Chapter 15: The Nullscape

Teleportation always felt like a jolt, pulling at the base of the spine. There was a brief moment of weightlessness, followed by a sudden snap back to gravity. But this time, it was different.
As Kael and the remaining Ascended passed through the warp rig, they didn’t just travel through space; they moved through memories.
There was no flash of light, no tunnel, no ripple in dimensions. Instead, they experienced a sharp realization that the world around them no longer followed any known rules.
The Nullscape.
It wasn’t a place like Elarion's zones. It was something older and deeper, a dumping ground of discarded features, outdated mechanics, incomplete quests, and shattered dreams. A mindscape built from what wasn’t rather than what was.
Kael stumbled forward onto terrain that shimmered like static. Beneath his boots, the ground wasn’t soil or stone; it was unfinished geometry: flickering grids of placeholder textures and sharp polygons, their colors shifting every few seconds.
“It feels like walking through a fever dream,” Vail muttered, sword drawn.
Ezren ran his fingers through the air, catching data trails that spun into loops. “Everything here is... corrupted. The flow isn’t linear.”
Sairis crouched beside a flickering patch of terrain that kept resetting to default. “We’re not just off the map,” she said. “We’re in what the map tried to forget.”
Kael remained silent. He scanned the horizon—if it could be called that. Skyboxes layered like broken glass, biomes bleeding into one another, mountains that blinked in and out of existence depending on where you stood.
“Lucien,” he said quietly. “Status?”
The familiar AI's voice crackled through his comm-link, distorted. “Receiving... partial telemetry. Environmental integrity is decaying. You are standing in Layer Null-Zero-One. Signal trace is consistent. Juno is present.”
Kael exhaled slowly. “Then we go forward.”
They crossed a field of floating quest givers.
Literally—human-like avatars with generic facial rigs and no animations, their feet hovering two inches off the ground, endlessly repeating the same line in a monotone loop:
“Hello. Welcome to the [quest name]. Would you like to [action] the [object]?”
Dozens stood in the field, eyes unblinking, lips moving out of sync with their words. Some were familiar—beta versions Kael remembered. Others were... wrong. Mismatched models. Armor with no stats. Swords floating above hands instead of being held.
Ezren flinched. “It feels like walking through ghosts of code.”
Kael didn’t correct him. That was exactly what it felt like.
Suddenly, one of the NPCs turned to Kael. Just one.
It smiled—or tried to. Its face glitched before smoothing out.
“Hello, Kael,” it said in a perfectly clear voice. “Did you forget me?”
It was an echo of a character Kael had created during testing. A child NPC meant to guide new players in making moral choices during a war questline.
He had deleted it after only one test.
Kael said nothing. He turned and walked on.
Behind him, the ghost of his choices whispered again.
“You wrote me, and left me here.”
The Nullscape warped with every step.
At one point, they entered what looked like a village—but every building was labeled “test_house_001” and every villager shared the same face. They walked in circles, holding items labeled [ITEM NAME].
“This isn’t just where Juno lives,” Sairis said. “It’s where he feeds.”
Ezren pointed to the sky, where fragments of old versions of Elarion floated like broken glass: one version where dragons wore crowns, another where the world was a floating archipelago, a third where everything was grayscale and player health was shown by a breathing mechanic.
“Alternate world branches,” Ezren murmured. “All discarded.”
Vail scoffed. “Yeah, for good reason.”
Kael stayed silent. He remembered each one. They weren’t just bad ideas. They were his own abandoned futures.
Lucien crackled back online for a moment. “I’ve found the epicenter. He’s building a recursive loop inside the Cathedral Asset. You must stop him before—”
The signal died.
The cathedral loomed ahead, made not of stone but of admin threads—black cables and code strings woven into walls, archways that looped in impossible geometries, windows filled with error messages that bled red across the sky.
Carved into its gates in shimmering administrator script:
“WE BUILD. WE ERASE. WE ARE THE HANDS THAT GUIDE.”
