There was no staircase after the top, only absence. Octavius stood on the edge of the Tower of the Night King and stared into a sky that was not sky but memory congealed into black silk.

The stars were watching him, each one an eye blinking out of sync. Below, the world held its breath. Not dead. Not alive. Just waiting.

He felt it before he understood it: the weight of stillness pressing from every direction, as though the universe were poised mid-sentence, one syllable from meaning.

Then it came, soft as a whisper but thunderous in its knowing: he was the question.

Not the seeker, not the hero, not the lost soul searching for a key, a god, or a name.

He was the wound the world had closed around.

The eternal night wasn’t a curse, spell, or a punishment. It was a reflection. A consequence of the silence he’d kept inside for lifetimes, the part of him that refused to see the root. 

What had he turned away from? What truth had he bartered with the Merchant of Echoes? What part of himself did he never ask about because he feared the answer?

He dropped to his knees on the obsidian stone. It hummed beneath him, as though remembering something long ago forgotten. In his chest, something opened like a book no one dared to read. 

Pages flipped. Names spilled out—his and not his. Lives unraveled. He saw himself in a dozen mirrors, screaming and silent, violent and kind, a king and a coward.

And then, finally, he let go. Of answers. Of shape. Of the hunger to know. He surrendered.

The sky cracked, not with sound, but with light.

It began as a thread at the horizon, too thin to name, just a suggestion of warmth. Then, color bloomed across the land—faint at first, then bolder, like memory returning after a long sleep. The crawling things on the tower stopped moving. Some wept. Some crumbled into dust.

The Night King’s face—his own—shattered like porcelain and blew away.

Light seeped back into the earth. Trees began to breathe. Shadows retreated, uncertain. The paused dreams in the library stirred and rearranged themselves. The dancers in the ballroom took on color and faces. The cathedral built itself a heart.

He fell. Not a fall of terror, but of release.

***

He awoke with birdsong in his ears. Dawn glowed like spilled paint across the sky. He lay in a field of grass.

The tower was gone. Or had never been. The fog had lifted, revealing a landscape half-familiar, as if the world had been reassembled from memory with a few pieces out of place.

He sat up. His body felt real, heavy, and present—but not entirely his. Everything shimmered at the edges. Trees seemed to breathe when he wasn’t looking. The sky pulsed faintly, like something alive.

A child passed him on the path. She wore a fox mask, slightly cracked.

She paused, turned her head just enough to be heard, and whispered: 

“You asked the right question.”

Then she walked on, leaving no footprints.

Octavius stood. He did not remember the journey in sequence. He did not remember all the riddles, or the names he’d worn, or the mirrors he’d walked through. But he remembered being the question.

And in this strange new dawn, that was enough.

The End