents, oceans churning, a faint atmospheric shimmer. But the image wobbled—not from any technical fault. No, it was thinking. The feed wasn't just a passive display; it was a live link to an active simulation.
"Subject G-3324 responding with non-compliant thought patterns," the feed intoned.
Xel'Varn squinted. The species inside—bipeds, carbon-based, painfully emotional—had begun deviating from their narrative arc. Again.
He tapped a claw against the glass interface. The AI chimed politely.
"Query?"
"Replay the moment of deviation," he said. "Zoom in on Sector 14, upper Western Plate."
The projection rippled and surged forward. Inside, a girl—not even into her second decade by human reckoning—was sketching symbols onto a wall. Symbols that weren't part of the seed design. Worse: she was recognizing the structure. She was drawing the Watchers.
"Impossible," Xel'Varn muttered. "No observational leakage. No cracks in the containment."
But there they were: spiral glyphs echoing the Collector's own registry marks.
He reached toward the override node—
And paused.
Because—just for a moment—the girl in the simulation looked up. Straight through the lens. As if she could see him.
And smiled.
Shrieking and hiding behind the floating chairs the Watchers used, they peeked out with glimmering obsidian eyes and twitching translucent tendrils. Their forms shimmered in and out of visible geometry, like half-finished thoughts.
"We can't let this anomaly go any further!" hissed Lii'Tch, one of the senior observers, coiling tighter around her perch. "This is the third deviation in this experiment. Three! That violates breach protocol Kesh-Thon-Eclipse. We must shut it down!"
A wave of murmurs—chirps, rustles, and flanging clicks of thought-pulses—filled the chamber.
Then came a lower voice. Smooth. Confident. Curious.
Xarthuun the Cold-Bound, no longer reclining, unspooled lazily from a resting coil near the central aperture. His form stretched from fluid lines into something massive and vaguely humanoid. Segments hardened and softened in sequence, like sculpted plasma breathing.
"No, no," he crooned, now fully coalesced into an angular silhouette draped in psionic flickers. "Let it continue. The biped has come this far. It's getting… entertaining. A curiosity. A game piece."
Another Watcher, tall and draped in star-threaded bio-silk, tapped a flickering limb against the glass projection. "Entertainment? What if it spreads? If it's breached the veil between script and sense, what's to stop it from escalating?"
Xarthuun's form swelled slightly, amused. "Then let it. I've grown weary of the static ones. If this thing has teeth… let it bite."
The chamber fell quiet.
Then the projection shimmered again.
The girl was no longer drawing.
She was writing.
In Watcher code.
Right across the walls of her dimension.
One word blinked into view on the main console, translated crudely for their understanding:
"I see you."
Xarthuun shimmered into full presence, folding out from layered dimensions like silk unspooling in reverse. His mass warped and buckled before stabilizing into a loose giant of blacklight and shifting fractals. Tendrils drifted lazily through the gravity-neutral mist of the chamber core, tracing gentle spirals across the containment shell. He handled it like a sacred Zoeg node—as if it held not just a world, but a temptation.
"Ohhh, do you now, little one?" he purred, voice vibrating through the bones of the chamber. "You see us. How curious… such a small little creature, squishy and finite, yet somehow able to peer through the Veil."
He tilted his cluster of luminous thought-filaments toward the others, a grin forming—not on a face, but across a shifting band of phosphorescent runes.
"Us, of all things. Now isn't that… interesting."
Lii'Tch spat static. "It must be shut down! This is not evolution—it's infection. Contamination!"
"Or revelation," Xarthuun murmured, pressing a tendril softly to the orb. Inside, the girl now stood in the center of a drawn sigil, eyes glazed in half-trance. A storm brewed overhead—both literal and metaphysical.
"She is tuning in," he continued. "She hears us not as voices, but as rhythm. Instinct. Echo. She resonates."
Another Watcher jittered into partial coherence. "Containment breach will invalidate the entire shelf. Hundreds of simulations. Do you want that consequence in your neural vault, Xarthuun?"
Xarthuun didn't reply immediately. He leaned closer to the orb.
Inside, the girl looked up again.
This time, she whispered a word.
The sound crossed planes.
Xarthuun heard it.
So did the chamber.
She said:
"Xarthuun."
Xarthuun's laughter rolled out like a tidal collapse across dimensions.
It wasn't sound.
It was pressure.
It rippled through atomic bonds. Trees on Earth bent slightly with no wind. Animals shivered and turned their heads skyward. In other worlds, skies split just a little, and priests fell to their knees, frothing prophecies.
The lower forms—those bound by physics—felt only an odd breeze, or a subtle chill down their spine.
But the higher forms—archons, trans-thought intelligences, inner-plane nomads—felt dread. The kind that reeked of change. The kind that whispered: Xarthuun is interested.
The chamber lights dimmed—not from malfunction, but from reverence.
"Ahahaha! You can speak!!" Xarthuun boomed, spinning slowly, mad with delight. "Marvellous. Simply magnificent!"
He pressed his tendrils tighter to the orb, making the sigils inside flicker.
"Little creature," he said, now almost whispering, "who gave you that name?"
The chamber erupted into chaos.
Watchers blinked in and out of existence mid-panic. Emergency protocols flared across subspace. Several junior observers began the ritual for Data Destruction, just in case. Others pleaded in the old tongues, begging the Fracture Council to intervene.
But no one dared interrupt Xarthuun.
Because they all saw it.
He was no longer fluctuating. No longer drifting.
His great swirling gaze had condensed into fixed mass.
He was focused.
He was choosing.
Inside the orb, the girl stood with eyes glazed over, blood from her nose trailing into the sigils she'd carved.
She looked up again and said, calm and clear:
"My name is Alice."
The orb pulsed.
So did Xarthuun.
He hissed, amused. "A name with no power."
Then, louder—deeper—etched into every surface of the chamber like heat branding the walls of the multiverse:
"I name her. I claim her."
"From this moment onward… she is mine."