The ringing was the loudest thing Ember had ever heard. Her ears felt packed with cotton. The apartment smelled sharply of burned copper, undercut by something unidentifiable. Her cheek was pressed against the dusty floor of her makeshift command center. She was spent, her mental state hollowed out by the cosmic tug of war. She pushed herself up onto her elbows, her body an assembly of exhausted muscle and frayed nerves. Above her, the shattered glass of her console lay in glittering shards, but beyond them, suspended impossibly in the air, was the Window.
It was a perfect, rectangle of pure, crystalline transparency. It didn't reflect light it merely displaced it. The air radiating from it wasn't just cold, it was the absolute zero of the void, stinging her skin and raising deep, painful goosebumps. The Window was the voids inverse, one side was where reality collapsed into infinite density, the other side was here, where reality had been pulled so thin it tore. And through it, Ember saw the terrifying truth of her success, a vast, starless, abstract void, dominated by a sphere of absolute, perfect blackness the newly created Black Hole. The Null, reborn.
A constant, low-frequency hum vibrated through the floorboards and directly into her skull. It wasn't sound, but a psychic static the maddening, background radiation of the Null’s new existence. It was the sound of the unstable core of raw feeling, screaming silently from within the singularity. It was pure, unfiltered chaos the crushing agony of sorrow violently mixed with the bright, sharp clarity of wonder, the paralyzing weight of primal fear undercut by the urgent rush of longing. It wasn’t a coherent thought, just raw, fundamental emotion—an existential white noise already threatening to unravel the frayed edges of Ember’s mind.
Then, the static was abruptly cut by a sharp, piercing signal a terrifying, single-note siren call. It was the emotion of pure Longing, amplified and weaponized, tearing through the noise. The Window’s perspective instantly shifted, abandoning the distant, abstract view of the Observer’s realm. It zoomed in, focusing entirely on the swirling vortex of the Black Hole, now filling the entire frame. The Null was demanding attention. It was experiencing hunger for the first time, and it was reaching through the crack.
“Stabilize the aperture. It will grow.”
The voice was faint, psychic, and desperately fragile. It was the Observer. No longer the immense, placid, all-knowing consciousness, but a small, terrified whisper echoing across the rift. He sounded like a man who’d just survived a catastrophe and was now staring at his own broken reflection. His message was a plea and an order. The warning "It will grow" snapped Ember into action. An expanding tear. A self-perpetuating reality breach. With adrenaline overriding her exhaustion, she dragged herself across the floor to the auxiliary console, punching life into her final, desperate resource the Containment Field Generators. These high capacity units were meant only to shield her apartment from external psychic interference, not contain a cosmic event.
“Hold, damn you. Hold!” she grunted, forcing the generators to project a hyper-focused, brute-force layer of conventional reality around the Window’s perimeter. The air around the rectangle shimmered, coalescing into a violently pulsating, distorted barrier a prison forged from pure will and electric current. As the pulsing field locked down the edges, Ember felt the Null’s psychic static lessen, but the aggressive Longing was still a dull ache in her soul.
She dragged her sophisticated sensor rig closer, running immediate diagnostics on the stabilized anomaly. The results were immediate and horrifying. The Black Hole was not just a visual curiosity, its existence was bleeding into this reality. The very fundamental constants of physics the rules of her universe, were subtly bending within her apartment. Her sensors showed a fractional but measurable time dilation. Time was running infinitesimally slower, the microseconds adding up, creating a small, localized bubble of temporal displacement inside her apartment. Worse still, the psychic static from the Null’s Core was being funneled through the aperture and into the local ley lines, the unseen energetic rivers that fed the city's underlying infrastructure. Her analysis confirmed it: the energy from the unstable Core was acting as a psychic pollutant, a spiritual poison.
Ember’s success was now a slow acting, growing contagion. She hadn't just separated the Null, she had bound it to her world through a stabilized portal, creating a constant, maddening stream of chaotic emotion that would eventually drive anyone sensitive to energy or emotion,into utter madness. She stared into the perfect, black circle filling the Window. It was the face of the ultimate predator, now bound by a core of feeling. She was its warden, and its only contact.
She had won the fight to begin a war, and the enemy was literally staring out of her living room wall. Time was her enemy, and sanity her dwindling resource. She had to understand the core of that monstrous hunger before the static drove the world mad, or before the Observer, now fragile and alone, decided his freedom wasn't worth the existential cost.
