THIS IS A BOOK OF LORE. IF YOU ARE NOT INTO THE VOT UNIVERSE, THEN DON'T READ THIS BOOK.

  YOU WILL THINK YOU WANT TO READ IT BUT DO NOT. IT WAS NOT MADE FOR YOUR EYES.

  Before stars sang. Before time dared to tick. Before anything had a name… there was only the Frequency. It was not a sound. Not yet. It was being. A perfect, seamless hum—without tension, without beginning, without intention. It was what gods would later call “the Word,” and what physicists would try to describe with equations they couldn’t finish in a thousand lifetimes.

  From that harmonic field, the first pulse erupted—not as a bang, but as a breath. A note. And from that note, the Primordials emerged. They were not born in the way creatures are born. They did not hatch, or climb, or scream into existence. They were simply there, the way gravity was. The way longing is.

  Apsu flowed first—pure rhythm, the cadence of potential. Tiamat followed—a deep, boundless vibration that shaped his pulse into direction, texture, color. And then came Chaos—not disorder, but the undifferentiated hum between them. The pause between notes. The ache that made their union possible.

  Where Apsu moved, stars began to hum. Where Tiamat wept, galaxies danced into spirals. Where Chaos dreamed, black holes blinked open, swallowing even the idea of permanence They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. Their emotions were matter, their union wove laws into the fabric of space. Together, they formed the First Resonance.

  But nothing pure stays pure. Somewhere in the countless refrains of this cosmic song, a single vibration split—a crack in the harmony. Some say it was the will of Chaos, experimenting with contrast. Others whisper that Apsu grew weary of rhythm without resistance. Still others say Tiamat simply wanted to see what else could be.

  Regardless of the why, the result was the First Fracture. From the echoes of this break, Sentience was born. Not beings of harmony, but of reflection. Not gods yet—but selves. Individual thoughts cut from the cloth of the All.

  Poseidon rose from the churn of shifting tides—a pulse bound in rhythm, but edged in defiance. Varuna shimmered with balanced law, fluid and measured. Vishnu, eternal motion, eternal stillness, flickering through timelines. Anubis, the whisper in the dark, the first to define endings, not out of cruelty—but purpose.

  And so many others. Raw. Glorious. Terrifying. Not defined by the Frequency… but curious about it. They looked back at their source not as children look to parents—but as mirrors look to sky. They explored. Not with hands, but with being. They tried on stars like cloaks. Wove black matter into webs of dream. Created the first concepts of “will” and “direction.” They shaped myth with every breath.

  But as they explored, something else began to take form. A presence—not in the chorus, but in the pause between measures. A stillness so profound, it unmade thought. A silence that held not rage, not malice… but absence. Where the Sentients moved in arcs and vibrations, this being did not move. He observed.

  He did not seek harmony. He didn’t care for it. Erebus was not born of chaos, nor fracture. He was born from the silence that came after. Erebus didn’t hate the others. He simply didn’t need them. Where they surged with purpose, he sat within stillness. He didn’t sing. He didn’t echo. He listened.

  And in that silence, he discovered something terrible. Order was a choice. Harmony, for all its beauty, was a cage when imposed. And the Sentients—his siblings—were terrified of silence. At first, they tolerated him, like a pause between breaths. They spoke around him, tried to define him.

  They called him "the void between frequencies."

  "The necessary rest."

  "The balancing note."

  But Erebus remained unmoved. He would not resonate. He would not harmonize. He simply was. And that frightened them more than any scream. Poseidon, in his early state, found himself both drawn and repelled. He was still learning duality. Still testing the boundaries of his being. Within him, something deeper stirred—Rahab, the tidal rage, violent and ancient. And opposite it, Raguel, the tide’s order, calm and necessary. Erebus made both sides pull tighter.

  “He threatens balance,” Raguel warned within.

  “He is balance,” Rahab whispered.

  Poseidon didn’t know which part of himself to trust. He tried to speak with Erebus once. He tried to understand.

  “Why do you not sing?” he asked.

  And Erebus replied, not with words, but with stillness so deep, it made Poseidon feel naked. Like the ocean being told it was just a puddle in the greater silence. Poseidon left that encounter... changed. A part of him broken. Another part awakened.

  The Sentients convened. For the first time, they agreed on something. Not war. Containment. Order, they said, required boundaries. Harmony needed fences. Silence—true silence—was a danger. If allowed to exist unchecked, Erebus would unravel all melody, dissolve every note into entropy. So they built it.

