Chapter 57 – The Hollowing Sky (Part 1)

The sky didn't break all at once.

It thinned, layer by layer, like the heavens themselves were being stripped of meaning. Where there had been fleeting snatches of stars or drifting pieces of memory-worlds, there was now nothing—only an expanding emptiness, wide and jagged, as if the sky itself had been re-written into silence.

Yusuf felt the shift in his bones before he could see it. With each breath, the air thickened, not from smoke or ash, but from the strain of a collapsing firmament overhead. The Codex pulsed in his arms, hotter than it ought to be, more restless, like a living heart sensing predator near.

Beside him, the faceless child tilted its head in the direction of receding skies. Its shape, never clear, seemed even more human-less now, its blank face pointing upwards as though it heard something Yusuf did not. Hum without sound. A call ringing through the void.

What is it?" Yusuf complained, his voice rough from exhaustion. His throat ached from screaming during earlier battles, but now even a whisper felt dangerous—like sound itself would break under the weight of the moment.

The child's blank face slowly pivoted back in his direction. No lips. No eyes. But Yusuf felt the intent behind its stillness. Then, finally, it raised one hand and laid it flat on top of the Codex. A single word rolled out across the page in light:

Rootwake.

Yusuf wracked his brain. "The Tree?"

The child nodded hardly.

He had seen fragments before—shards of that impossibly vast trunk stretching through void and memory alike, its branches threading through every world he had touched. But now, for the first time, he felt it watching him. Not passively. Not as a distant part of the tapestry. But with an awareness vast enough to strip him bare.

He shuddered. “It knows I’m here.”

The Codex responded with a one-word answer that carved itself onto its very trembling surface:

It always has.

The ground surrounding them split—not earth, not rock, but material of remembrance itself. Splinter-lines flowed out like veins, a fine light pulsating along them with filaments of forgotten names, faces, whole lives thinning through the cracks. Yusuf found himself, one hand holding the Codex's spine, the other tracing the shard Rae had thrust into his hand what felt like centuries past.

Her shard pulsed faintly, an ember dying.

The air trembled again, this time more forcefully. Yusuf felt his own memories quiver on the fringes of his mind. Memories of childhood on the brink of peeling away like weathered paint: the ring of his mother's laughter as she tried to flatten his unruly hair; Cairo's smells after a rain: wet asphalt, sparks of bonfires, and fresh earth; the cold, antiseptic stillness of the museum archive after all others had departed.

He gnawed down on his lip hard enough that he could taste blood. "Not yet," he breathed.

A chill ran through the vacuity. The hollowed sky grew dark.

First, Yusuf thought he was dreaming—but then he saw shapes forming in the vacant space above. Not stars, not shards. Roots. Colossal roots, black as coal but somehow transparent, as if cut from the negative of light. They stretched across the firmament, unimaginably vast, each faintly pulsing with veiny strata of shifting remembrances. Entire worlds shivered in their surfaces, fossilized like fossils in amber.

And they were moving.

The roots didn't simply lie there—they stretched. Slithering along, seeking. Sliding down towards him.

Yusuf backed away instinctively. The vacancy provided no traction; with every step, cracks spread further. He almost lost his balance entirely before the child wrapped his sleeve with a grip of surprising force.

Why now?" Yusuf spat, though he already knew the answer. He had restored too much, repaired strands that were left to rot, carried the weight of memories the Tree had long since left to rot. In so doing, he had disobeyed its will.

The Codex hurled its own pages in fury, coming to rest on a half-finished passage he'd never read before:

The Archivist who recalls too much shall awaken the Root wake.

His breath frozen. "So it's my fault."

The child did not move.

Above, a root twisted awry, and the vacant sky screamed. The noise tore at Yusuf's ears, though no air seemed to vibrate. It was not sound in the usual sense—it was recollection unwinding, names unspooling into clean noise.

Yusuf clenched his head, trying to block it out. He heard a thousand voices breaking: mothers crying for children they couldn't remember, lovers breathing names that dissolved halfway, scholars quoting histories that concluded in white noise.

The source hit.

It slammed like a crashing mountain, into the emptiness floor with a force that sent Yusuf tumbling. He struck with a solidity, ribs aching, but rolled hard enough to cushion the Codex from impact against his chest. The kid landed beside him in silence, getting up again as if gravity was meaningless.

Yusuf strained to his knees, coughing blood. The air was filled with the smell of burned paper. Where the root had fallen, the floor was not broken stone—it was missing. A level crater, smooth and hollow, as if nothing had ever been there at all.

His stomach roiled. If one of those hit him directly, it wouldn't kill him. It would take him apart.

The boy tugged on his sleeve again, telling him to get up. Yusuf stood up, staggering sideways as another root fell from above, plunging into the empty-floor with a shaking ripple. With each impact, blankness radiated outward further, engulfing land itself.

"Run where?" Yusuf exclaimed. There was no direction to go. The emptiness was boundless, its edges moving with every breath, its beacons mere illusions that dissolved when he gazed too deeply.

But he forced his legs onward. He and the boy ran, dodging left as a second root plunged beside them, void stretching out behind. Yusuf leapt over a cleft at the last instant, the Codex burning so hotly he thought his arms would incinerate.

"Why me?" he swore out between clenched teeth. The words tore out coarse, half curse, half prayer. "Why did it have to be me?

The empty sky responded by opening wider.

In this case, Yusuf could see the trunk.

Not complete—no living thing could have encompassed its enormity—but sufficient. A pillar of intertwined light and darkness reaching to infinity, branches tracing through the hollowness of heaven, roots delving into space deeper than space itself. Seething on its surface was life: histories that flowed like rivers, entire ages disintegrating and reforming within its bark. A presence enormity, older than universes, indifferent and absolute.

The Tree of Memory. The First Archive. The thing he had unknowingly been fighting all this while.

And it was alive.

Yusuf's knees buckled. His chest heaved so hard he was sure his ribs would shatter. The Codex flared open again, pouring light into the falling darkness, and words scribbled across its pages in spasmodic, furious script:

RUN.

Another root pierced in.

Yusuf flung himself to the side, nearly losing grip of the Codex. He hit the earth, rolled, scrambled to stand again for the third time with his lungs tearing from the effort. The child kept pace with him, its bare head spinning wildly every time a root was in danger of colliding. It succeeded in seeing them coming before they crashed somehow.

Though it instructed, Yusuf was out of space. Each root erased more of the battlefield, stripping life from scythes until strips were all that were left.

Desperate, he grabbed him. He couldn't go on like this. He wasn't strong enough.

And then—far away, improbably—he heard a voice.

It wasn't the Codex. It wasn't the Tree.

It was Rae.

"Yusuf."

He stopped short, nearly falling. The voice had come out of nowhere, thin as a reed, disappearing, but it was her. Soft. Tired. Nearly gone.

The splinter in his hand pulsed once, weak as a dying sun.

For one heartbeat, the rest faded away—the hollowness, the roots, even the hollow sky. It was just her voice, suspended there like a thread he couldn't let go.

He pushed himself upright, forced his body to keep running. "I hear you," he whispered hoarsely. "I will not cease."

Above, the Tree transformed again, its roots twisting like a snake. But Yusuf no longer felt utterly alone.

The emptying sky grew darker, threatening only devastation.

And still he ran.