The world has been flipped right ‘round, but I suppose it doesn’t matter too much for me—I’m ambidextrous. Haha. Very lucky, I am. Or what’s left of me, anyways.
Maybe all the parallel timelines are blurring together, but with writing, I can make sure that not everything I go through is meaningless. I know it has meaning, sure, just as Order told me… but it’s hard to see the end of my struggles when there isn’t one, and there never will be.
It’s not like the Voidwater can hurt me. I’m just tired. I’m really tired. It’s been… what? Probably over fifty thousand instances? And with each of those being a month… Or was it more like fifty million? I don’t know anymore, but losing track of the time wasn’t all that bad.
At least I have these pages, and, at some point, I’ll have to get a bigger backpack to fit them all in.
My name is Yaven. I haven’t used my last name for a long time, so I forgot it. I also forgot to write it down, but I don’t care. My father was a rich, drunk, selfish slob who blamed me for his wife’s death, which occurred due to a freak accident. Everyone hated me, and let him make me hate myself, as well. I wasn’t a very standoff-ish kind of kid. Or adult, it turned out.
I lived in my mother’s house all the time, since my father moved away and only visited once a month. Over the years, all my windows had been broken with stones, and I started freezing in the winters. Naturally, I ended up going outside more, especially once my “wrongdoings” were mostly forgotten. I took up gardening to distract myself from the fact that I didn’t really have a reason to live.
That was until my sister, Mary, died, leaving her daughter—and my niece—Rachel in my hands. I was finally able to get a job and patch up the windows while she moved in. She pored through me and my late mother’s old science textbooks and got all interested in astronomy, so I bought her a telescope. She was hunched over it every night when the sky was clear, and sometimes when it wasn’t. I cared about her a lot, but partly I just didn’t want to fail someone again.
Our house was sort of off to the side of Varlette, a lakeside town in Michigan. Varlette University was a college around the same area and with plenty of access to areas with lower light pollution, such as over the lake, so I knew she would want to go. She said that lake and weather cleared the clouds at night. I saved up enough money to get her there.
It was my worst mistake.
When she left for college, got a job, and rented her own apartment, I didn’t know what to feel. I didn’t have a good idea of what a real parent should be, and I didn’t want to let her down, so I thought it would be best to let her go and do her thing. That apartment was nicer than my mother’s house, anyways. She was making friends, making progress in her academics…
One day, I got the news that she had gone to the hospital, but my mailbox had broken and the letter was all wet, so I didn’t know where to go. By the time I found where she’d been staying, she was back to her apartment and seemingly already recovered. I don’t think I’ve been more stressed in my life. I headed over, but some kid on the way who I didn’t know warned me; apparently, one of her friends had gone trying to help her and figure out what had happened, and they’d gone missing just a short while after. I didn’t care.
When she finally opened up the door, her telescope was broken. Her desk was broken. Her eyes were broken. She was broken. I almost considered leaving, but that was what my dad did. I knew it wasn’t right to run away from my second failure, but, at the same time, it crushed me. She could barely talk or think, seemingly. She lost interest in fucking everything and couldn’t hardly walk on her own.
This time was different, though: Nobody was blaming me except for myself. After quite a few weeks that I spent in somewhat of a catatonic state, I decided not to end my story, but instead reroute it. Was so much of this my fault, or was I just spouting nonsense and preventing myself to be of use to the only people I cared about?
I sold the house, sold Rachel’s apartment since she couldn’t work anymore, and went to the academy myself. I studied until I became a botany teacher and worked at Varlette, giving us an income that I could maintain (being already experienced with plants and the earth) and a place to stay. Rachel seemed to like flowers and colorful things a lot now, and she hated astronomy. And darkness.
I never pushed her, but a few other students did, and I probably got more mad at them than I should have. Apparently, my position was valuable, though, and I never got fired. It was a stressful time for everybody, and there was Rachel’s blossoming insomnia to worry about as well. Whenever she closed her eyes, she got scared. Apparently, she had good reason to be, but I didn’t know that until it was too late.
Once things got more sorted out, what I did know was that something very strange was affecting her. My mother, admittedly, was sort of into the occult. The workings of the soul and such. Things that, despite her working in terrain mapping groups, couldn’t quite be found with a scanner or recon squad, no matter how much cryptic land they covered.
