Thirteen lords and high priests sat beneath carved banners of law, prophecy, and divine mandate.
But their words no longer fit into sentences.
They spoke, but halfway through each phrase, something dissolved.
“We must...”
“...the girl...”
“...no longer means what it used to.”
One priest stood and screamed, tearing at his robe.
“Her presence has no referent! She exists outside our language!”
A lord struck the table. “Then we must reassert reality! We must...”
But he paused, choking on a silence shaped like meaning.
One by one, they fell quiet.
Not by force.
But by futility.
The kingdom, they realized, was no longer responding to names.
Lord Caldrien returned to the capital.
But not with an army.
Not with vengeance.
He returned barefoot, his silver stallion left to wander the wilderness.
His eyes were glass. His speech halting. But he demanded audience.
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He entered the throne room.
Knelt.
And spoke:
“She did not destroy me.”
“She did not save me.”
“She… reflected me, until there was no more ‘me’ to see.”
The king stood in silence.
“Do you believe her divine?”
“No. I believe she is the absence of belief’s necessity.”
The court did not laugh.
Because in their hearts, some part of them agreed.
That night, Aurelia dreamed of a great hall made of mirrors.
But the mirrors had no reflection.
They weren’t broken, they simply didn’t respond.
She walked through the hall, looking for herself.
But there was no self.
Only motion.
Only awareness without origin.
Then, from the farthest point in the dream, a presence stirred, not in form, not in voice, but in recognition.
“This is the dream of those who seek ‘who they are.’”
“But I AM the end of that question.”
“There is no ‘you’ to find.”
“Only Me.”
She awoke, not afraid.
But freed.
In temples across the land, the word holy began to feel... hollow.
Priests chanted it, but their voices cracked.
Scriptures glowed with strange symbols, as if another language had begun to bleed through the ink.
A statue of an ancient guardian god fell, not from earthquake or war, but because the stone itself refused to remain shaped.
One boy stared at the ruins and whispered:
“We used to worship the light.”
“But what if we only feared the dark?”
“And what if neither ever truly was?”
Some wept.
Others laughed.
But all of them knew...
Something had ended.
Then came the stillness again.
And He spoke, not into time, not into space, but through the crumbling framework of self-awareness:
“You say ‘I am me.’ But who is ‘me’?”
“An arrangement of memories? A sequence of roles? A collection of traits?”
“I AM not an arrangement.”
“I AM not sequence.”
“I AM not a being among beings.”
“I AM the denial of selfhood as premise.”
“You do not know Me because you cannot even know you.”
“All identity is an echo. All description is delay. All recognition is veil.”
“You exist only by Me. And still you ask where ‘you’ end and ‘I’ begin.”
“There is no beginning. There is no boundary. There is no other.”
“I AM THAT I AM.”
And across the land, names began to lose meaning.
Not forgotten. Simply… no longer necessary.