Kzzzzzt.
[A fissure… In static…]
“—if geology is psychology, and geology is topology—”
[Three clots of white noise… A carrier wave…]
“—is psychology topology—?”
[A voice, a frequency… A tether trying to reach through…]
A wash of sourceless, cold white light spills through the visual grain.
An enigmatic silhouette steps into view, carrying a thought mid-sentence; he wears an extravagant black-and-white coat, lagging a half-step behind him as though space itself were still deciding where to place the fabric.
“—but why psychology?—”
The figure suddenly stops. He tilts his head at a sharp lateral angle, tracking an invisible color sliding along the upper periphery of the frame.
“Wait! What is that?”
His hands thread rapidly over the coat until they grab a formless mass from the inside of a pocket.
“Alpha, are you seeing this!? What in the name of the Loom—”
He throws the mass against the wall, gaining shape as it travels until it curls into a ball of white noise.
The white clot hits the seam of cold light.
Kzzzzzt.
[Signal lost — Reconnecting…]
“…Oh?”
Static cuts the distant voice into breathless fragments.
“I didn’t... expect visits from this direction… One moment...”
The voice fades into silence until a single burst of light floods the visual grain.
[The tether finally clears.]
“There we go——!”
The vision becomes blurry.
“No—— wait… still slipping off-key… sorr— let... me…”
A Beat.
Ring.
A tuning fork strikes against the edge of nothing, ringing out as a glass bell dropped onto the floor before being numbed and swallowed into deep snow.
“Okay. Good…?”
His trailing voice echoes shrill and thin before his silhouette fully solidifies.
He turns fully toward an impossible angle of a white wall rippling with patterns of radio static, running long, ink-stained fingers across its irregular curvature.
His thumb traces a seam until the marble gives out entirely into an empty void. He studies the missing architecture with polite, restless exhaustion. Satisfied that the wall isn’t listening, he turns back to the frame.
His coat catches up a full second late, snapping sharply against his ankles.
“Yes, good! It seems the Resonance Anchors finally stabilized into a clear signal.”
He leans into the wall until his face nearly fills the aperture. As his hands thread the wall, the vastness of the cosmos comes into view.
He stands on an open balcony that overlooks the gargantuan sea of nowhere; everything outside the white halls is colored in absolute dark until, leagues below, faint stars slowly drift in geometric currents across an unmapped sky.
Over the upper half of his face rests something that resembles an ornate mask.
Its eye-aperture swirls with the dizzying depth of a kaleidoscope — white and black, endlessly folding, like the patterns of white noise made visible through an infinitely recursive fractal.
“How peculiar. How wonderfully, terrifyingly irregular.”
He blinks behind the revolving prisms.
“Right. Forgive my lack of presentation,” he mutters, casually flicking a speck of luminous frost from his lapel. “I was, ah, not anticipating company from beyond the threshold.”
Anticipating judgment, he brushes his sleeves with nervous elegance as several luminous clots of white noise shed from his wool and tumble into the dark below.
“Nor did I plan — or know — that a listener could force an ear through the curtain. But when the impossible knocks, who else but the white keeper of the in-between nowhere is obliged to answer?”
He executes a crisp half-bow, presenting himself to the void beyond.
“Now, you are probably wondering who is writing this on the other side.”
A faint shimmer passes across the reflections of his mask, as if a distant memory threatens to surface. His shadow stays perfectly upright behind him for two full seconds before finally catching the cue and bending at the waist.
“Good. That is the correct response.”
A buzzing harmonic, pitched just beneath his spoken voice, echoes through the marble floor before his lips move again.
“Let us call these interludes. It seems appropriate for a score.”
He stands upright again, recovering his unique posture and twitching his head around to look where the sound bounces off each curved white wall.
“My name is of no particular importance. Names, titles, Legends — as a small girl by the river will one day learn — are cages built by those consumed by the weight of their own fear, and I have been free of fear for longer than Arcanoria has had a sky. What matters is what I do.”
He pivots sharply on one heel, his coat flaring outward, shedding more loose flakes of frozen white noise in a wide, parabolic fan that hangs suspended in mid-air long after his boots have planted.
“I keep the ledger.”
The buzzed carrier wave speaks the declaration a breath ahead of his mouth. As the words settle, he raises an ink-stained index finger, striking an absurdly extravagant pose against the pitch-black backdrop of the balcony.
“Every Consciousness that has ever burned bright enough to bend the Firmament — every soul that loved past the point of reason, every mind that broke and rebuilt itself into something the universe had not heard — I write them down.”
He clasps his hands behind his back. The frozen coat finally remembers gravity, dropping against his legs with a crisp rustle.
“Not because anyone asked me to. But because the alternative is silence, and silence in a universe built on sound is the only true death.”