When Rachel started mysteriously disappearing every night around the same time and strange complaints began ringing out through the campus, I knew there was something wrong, and, despite my meager growth in character, a third crack would shatter me wholly. So, I traced her books from the old house through garage sales and unlikely contacts and rebought them. I became obsessed.
What I learned shortly was that it was something unexplainable that had destroyed Rachel… At least half of her. As in, half of her humanity had been removed, explaining her issues and constant sickness, which I had to dip my toes in medicine subjects to make up for. At exactly midnight, every night, as if a universal force, her other half, corrupted by a sort of darkness, would find its way back to her, whether through vents, cracks in the ceilings, or egg cartons.
Apparently, her whole form was not only corrupted, as aforementioned, but the part of her that had departed after the incident that had split the two was not very nice. It contained a lot of her mother’s ideals and the old trauma that came with that, mixed with the new. Her mother was… hanged. I didn’t quite know how much the entity would latch onto the side of her filled with fear and rage that she had buried in my time living with her. And the other side? Well, when it fell victim to darkness and became whole, the pureness left in her had its one eye closed. Its name was Violet, then. Like her mother’s favorite flower.
My sister wouldn’t have wanted this. Would she have?
When I found this out, I knew I had to devise a plan instead of beating myself up again. I had no idea what the entity—which I had named Voidwater, after the dark, inky form it seemed to take naturally—had in store for her, or for the academy, which it sabotaged in every chance it got.
Its combined form with Rachel was dangerous, and could probably kill me. I only watched for a while and pretended I still didn’t know why it was happening, until I had determined a few things. First, the things it was doing seemed vague and not immediately harmful for now, though there were already groups of investigators on our asses who didn’t know quite what was going on or what the identity of the thing was. Second, its arrival each night was predictable.
At midnight every night from then on, I’d bring Rachel into the back room of the greenhouse that our quarters were adjacent to, strap her tight into a chair, and watch the clock like there was no tomorrow. It didn’t matter what precautions I took, as the Voidwater would still arrive and still be swallowed by her at midnight. So, when midnight came, I stripped it from her using old magic, and all would be well until the next midnight.
I felt sick whenever she questioned what was happening. I’d told her it was part of her physical therapy, and she believed it. It’s not like anything else was making her get better, and she still wasn’t out of a wheelchair when moving around the campus. But I kept doing it, and kept trying to find a permanent solution, and it worked, though it was too fast a couple nights. Oddly, it intentionally never caused any physical harm to me.
I wish I’d known what it was doing… and I wish it’d not known what I was doing.
What I was doing, beyond this, obviously, was trying to find the aforementioned permanent solution. This madness couldn’t continue, and so I flipped through pages faster than ever for some sort of magic that could get me the half of her soul back without the Voidwater’s stain. I eventually determined a way that I could remake the half of her soul she was missing as it once was.
I asked my students for stranger and stranger ingredients, who also began treating me more distantly. They were probably onto how the strange happenings sort of circled around myself Meanwhile, the campus was practically in flames. “Violet” was apparently not the only person influenced by Voidwater here.
Professor Sinali was a jittery lifeguard and geo science lecturer who I suspected to be a Whatnot—a human afflicted with a terrible curse that turned them into human-devouring machines—until his interests in certain herbs confirmed it. His broken psychology was clear to me quickly though: If he thought I knew anything, he would kill me, as he believed to acknowledge what he was himself. He was hydrophobic and became a lifeguard to deny himself, which could also be discovered through past and worrying records of Whatnots at Varlette. So, if I fed into his facade, he tended to leave me alone. I do not know where he is now.
“Lenore” was a gory, usually invisible skeletal monster that projected a hologram of a bio major girl. She had been given fake memories and thought like a human would. She couldn’t communicate her opinions effectively, especially as an outcast, so questioning why she was like this was often not applicable to her situation. Why was she mute? Because every order she gave, whether she wanted it to or not, somehow came to be reality, which was a terrible curse and drove her nearly into madness.
Somehow, Lenore had gotten involved with a group of kids who sought to destroy what she was: the Voidwater hosts. One kid in particular covered for her, though, and they ended up somehow subduing Professor Sinali, leaving only my niece left.