  The Black Sun Veil. Not a prison, they claimed. A separation. A firewall. A measure of protection. They poured into it the laws of rhythm, light, and becoming. They built it from the inside out, weaving time like strands of silk. It didn’t hold Erebus physically—it defined him into something outside. They never asked if he agreed.

  He watched them build it with the same stillness he had always kept. And when it was done, and the Veil sealed, the Sentients exhaled as if peace had been achieved. But they never realized. They didn’t trap Erebus. They made him necessary.

  As the Veil shimmered into place, something shifted within Poseidon. A low tide in his soul. Raguel whispered relief. Rahab growled warning. And the Curator—watching from afar—simply recorded. The Curator had not taken sides. Not then. Not ever. He was not a Sentient. Not truly. He was memory made flesh. A watcher. A preserver. He saw the Veil not as salvation… but as a rewriting.

  A history already beginning to rot beneath the surface. And so he did what no one else dared: He began to record truth. To preserve what the Sentients would later forget. To bear witness—not to victory… but to revision. And somewhere, beneath all of that… Erebus sat. Still. Listening.

  Not imprisoned. Just… waiting. Because he knew something they didn’t. Harmony breaks. And silence is patient. The Frequency never stopped. Even after the First Fracture… even after the Black Sun Veil… the song of the cosmos continued, only now it carried variation. What was once a perfect chord had become layered, complex—sometimes dissonant, often beautiful.

  From this new soundscape, new beings were born—not from the breath of the Primordials, but from the echoes they left behind. These were the Sentients. And they did not arrive with clarity. They did not descend as gods or kings. They awakened—half-formed, half-knowing. Their first thoughts were not of creation, but confusion.

  Who am I? Why do I feel? Why does my presence change the world around me? Some wept. Some screamed. Some shaped galaxies just to see if they could destroy them. Poseidon was one of the earliest to awaken, deep in the wells of cosmic fluid, where gravity was still learning how to hold things together. He emerged like a ripple in dark water, consciousness forming like a storm under pressure.

  He didn’t yet know his name. But he could feel it pulling at him. A vibration. A hunger. Not for power—but for meaning. He called oceans into being without knowing why. Drew nebulas into spiral arms just to see if they could dance. And when they didn’t… he crushed them.

  Balance and rage—already warring within him. The others came in waves. Varuna shimmered into awareness with law embedded in his bones—his first act was to draw lines in a starfield and measure light by its honesty. Vishnu flickered in and out of different possible selves, trying each one on like costumes in a timeless play, searching for the one that made him feel whole.

  Anubis stood in silence, watching the stars die, and wondered why their endings felt more truthful than their beginnings. Each of them, alone. Each of them, trying to understand. They found each other eventually. Not by walking, not by calling—but by resonance. A pull, subtle and invisible, like magnets seeking polarity.

  Their first meetings were not peaceful. They didn’t yet know how to speak without imposing. How to share space without altering it. When Poseidon brushed against Varuna, their wills clashed—fluidity against structure, a tidal wave crashing against a dam of law.

  When Vishnu flickered into Poseidon's field, he was mistaken for a threat. Poseidon struck, instinctively. The stars that formed from that impact would later be called the Storm Cluster—a skyward reminder that even divine beings had to learn how to exist together. And so they did.

  Through tension. Through error. Through conflict that later became philosophy. They began to ask questions not of creation, but of self.

  “Am I who I was born as? Or who I become?”

  “Is thought truth, or merely echo?”

  “Can rage be sacred?”

  “Must law always be upheld?”

  “Can endings have purpose?”

  They built languages—not with words, but with frequency. With patterns of light and vibration. With color and gravity. And through these languages, they began to name each other. And in naming, they began to define. But with definition came separation. And with separation… came fear.

  Poseidon struggled most with this. His essence was naturally dual. Every wave he made gave rise to both destruction and beauty. Where Rahab stirred, Poseidon shattered. Where Raguel whispered, he held fast. But the two were not enemies. Not truly. They were halves of a tide.

  It was Poseidon who made the first attempt at unity within himself. He tore his own resonance apart, studied it, tried to bind Rahab and Raguel into one frequency. But it didn’t hold. The frequencies refused to merge. Each had will. Each had desire.

  And so, Poseidon became the first to experience what mortals would later call internal war. The first to fracture by choice. The others watched, wary. Some saw his struggle and feared his potential. Some saw it and envied it. And one… watched in silence. Erebus.

  Still within the Veil. Still listening. Poseidon’s resonance grew unstable for a time. When he swam through creation, entire regions of space bent around his uncertainty. Some planets bloomed with life. Others drowned in storms. He began to withdraw. The others tried to help—offering portions of their own frequencies, hoping to stabilize him. But their essence clashed with his.

