Nothingness and the Second Sun

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Astalor

Sage

April 03, 2024

4 min

Lore | Nothingness and the Second Sun

The book smelled of ash.

Not the clean ash of a temple brazier—something older, something wrong. Sage Meridia lifted the cover with gloved fingers and felt the leather crack beneath her touch like dried skin.

“Where did you find this?” she asked.

The merchant shrugged—a gesture that managed to convey both ignorance and deliberate evasion. “Flooded cellar in the river district. Old building. Nobody claimed it.”

Meridia turned the first page. The parchment was stained with water damage, but the writing remained clear: angular script, pre-unification style, perhaps eight centuries old. Maybe older. The ink had a faint bronze tint that suggested mineral pigment rather than standard gallnut.

An original, she realized. Not a copy. Nobody made copies in that ink anymore. The formula was lost.

She paid the merchant twice what he asked. He left quickly, as if glad to be rid of his burden.

The translation took three weeks.

Not because the language was difficult—Meridia had studied the old tongues since childhood—but because the text refused to behave like text should. Words that seemed clear on first reading became ambiguous on second. Sentences rearranged themselves when she looked away. Numbers contradicted each other between paragraphs.

She began keeping multiple copies of her notes, comparing them each morning to see what had changed. Sometimes nothing changed. Sometimes everything did.

By the end of the first week, she understood that the book was not a single document. It was a compilation—fragments from at least four different sources, bound together by someone who either didn’t notice the contradictions or didn’t care.

In the beginning, read the first fragment, there was only void—endless and empty. Then came a spark.

In the beginning, read the second fragment, there was only sound—a note without origin, without end. The spark was a lie the sound told itself.

There was no beginning, read the third fragment. The concept of beginning was invented later, to make the records orderly.

Meridia made three columns in her notebook: Fire, Sound, and No Origin. She assigned each fragment to a category, hoping patterns would emerge.

The patterns that emerged were not reassuring.

Meridia made three columns in her notebook: Fire, Sound, and No Origin. She assigned each fragment to a category, hoping patterns would emerge.

The patterns that emerged were not reassuring.

The section on the gods was worse.

Human folly summoned 12 major gods, one source claimed.

Human wisdom invited them, said another.

The gods were already present, insisted a third. They simply chose that moment to reveal themselves. The summoning was theater.

Marginalia in three different hands argued with each other across the pages:

This contradicts the Temple of Azarion’s account—compare with the Vespertine Codex.

The Vespertine Codex is a forgery. Everyone knows this.

If it’s a forgery, why does the Archpriestess quote it every equinox?

Meridia found herself tracing the arguments with her finger, trying to follow the logic. The logic did not follow. Each voice was certain. Each voice was certain differently.

If it’s a forgery, why does the Archpriestess quote it every equinox?

Meridia found herself tracing the arguments with her finger, trying to follow the logic. The logic did not follow. Each voice was certain. Each voice was certain differently.

The section on the First Pacts was missing sixteen pages.

The numbering jumped from page forty-three to page sixty—a gap marked only by a note in crimson ink:

These pages were removed by order of the Third Council. The content was deemed hazardous to doctrinal stability. Replacement text follows.

The replacement text was three paragraphs long and said nothing useful. It praised the wisdom of the Pacts without explaining what the Pacts contained. It celebrated the harmony between gods and mortals without describing how that harmony was achieved.

Meridia read it twice, then wrote in her notes: Something important was here. Something they wanted us not to know.

She moved on.

Six gods engineered new races, the book claimed. Three birthed beings of pure goodness. Three created beings of pure evil.

The marginal hand was back, sharper now:

The word translated as ‘goodness’ is more accurately rendered as ‘utility.’ The word for ‘evil’ is closer to ‘resistance’ or ‘wildness.’ These are not moral categories. They are functional ones.

Another hand, different ink:

Functional to whom?

No answer followed.

The final section—what remained of it—concerned the Second Sun.

Meridia could barely read it. The pages were smoke-damaged, their edges curling inward as if the fire had come from within rather than without. Great black streaks obscured half the text.

What remained:

…a new era dawned. Diverse species. Active gods. Regional confli—

—necromancers discovered transmutation. They created dragons from—

—gods responded. They granted their followers—

—banished to Wyrmreach, a remote, forbidding—

The last readable sentence:

Some called it a sun. Others denied it was light at all. The truth, if there is a truth, remains unwritten.

Below that, in the same crimson ink as the censorship note:

This book is incomplete. The final chapters were destroyed by order of the Assembly of Sages. The flame that consumed them was blessed. The blessing was not sufficient.

Meridia closed the book.

Her hands were trembling—not from fear, but from the peculiar exhaustion that came from trying to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously. The truth about Astalor’s creation was not hidden; it was fragmented. Scattered across dozens of sources that could not agree on basic facts.

Was the universe born from fire or sound? Did humans summon the gods or merely recognize them? Were the Pacts an agreement or a surrender?

The book offered no answers. Only questions wearing the masks of answers.

She filed it in the restricted archive, beside seventeen other texts she had studied and failed to reconcile. Someday, she hoped, a scholar would come who could make sense of the contradictions.

Someday.

In the meantime, she taught the Official Account: clean, orderly, safe. The story the Academy approved because students needed something to believe.

It wasn’t true. But it was stable. And stability, in a world born from contradiction, was the closest thing to truth anyone could offer.

Compiler’s note: The preceding text was reconstructed from surviving fragments. All translations remain disputed. The Academy takes no official position on authenticity.