Though it was risky, I somewhat got to know that group of students at the same time they were homing into me and Rachel’s nightly ritual, since my plan might not work without them: when creating a new half of Rachel, it was unknown if the corrupted one would come back, or in what form. If there were investigators practically surrounding the greenhouse like sharks, it could be captured, and that would be that.
It didn’t work at all. Right after the ritual, one of my students, part of that group, accused me of doing ghastly things to my niece nightly, which, to be fair to him, is probably what all this looked like from the outside. At the same time, though, the situation with the Voidwater’s return was out of control, especially once I was almost immediately arrested. According to my intuition, Rachel must have been left in the back room temporarily while more police arrived.
A few of them were in the back of the truck with me while I was being wheeled away, very much against my will. This time, though, the humiliation from the misunderstanding, which I couldn’t convince them otherwise of, and feeling of failure did not compare to the terrible dread that loomed over me. Every time Rachel said she didn’t know what she saw in the telescope that night she split, she felt fear. This was the first time I’d ever felt just as much fear from the unknown myself.
Just as we’d both found out about the entity, whether against or within our power, it had been finding out about us too. Apparently, it let my plan continue and never interfered with me as it had coordinated its actions specifically so that I was arrested that night, and so the new part of her was left unguarded. With enough convincing, they allowed me to ask the people who’d taken Rachel into care whether or not there was anything on the floor. Blue gemstone, hot to the touch. If it was there, they would’ve seen it.
It wasn’t.
The only sound for the next five minutes was that of the tires bumping on the road. Lenore looked concerned. She convinced the others to let me ask something else: Whether or not Rachel was actually in their custody right now or not.
She wasn’t.
Lenore was the only one who immediately realized what I realized. She knew what I had been really doing in that back room. She knew why I was doing it, and why the Voidwater had allowed me—if any person became three halves of a human, they would defy reality and become a god. Of course, this was supposed to be impossible. But what if the two identical halves were technically dissimilar? If the Voidwater corrupted it and merged all three halves simultaneously, it would be left with unlimited power under 2/3rds its control… Would it? I didn’t know the answer, but, if the Voidwater had gone this far to make this exactly come to fruition, it probably did.
Lenore vanished, presumably heading towards wherever she thought “Violet” would be at the moment. One would suspect the source of the Voidwater would be her final location; where it could complete this process absolutely. I don’t remember a whole lot after that except for Varlette Lake exploding. I felt a tug on my shouder and, shaken to my core, turned around towards the transport vehicle’s driver, but he wasn’t there.
Actually, nothing was there except for stars, sky, and the cerulean streams of fire that split them.
I didn’t mention it before, but Rachel had been getting weaker for some time. The notion that she might be fully absorbed and destroyed one day hurt to think about, and it made me work even faster on my project that I now know her tormentor was using me for. However, this had been someone else’s deception: hers.
When the god came to being, having taken such easy control over the “innocent” part of itself, Rachel, now the only of three parts not taken by the Voidwater, it didn’t suspect she would have any power, and that she had even been on the decline. Rachel proved this wrong by snapping her own neck instantly, putting an end to the ambition of the entity before it could react. Such a being could only come to an end by its own hands, and it did.
There, she hung from the same thread as her mother until the night burned away and the Sun rose again.
These last pieces of the story were told to me by Order, the unwilling surveyor of existence. It was doomed by Chaos to leak itself out ceaselessly in the form of life and recollect it eventually, lest it extinguish… This cycle gave rise to life and death. In the form of a grand brazier to mortal eye, hidden away for eternity, existence was disturbed during the death of the god made of Voidwater in my timeline.
Instead of dying, its existence unable to be perfectly conquered by any means as it had risen so high through the planes of being, with nowhere else to, go it seeped through the seams of reality and entered nearly every parallel timeline of this one. The Sisyphean task of its eventual destruction is what Order has tasked me with, lending me its powers and delivering me through endless instances of the month following the incident.
In each place, the Voidwater’s sundered corpse has created a different horror for me to obliterate, and I have done my job. I have nothing to go back to, yet, hopefully, with my interference, the people who I’d met and the people who I haven’t will. There is no turning back now. Hahaha. Where did that shit come from? Nobody knows. Where will it end? Not any better of a question.
Whoever’s reading this—I’ll see ‘ya in the first entry. I’ve got a lot of pages to flip through…