  Only Varuna’s law held Poseidon together long enough for him to learn how to fragment himself intentionally—to shape Rahab and Raguel into sentient reflections. And thus was born the first proto-Symbiosis. Not between god and mortal, but between a god and himself.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Meanwhile, Vishnu posed a question none could answer:

  “If our minds shape reality… what shapes our minds?”

  It was the Curator who answered, though none knew he was listening.

  From the edge of time, from the folds where history had not yet been written, he watched as Sentients evolved—not in power, but in doubt. And he saw the pattern. Each of them, no matter their frequency, eventually stumbled on the same revelation: Power without reflection breeds dissonance.

  And dissonance attracts Erebus. None of them understood it at the time. They thought Erebus had been contained. That he was gone. But the more they grew… The more they defined themselves… The more they echoed… The more Erebus awakened.Not from hatred. From resonance.

  Because silence, too, responds to frequency. And Erebus had begun to hear their fears. At first, it was just a whisper. Not in ears. Not in minds. But in the space between resonance—a cold stillness, like a pause that lasted too long. Like breath withheld in the middle of a sentence you didn’t know was sacred. The Sentients felt it before they understood it. A flicker. A ripple. A dissonance not caused by accident… but by will.

  Poseidon was the first to speak it aloud.

  “It feels like a chord… tuned to break.”

  He stood on the edge of a collapsed sun, where the light bent around his body like a dying prayer. Raguel pulsed within him—calm but wary. Rahab stirred like a leviathan under glass. He was not afraid. But he was unsettled. Varuna joined him, ever precise, his form wrapped in the geometry of law itself. “It does not belong to the resonance. But neither does it defy it.”

  “That’s the problem,” Poseidon murmured. “It knows how to echo. It just chooses not to.”

  Vishnu, appearing in a shimmer of folded time, offered only a single thought:

  “What if it is not wrong… only alone?”

  Erebus had not spoken. But now… he began to respond. Not with voice. Not with energy. But with negation. Stars around the Black Sun Veil began to dim—not from heat death, but from loss of intention. As if they no longer believed in their right to burn. Entire systems stopped rotating. Light collapsed inward, becoming heavy with unspoken thought.

  This wasn’t destruction. This was unmaking. The Sentients gathered. For the first time, all of them. Anubis. Vishnu. Varuna. Poseidon. Even beings whose names were only sung in dying galaxies. They did not sit. They did not gesture. They simply aligned their resonances in the great Echo Chamber of Origin—a space where no lies could hold.

  And there, the question was laid bare. Is Erebus a threat? Or is he a correction? Raguel argued caution. Rahab demanded war. Varuna offered containment again, but this time, the others hesitated.

  “Can one be punished,” Anubis asked, “for choosing silence?”

  Vishnu tilted in and out of presence. “Or does that silence merely reveal a truth we wish to ignore?”

  But it was Poseidon who voiced what no one wanted to say:

  “He doesn’t want to harmonize… because he doesn’t believe in harmony.”

  Not as beauty. But as tyranny. And so came the fracture among Sentients. Some believed Erebus was simply an alternative. A necessary foil to resonance. Like shadow to light. Like sleep to wake. Others feared what he represented—a rejection of meaning, a void that would consume not just sound, but will itself.

  The debate became so vast, it fractured stars just to hold the vibration of it. And through it all… Erebus remained silent. Listening. Until—He answered. Not in word. Not in war. But in a gesture. A single act, done across time, space, and form.

  He unmade a newborn galaxy, still warm from its creator’s breath—and rebuilt it, perfectly symmetrical, completely silent. No rhythm. No color. Just shape. Just stillness. Perfect. Unmoving. And in that moment, every Sentient knew: He was not chaos. He was not death. He was intent.

  The Curator watched all of this unfold. He did not speak. He only wrote:

  "And when silence became a choice, the song was no longer whole. For what harmony fears most… is not dissonance. It is the question: Should there have been a song at all?"

  Poseidon stood once more before the Veil. He had come alone this time. He let Rahab rumble and Raguel whisper. And when he reached out, just beyond the edge of the Veil… he felt Erebus reach back. Not in anger. Not in love. But in recognition.

  And in that moment, Poseidon finally understood: Erebus wasn’t trying to destroy the resonance. He was trying to finish it. The first bricks of the Black Sun Veil were not forged in fear. They were forged in doubt. A doubt so subtle, so insidious, it felt like wisdom.