The ringing was the loudest thing Ember had ever heard. Her ears felt packed with cotton. The apartment smelled sharply of burned copper, undercut by something unidentifiable. Her cheek was pressed against the dusty floor of her makeshift command center. She was spent, her mental state hollowed out by the cosmic tug of war. She pushed herself up onto her elbows, her body an assembly of exhausted muscle and frayed nerves. Above her, the shattered glass of her console lay in glittering shards, but beyond them, suspended impossibly in the air, was the Window.
It was a perfect, rectangle of pure, crystalline transparency. It didn't reflect light it merely displaced it. The air radiating from it wasn't just cold, it was the absolute zero of the void, stinging her skin and raising deep, painful goosebumps. The Window was the voids inverse, one side was where reality collapsed into infinite density, the other side was here, where reality had been pulled so thin it tore. And through it, Ember saw the terrifying truth of her success, a vast, starless, abstract void, dominated by a sphere of absolute, perfect blackness the newly created Black Hole. The Null, reborn.
A constant, low-frequency hum vibrated through the floorboards and directly into her skull. It wasn't sound, but a psychic static the maddening, background radiation of the Null’s new existence. It was the sound of the unstable core of raw feeling, screaming silently from within the singularity. It was pure, unfiltered chaos the crushing agony of sorrow violently mixed with the bright, sharp clarity of wonder, the paralyzing weight of primal fear undercut by the urgent rush of longing. It wasn’t a coherent thought, just raw, fundamental emotion—an existential white noise already threatening to unravel the frayed edges of Ember’s mind.
Then, the static was abruptly cut by a sharp, piercing signal a terrifying, single-note siren call. It was the emotion of pure Longing, amplified and weaponized, tearing through the noise. The Window’s perspective instantly shifted, abandoning the distant, abstract view of the Observer’s realm. It zoomed in, focusing entirely on the swirling vortex of the Black Hole, now filling the entire frame. The Null was demanding attention. It was experiencing hunger for the first time, and it was reaching through the crack.
“Stabilize the aperture. It will grow.”
The voice was faint, psychic, and desperately fragile. It was the Observer. No longer the immense, placid, all-knowing consciousness, but a small, terrified whisper echoing across the rift. He sounded like a man who’d just survived a catastrophe and was now staring at his own broken reflection. His message was a plea and an order. The warning "It will grow" snapped Ember into action. An expanding tear. A self-perpetuating reality breach. With adrenaline overriding her exhaustion, she dragged herself across the floor to the auxiliary console, punching life into her final, desperate resource the Containment Field Generators. These high capacity units were meant only to shield her apartment from external psychic interference, not contain a cosmic event.
“Hold, damn you. Hold!” she grunted, forcing the generators to project a hyper-focused, brute-force layer of conventional reality around the Window’s perimeter. The air around the rectangle shimmered, coalescing into a violently pulsating, distorted barrier a prison forged from pure will and electric current. As the pulsing field locked down the edges, Ember felt the Null’s psychic static lessen, but the aggressive Longing was still a dull ache in her soul.
She dragged her sophisticated sensor rig closer, running immediate diagnostics on the stabilized anomaly. The results were immediate and horrifying. The Black Hole was not just a visual curiosity, its existence was bleeding into this reality. The very fundamental constants of physics the rules of her universe, were subtly bending within her apartment. Her sensors showed a fractional but measurable time dilation. Time was running infinitesimally slower, the microseconds adding up, creating a small, localized bubble of temporal displacement inside her apartment. Worse still, the psychic static from the Null’s Core was being funneled through the aperture and into the local ley lines, the unseen energetic rivers that fed the city's underlying infrastructure. Her analysis confirmed it: the energy from the unstable Core was acting as a psychic pollutant, a spiritual poison.
Ember’s success was now a slow acting, growing contagion. She hadn't just separated the Null, she had bound it to her world through a stabilized portal, creating a constant, maddening stream of chaotic emotion that would eventually drive anyone sensitive to energy or emotion,into utter madness. She stared into the perfect, black circle filling the Window. It was the face of the ultimate predator, now bound by a core of feeling. She was its warden, and its only contact.
She had won the fight to begin a war, and the enemy was literally staring out of her living room wall. Time was her enemy, and sanity her dwindling resource. She had to understand the core of that monstrous hunger before the static drove the world mad, or before the Observer, now fragile and alone, decided his freedom wasn't worth the existential cost.
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