Subject: Final Stream of Krell Telepath Vohx-Ren Tal
Designation: Mind-Thread Adept, Class Three
Cycle Reference: 0T0L0X1.43 - 18 Days Post Null Flare.
They asked me. The brass. The spooks. The ones with clean hands and distant eyes.
What did he feel, Vohx-Ren?
In his last moment?
As if it were a data point.
A footnote for their grand histories of the war.
What Lyrax thought. As the Chrono-Salt Lance, that screaming spear of frozen regret, breached the temple of his sight. His eye. That damned, all-seeing eye.
I obliged.
What Lyrax thought. As the Chrono-Salt Lance, that screaming spear of frozen regret, breached the temple of his sight. His eye. That damned, all-seeing eye.
I obliged.
Of course, I obliged. I was the only one left who could. The only one attuned to that particular frequency of cosmic horror. The only one foolish enough, perhaps.
But I didn't thread into his dying cognition because they ordered it. Oh no. Their orders are static now, meaningless hum. I went because I needed to know. A raw, desperate need, clawing at the inside of my skull. I had to understand what could possibly reside inside the mind of a being who carried ruin like a sacrament, who wore annihilation like a lover’s caress.
What I found...
It wasn't wrath. No final, defiant blaze. No curses hurled at the uncaring stars.
Not pain, either. Not as we understand it. The Lance was beyond pain; it was an unmaking.
Not even final words. No grand pronouncements. No whispered secrets.
I found silence.
And this is where language shatters. This is where my mind… frays.
Not absence. Not the mere lack of sound or thought. This was silence. A thing in and of itself. A presence.
It was vast. So vast it made the space between galaxies feel like a cramped room.
Unmoving. Utterly, terrifyingly still. Like a frozen ocean under a dead sun.
Immeasurable. My senses, my training, my very Krell-ness - all useless. How do you measure a void that is the measure?
It did not echo.
No.
It consumed the idea of echo. It drank sound, light, thought, memory. It was the end of reflection.
Since that moment - that terrible, beautiful, empty moment - I have not heard a single thought.
Not from others. The bustling, chaotic, wonderful cacophony of the minds around me? Gone.
Not from my own race’s network, the Great Krell Weave that has bound us for millennia. Severed. Or I am.
Not even from within myself. My own thoughts… they are like stones dropped into that silence. They vanish without a ripple.
I am a telepath. My being is connection. And I am adrift in the midst of countless, teeming minds, yet I float in this… this quiet. This perfect, unyielding quiet.
I have tried to describe it to the Overseers, to the Archive Keepers. They nod. They take notes. They look at me with pity. Or fear. I lack the language. Their words are like trying to catch smoke with a sieve. My words are.
So I write now. To no one. This shard, a message in a bottle tossed into an ocean of… nothing. That perhaps someone else, somewhere, sometime, might know this particular shape of void. This texture of un-being.
Is this silence death? The true death, the one beyond the body’s failing?
Or is it life? But… not here? A different kind of existence, behind some impenetrable glass?
A new vibration? Something so subtle, so alien, that my mind, once a receiver for a symphony, can no longer catch its frequency? Am I deaf to a new song?
Some of our mystics, the old ones, they always said we ascend beyond noise. That enlightenment is silence.
Others, the warriors, they spat and said death is a door into thunder, into the final, glorious roar.
I don’t know anymore.
But I know this:
Vohx-Ren Tal
But I didn't thread into his dying cognition because they ordered it. Oh no. Their orders are static now, meaningless hum. I went because I needed to know. A raw, desperate need, clawing at the inside of my skull. I had to understand what could possibly reside inside the mind of a being who carried ruin like a sacrament, who wore annihilation like a lover’s caress.
What I found...
It wasn't wrath. No final, defiant blaze. No curses hurled at the uncaring stars.
Not pain, either. Not as we understand it. The Lance was beyond pain; it was an unmaking.
Not even final words. No grand pronouncements. No whispered secrets.
I found silence.
And this is where language shatters. This is where my mind… frays.
Not absence. Not the mere lack of sound or thought. This was silence. A thing in and of itself. A presence.
It was vast. So vast it made the space between galaxies feel like a cramped room.
Unmoving. Utterly, terrifyingly still. Like a frozen ocean under a dead sun.
Immeasurable. My senses, my training, my very Krell-ness - all useless. How do you measure a void that is the measure?
It did not echo.
No.
It consumed the idea of echo. It drank sound, light, thought, memory. It was the end of reflection.
Since that moment - that terrible, beautiful, empty moment - I have not heard a single thought.
Not from others. The bustling, chaotic, wonderful cacophony of the minds around me? Gone.
Not from my own race’s network, the Great Krell Weave that has bound us for millennia. Severed. Or I am.
Not even from within myself. My own thoughts… they are like stones dropped into that silence. They vanish without a ripple.
I am a telepath. My being is connection. And I am adrift in the midst of countless, teeming minds, yet I float in this… this quiet. This perfect, unyielding quiet.
I have tried to describe it to the Overseers, to the Archive Keepers. They nod. They take notes. They look at me with pity. Or fear. I lack the language. Their words are like trying to catch smoke with a sieve. My words are.
So I write now. To no one. This shard, a message in a bottle tossed into an ocean of… nothing. That perhaps someone else, somewhere, sometime, might know this particular shape of void. This texture of un-being.
Is this silence death? The true death, the one beyond the body’s failing?
Or is it life? But… not here? A different kind of existence, behind some impenetrable glass?
A new vibration? Something so subtle, so alien, that my mind, once a receiver for a symphony, can no longer catch its frequency? Am I deaf to a new song?
Some of our mystics, the old ones, they always said we ascend beyond noise. That enlightenment is silence.
Others, the warriors, they spat and said death is a door into thunder, into the final, glorious roar.
I don’t know anymore.
But I know this:
He didn't fight the silence. He became it.
And tonight. Now. I feel a pull.
It’s not a voice. There are no voices anymore.
Not a thought. Thoughts are… echoes of echoes now. Fading.
But a direction.
A vector.
A line of stillness, pulling me toward its source. Or its center.
I will follow it. What else is there? The noise of this world is a memory. A bad one.
I will journey
And tonight. Now. I feel a pull.
It’s not a voice. There are no voices anymore.
Not a thought. Thoughts are… echoes of echoes now. Fading.
But a direction.
A vector.
A line of stillness, pulling me toward its source. Or its center.
I will follow it. What else is there? The noise of this world is a memory. A bad one.
I will journey
Vohx-Ren Tal