Epilogue: Of Contradiction, Emptiness, and the Voice of God

  The room was cold.

  The walls were cracked. The floor was moldy. The windows were nailed shut.

  He had lived there for years—forgotten, unwanted, unseen.

  The only thing he had ever been given was a silent command: disappear.

  No parents. No memories of being loved.

  The one relative he had called him “an extra mouth” and locked him in the basement.

  More than the beatings, he remembered the hunger.

  He didn’t survive because he was strong or special.

  He simply—feared death.

  No—more accurately,

  he feared the void that waited beyond death.

  To die was to lose everything.

  Effort, honor, love, memories, even pain—vanished, completely.

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  Not peace. Erasure.

  He used to think:

  "Everything humans do is just a distraction from the void."

  We search for meaning because we’re afraid there isn’t any.

  Love, dreams, identity—all just blindfolds to cover up the truth.

  And yet, he was human too.

  Too weak to face the void.

  He longed for death, but could never follow through.

  The hand holding the knife would tremble. The rope would loosen.

  Contradiction—

  That, more than anything, was the essence of being human.

  “I’m weak... I’m scared of the void... but there’s no point in living…”

  No one heard his whisper.

  Eventually, even the scraps of food stopped coming,

  and he began to wither away in silence.

  His body stopped moving. His lips cracked. His vision faded.

  The last thing he saw was a sliver of light breaking through a crack in the wall.

  It was beautiful.

  Light, meaningless as it was, tightened something in his chest.

  I want to live.

  That wish had never truly left him.

  But it was too late.

  His mind sank.

  Deeper, deeper, into the darkness.

  Sensation, memory, identity—all dissolved.

  And then—

  It appeared.

  No sound. No shape.

  Not something that could be said to exist—yet undeniably present.

  “You who carry contradiction,”

  A voice echoed—not through his ears,

  but directly into the core of his thoughts.

  No warmth, no cold.

  Just infinite stillness—the void itself.

  “If you truly wish for nothingness, then sink.

  But your soul resists annihilation still.

  Because you are afraid.”

  “…Who are you…?”

  “I am God.

  A being that dwells beside the void, yet remains untouched by it.

  And I have come to bear witness to your contradiction.”

  Terror.

  Hearing the voice alone chipped away at his sense of self.

  It was an ocean that devoured identity, memory, even time—

  That was God.

  “The void is truth.

  But truth is unbearable.

  So humans choose lies over truth.

  And thus—you, too, shall choose a lie.”

  “What… do you want me to do…?”

  “Nothing.

  But beyond death lies another falsehood.

  I offer you that path.”

  A light bloomed.

  Warm. Familiar.

  Yet strangely distorted.

  He understood.

  He now stood between life and death.

  “Go.

  Carry your contradiction with you.

  For that is the proof you are human.”

  And with the nameless voice of God—

  He was released.

  He died.

  No—

  He began.