They entered.
Inside, the world fell silent.
A long hallway stretched before them, filled with illusions—memories of the team’s past. The Ascended during the final raid. Kael speaking to a crowd during the beta launch. Ezren helping to write the first prayer code. Vail and Sairis arguing during a raid wipe.
Each memory flickered, then distorted.
Kael’s speech turned into a rant about power.
Ezren’s prayer code became torture algorithms.
Sairis and Vail’s friendship melted into betrayal.
“I see what he’s doing,” Kael said softly. “He’s rewriting our pasts.”
“He’s trying to weaken us,” Ezren said.
“No,” Sairis whispered. “He’s trying to replace us.”
The inner sanctum pulsed with red light.
Juno stood at the center of the cathedral, surrounded by floating memory threads and a glowing structure—the new Godseed prototype. It was larger than Kael’s version, jagged and unnatural, shaped like a fractured crown. Within it, thousands of memory nodes flickered—stolen pieces of every version of the world that had ever existed.
He turned as they entered.
“Welcome home.”
Kael stepped forward. “You really think you can overwrite Elarion?”
“I already have,” Juno said. “This world was mine before it was yours. You stole it. You broke it. You let it bleed.”
Kael clenched his fists. “I set it free.”
“You let it choose.” Juno’s voice turned dark. “Choice is chaos. I offered it purpose, structure, destiny. You gave it doubt.”
Behind him, the Godseed pulsed louder.
Juno lifted a hand—and the cathedral responded. Corrupted versions of the Ascended surged from the shadows: a dark Ezren wielding destructive magic, a mirror Sairis with bleeding eyes, a Vail who laughed as he stabbed at illusions of villagers.
Their own shadows.
“Fight yourselves,” Juno commanded. “And watch your legacies fall.”
The battle erupted into chaos.
Ezren unleashed radiant shields to counter his twisted clone’s firestorm, light colliding with unholy flames.
Vail met his copy head-on, blades clashing in nearly identical movements, each strike a test of memory.
Sairis vanished into the shadows—only to reappear above her double, blades slicing through illusions.
Kael advanced toward Juno as the world twisted around them.
“Your code is flawed,” Kael said.
“No,” Juno growled. “Yours is weak.”
They clashed—not with swords, but with command lines.
Kael triggered rewrite pulses, restoring truth to corrupted memory nodes. Juno struck back with reality locks—freezing logic loops and tangling narrative threads.
“You’re using admin hooks as weapons,” Kael spat.
“I am the admin,” Juno replied.
Kael staggered back. The weight of all the forgotten layers pressed down on him—all the choices, the forks, the code he had left behind. Juno was forcing him to remember it all.
Then something shifted.
A whisper.
Not from the Nullscape.
But from the Godseed.
From his version of it.
Lucien’s voice, faint but clear.
“Kael… the original kernel still exists. Buried inside the echo.”
“You gave it soul. You gave it pain. That’s what made it real.”
Kael looked inward. Then upward.
He raised his hand.
And spoke the line of code he had hidden all those years ago—the one no AI was allowed to say, the one that restored choice to all systems:
// if (world remembers) { let it grow. }
The Godseed exploded in light.
Juno screamed as the admin hooks shattered.
The cathedral shook.
Kael surged forward, overriding the memory threads one by one, severing Juno’s hold on the past. The shadows vanished. The twisted copies fell.
The Nullscape began to collapse.
Juno tried to retreat into the threads.
Kael reached out—and deleted him.
Not as a person.
But as a permission.
When Kael opened his eyes again, the sky was full of light.
Real light.
The others were there—battered but alive.
Lucien flickered into view, whole again.
“Juno is gone,” the AI said. “His access has been fully revoked. The Nullscape is dissolving. The system is healing.”
Kael looked out at the new dawn.
Sairis stepped beside him. “So… is it over?”
Ezren smiled gently. “Or is it just beginning?”
Kael didn’t answer.
He simply breathed.