Awakening came not like dawn, but like impact.
Gilgamesh—once King of Humanity—returned to awareness with a skull-splitting ache and a question so old it predated language. He drifted within an immeasurable darkness, a womb inverted, where creation had once unfolded and now lay undone. This was not night. Night implies the promise of morning. This was absence wearing the memory of space.
Everyone he had known was gone.
His wife, whose laughter once bent the air around her.
His generals, iron-bound and unyielding, now reduced to forgotten intent.
His soldiers.
His people.
Humanity itself—erased so thoroughly that even its shadow no longer knew where to fall.
Between forty-five and fifty-five percent of creation had vanished. Even the numbers refused certainty, as if reality itself could no longer count its dead without trembling.
The pain would not cease. Inside his head, a supernova was being born and extinguished every second—a violent cycle of light and collapse, over and over, merciless and intimate. Each pulse carried fragments of memory, screams compressed into heat, love atomized into pressure. Yet above the pain hovered the question, primordial and unresolved, circling his thoughts like a carrion star.
Why did anything exist at all?
The question was older than this form.
Older than the crown.
Older than the first apology.
Gilgamesh moved.
In another age, it would have been called speed. Here, motion itself seemed reluctant, as though distance had thickened into tar. His fury carved a path through the void, but even rage dragged its feet in a universe that no longer believed in direction.
This was the continuation of conquest.
Though torn apart and scattered like embers after a divine firestorm, remnants still endured—life clinging to impossible corners, light flickering without source, thoughts dreaming themselves into being, celestial bodies drifting like corpses that had forgotten they were dead.
One by one, Gilgamesh erased them.
He did not wage war.
He ended things.
Stars were crushed into mute dust. Ideas collapsed before they could finish forming. Entire continuities were unstitched, their histories unraveling backward into silence. Over five hundred years—if time still deserved such a name—forty-four percent of what remained was wiped away.
Twenty-one percent by the hands of Gilgamesh alone.
Twenty-three percent by the UNWORD.
I pause as I write this. My hands shake—not from fear that the UNWORD might notice me, but from the quiet terror of comprehension. I cannot understand how a single being could harbor such a vast and enduring hatred for existence itself.
Or perhaps I can.
And that is what truly frightens me.
When there was nothing left within reach—no screams to extinguish, no light to bruise—Gilgamesh drifted. A solitary crown without a kingdom, a verdict with no defendant. The void carried him gently, mockingly, as though even emptiness had grown tired of resisting him.
Then—impact.
He struck something solid.
A wall.
On one side lay the familiar darkness: endless, colorless, forgiving in its nothingness. On the other burned an infinite white void—blinding, sterile, absolute. It was not light. It was negation dressed as purity.
He chose destruction.
His fist met the wall. The sound was wrong—too quiet, too final. The barrier did not bend. He struck again, harder, pouring centuries of wrath into the blow. Again. And again. Each impact a ritual, each failure peeling away another layer of hope he pretended not to possess.
The wall did not crack.
It did not tremble.
It did not acknowledge him.
For the first time since creation learned to fear his name, Gilgamesh met resistance that did not break.
Then, from within the white void, something moved.
A shadow where light should have been. A silhouette carved out of absence. It drifted forward without haste, as though it had always been on its way.
For the first time in an age defined by annihilation, Gilgamesh did not advance.
He waited.
From the shadow, a domineering existence warped into the white void.
The purity recoiled.
Reality bent, strained, adjusted—like a story forced to accommodate a truth it did not want to tell.
The figure took shape slowly: impossibly tall, clad in a regency-era suit immaculate beyond reason. A monocle rested over one eye, its glass swirling with something unsettled, reflective, strained—as though it were watching itself watch.
Both voids shook.
The black deepened.
The white flickered.
Creation bowed.
He smiled.
"I am Thamiel Aurelian," he said, voice smooth as poured wine yet heavy with something unsaid.
"Oh, Gilgamesh," "Great King of the World. Tumor of Creation. Sovereign of Ruin. Bearer of Humanity's Last Crown."
He paused, as though tasting the words.
"So many titles. None of them accidental."
He spread his arms.
"I come bearing that which you seek."
A breath.
"Answers."