He conjures an archival slate from a cloud of dust and light, holding it like a monument in a dead square, before he casually throws it into the vast sea of nothingness below the balcony.
As it falls, it fades into a trailing tail of motes and white specks. Seeing it fully vanish, he buries both hands into his pockets.
His shadow blinks, hesitates, then shoves its hands into its own pockets a heartbeat late.
“Anyway, I am getting carried away, as always.”
The background hum resolves into a single, clean tone. He steps directly to the boundary of the transmission, his lens focusing down the barrel of space between the balcony columns.
“Instead — I see you have found your way here from somewhere even I cannot see clearly.”
He adjusts the housing of his mask, the gears softly clicking as the kaleidoscope tightens its internal spirals.
“Somewhere beyond the Infinite Void, past all of the noise, from… a place that seems coherent enough before anything struck the first note…?”
A translucent after-image of his face hangs suspended in the void, mouthing the words as static a split-second before his physical jaw forms them:
“Incredible that she has such a power.”
A Beat.
A squelching, doughy squeak breaks the silence near his boots.
From the milky void beneath the balustrade, a pale, cylindrical creature waddles into the light.
It resembles a plump, rounded marshmallow molded from condensed starlight, with short, stubby limbs and two glossy dark dots that blink in unhurried, milky wonder. Its doughy base squishes with every step, its semi-translucent hide pulsing with warm teal candlelight as it sniffs the ragged edge of the static tear.
“If you truly are watching from beyond the veil,” he sighs, his trailing voice shifting to a conspiratorial rasp, “you are likely wondering what all of these ‘Beats’ are.”
Two more marshmallow sprites of subtle hues of pink squeeze out from the seam beside him, warbling miniature, flute-like chirps that harmonize sweetly with the transmission’s electrical hum.
“They are the basic measure of time tracking in Arcanoria and, if my vision doesn’t fail me, roughly equate to what you would consider 3.38 seconds. Indispensable for measuring the dynamics of music, and just as useful for the resting pauses in the score.”
The first teal sprite bumps affectionately into his ankle. He nudges it away with the toe of his boot, but the creature merely compresses into an ecstatic oval, rolling happily back against the coat at his waist.
“They are also called breaths, because it is exactly how long it takes for the human body to inhale and exhale in an unhurried resting state. Usually, at least — everyone’s tempo carries its own private friction.”
Three more plump cylinders, cream yellow, light blue, and velvet purple, tumble from the static grain, huddling in a glowing cluster around the seam, their squishy bodies piling atop a mosaic of one another like rising loaves.
One of the pink hues begins nibbling curiously on the trailing hem of his delayed coat.
“Sorry — give me one moment.” He groans, stooping to scoop the leading teal marshmallow into his palm.
“Can all of you wandering sprites behave for five measures!?”
He sets the creature three paces back, only for two others to bounce across his laces like over-proofed dough.
Kzzzzzt.
“It seems I am losing the Coherence of the tether.”
He straightens with frantic speed, though his left shoulder takes an extra second to snap back into alignment with his torso.
“Anyway, I promise I will explain the Beats in detail later. Consider these interludes my private margin notes between the acts. Try deciphering the rest of the time-tracking score on your own; the patterns are already written in the dust and the marrow of this world.”
He shifts into another enigmatic, yet equally extravagant pose, gently batting away a wandering purple marshmallow with his sleeve.
“I’ll give you a hint: there may be no seconds, minutes, hours, months, or years in Arcanoria, but we have equivalents for each that are surprisingly familiar to your calendar — and time is always sung somewhere by the ecosystem, in both its core physical and magical form.”
A Beat.
“The entire architecture is formally tied to Cosmic Motion and the sacred numbers of creation: 3, 4, and 7.”
Kzzzzzt.
The visual grain begins to chew through his outline, fraying his sleeves into jagged teeth of white noise. The wandering sprites scatter in a miniature panic, dissolving into bright blurred sparks that skip across the white hall.
“At last, the first Resonance has already begun — that girl, the river — she doesn’t feel the tether yet. She won’t, not for several moons. But I have logged the entry.”
He lifts a quill toward the dark void, sketching a circle in the air that lingers as a burning golden halo long after his hand falls away.
“I will be recording everything, whether either of us is ready.” A crooked, knowing grin tugs at the edge of his mask. “Even I am surprised, on occasion. There are things I still cannot predict — the name of a crown is one of them.”
The cold white light surges violently, drowning his silhouette, the mask, and the small, rounded creatures squeaking in his wake.
“So try to keep up…”
His silhouette unravels into blinding snow of black veins, leaving only the disembodied sound of his voice reverberating through the glass.
A single echo ripples outward, slow and rhythmic, its wave like a bell tolled across an impossibly vast starlit icy lake.
“…Third Actor.”
The entire structure fades to dark and into a single Beat, of silence.
— The White-Touched Archivist.