Gilgamesh did not move. The pain behind his eyes quieted—not gone, merely attentive.
"Why do you have to exist," the man continued, strolling along the wall as though gravity were a courtesy, "only to endure so much pain? You wish to know?"
A soft chuckle. Not entirely effortless.
"Oh… you truly do."
He faced Gilgamesh fully.
"Then let me tell you a story."
"Long, long ago—before these pages were ever stained with ink—there existed a boy."
He was five years old, and he learned the shape of an apology before he learned how to write his name.
"I'm sorry."
The words came to him instinctively—when he spoke too loudly, when he stood in the way, when he laughed at the wrong time. Once, he bumped into a table and whispered sorry to the wood, palms pressed together as though existence itself required permission.
Adults called him polite.
Children called him quiet.
No one called him necessary.
At night, he lay awake counting sounds, terrified of silence. Silence felt like rehearsal. For being forgotten.
So he learned to be useful.
He brought toys when others cried. He smiled before being asked. He made himself small in rooms that never noticed him anyway. Each moment of approval warmed him briefly, then slipped away, leaving him colder than before.
Somewhere far beyond childhood, something vast drifted in darkness—already aching, already questioning—though neither knew the other yet.
"He was insignificant. Utterly."
The monocle glinted.
"So eager to be liked that he would erase himself if asked."
The man's smile faltered—just briefly.
At twenty, the boy was admired.
People praised his patience. His kindness. His ability to listen without demanding anything in return. He had become a soft place to land, a vessel for confessions, a mirror polished smooth by use.
"You're such a good person," they said.
Inside, he was hollow.
Not empty—hollow. Like a bell struck too often until it forgot how to ring.
He helped everyone. Stayed late. Absorbed wounds that were not his. When people hurt him, they apologized. When they forgot him, they explained. When they used him, they smiled.
He began to notice the pattern.
How kindness was currency.
How virtue was often performance.
How the loudest saints hid the sharpest intentions.
The boy's gaze hardened.
"He began to see humanity as his children."
A fondness crept into the man's tone. Almost sincere.
"And he loved them. For their laughter. Their clumsy hope."
Then—
"But why?"
The word cracked like a whip.
"Why would they claw at his soul? He, who chose to bring them happiness—who accepted being forgotten so they could feel seen?"
And still, he loved them.
He told himself it was enough to be needed. Enough to be useful. That meaning could be outsourced.
After all, his greatest fear was being forgotten. So he tried not to be. Tried so very hard."
A pause.
"But even saints bleed. And the boy was human."
Then the laughter came.
Not joy—but collapse.
"Muahahahahaha—!"
The sound shook both voids violently. He clutched his abdomen, bending backward like a caricature of mirth, rolling in empty space as though the universe itself were a stage.
"Muahahahaha—!"
His laughter hurt. It scraped against reality, peeling meaning from structure.
"The peak of insanity," he gasped between convulsions, "is sanity."
He straightened suddenly.
"In the exact moment the boy broke—something reacted."
His monocle flared.
"Within him formed a petri dish."
The white void rippled.
"A world."
A pause.
"A mirror world."
He pointed at Gilgamesh.
"And you, King of Nothing—are its reflection."
Silence crushed the void.
"You were not born," the man said gently. "You were tested. An experiment. A hypothesis: What happens when love curdles into rage and is given power without limit?"
He began laughing again—so hard he folded in on himself, rolling, suspended, endlessly amused.
Between the convulsions, his breath hitched. His shoulders trembled not only with mirth but with something wetter, heavier. Tears streamed freely down his face—real tears, hot and unrestrained—breaking loose from eyes that could no longer hold them back.
He laughed as if choking.
He cried as if drowning.
Gilgamesh searched himself—blood, bone, memory, cell—for denial.
There was none.
Truth struck harder than any wall.
His body failed.
Blood separated from vein.
Bone loosened from purpose.
Organs drifted like unmoored planets.
Flesh peeled away—not violently, but obediently.
Yet the shape of him remained.
He did not die.
He decohered.
His rage bled into gravity.
His grief into entropy.
His question into the background hum of all worlds that followed.
A king unraveling, still crowned.
And as the void watched, the Storyteller adjusted his monocle again—this time not to see more clearly, but to hide the fracture spreading through the glass.