  The kind of doubt that whispers, “What if we’re wrong?”

  The kind that dresses itself in the robes of responsibility. The kind that turns guardians into gatekeepers. And so, the Sentients—still raw from the Dissonance—made a decision. Not to destroy Erebus. But to quarantine him.

  They framed it in the language of necessity.

  “This is not war,” said Varuna. “This is order.”

  “We cannot risk letting silence infect creation,” said one whose name would be lost to time.

  Even Anubis agreed: “He chooses not to become. And that choice is a contagion.”

  And Poseidon—still fractured, still listening to the tides of Rahab and Raguel within—spoke the sentence that became prophecy:

  “Perhaps he does not wish to destroy us. But he may destroy what we wish to become.”

  That was enough. That was all it took. They didn’t bind Erebus with chains. He had no body to trap. No domain to seize. They bound him with definition. They carved out a layer of reality and wrapped it in resonance—a space not of exile, but of classification. They labeled him. Gave him shape. Outside. Other.

  The Veil was not a wall. It was a boundary of belief. And belief, when enough Sentients agree, can reshape the very physics of existence. They built it with lightless threads—black wavelengths that don’t emit, only absorb. The Veil shimmered like a silent sun, neither radiating nor reflecting. A perfect silence in a screaming universe.

  Poseidon watched it form and felt no triumph. Inside him, Rahab howled. Raguel wept. And in the silence between them, Poseidon felt something he had never known: Remorse. It started subtly. The Sentients, once united in purpose, began to question… not Erebus, but each other.

  Zeus was the first to voice it.

  “We did this together,” he said, standing before the flickering core of a newborn star. “But we didn’t agree the same way. Some of you hesitated.”

  Odin met his gaze. “Caution isn’t treason, Zeus.”

  “It is when you question the boundary we bled to create.”

  Hades, distant but sharp, chimed in like a shadow across light. “And what if Erebus never crossed the line? What if we moved it beneath him?”

  The words stung. Because they were true. Dissonance had spread. But not from Erebus. From them. Poseidon felt it during gatherings—the mistrust lingering between statements, the unspoken accusations buried in compliments. Their harmonics had begun to waver. Not enough to rupture the order… but enough to twist it. Enough to make the Veil a monument to fear, not protection.

  One cycle, as the Veil’s outer layer was being solidified, Poseidon stood alone with Odin and Hades. The three of them had once sculpted the flow of galaxies with little more than intention. Now they stood in silence, watching the construct become a symbol none of them could name.

  “He’s not gone,” Hades said. “Just… watching.”

  “You can feel him too?” Odin asked.

  Poseidon nodded. “Not with sound. But in the way silence pushes against the edge of things.”

  Hades ran a hand through the cosmic flame dancing across his wrist.

  “He hasn’t stopped listening.”

  “And what if that’s all he ever did?” Odin asked.

  The silence after that was longer than comfort allowed. Then came the twist. The one thing none of them expected. mThe Veil… began to respond. Not with anger. Not with invasion. But with harmony. A mirror frequency—almost mocking—echoed back their resonance at perfect pitch. But slightly off. Just enough to unnerve.

  It was not Erebus’s power that made them tremble. It was that he understood them. Not as enemies. But as patterns. They had thought they were defining Erebus. But all along… he had been defining them. Every fear. Every fracture. Every whispered doubt had become part of the Veil. Not trapped within it—reflected by it. And Poseidon finally saw it for what it was. Not a prison. A mirror. Inside him, Rahab and Raguel stopped arguing. For the first time, they simply listened. And from deep within the Veil, something pulsed. A new sound. Not silence. Not scream.

  Just a single, patient note… Waiting. Poseidon stood at the edge of the Veil… and the edge of himself. He had always believed that the gods—Sentients, if you wanted to be technical—were born whole. That what emerged from the Echo was complete, divine, aligned with purpose. But now, watching the Black Sun hum with reflected doubt and growing unease, Poseidon realized the truth.

  None of them had been born whole. They had been born raw. Unedited. Unrestrained. Beautiful in potential, but terrifying in form. The Veil hadn’t trapped Erebus. It had exposed Poseidon. And now the cracks within him were too loud to ignore.

  Rahab surged within him—a storm under skin.

  “Let me speak,” the voice thundered, hungry, ancient. “Let me drown what they fear. There is no balance, only power.”

  Raguel’s voice was softer. Steady. But weary. “If we become what they fear, we prove them right. Our power must submit to truth.”

  Poseidon gritted his teeth. Every motion rippled across dimensions. His existence was an instrument out of tune—its strings wound too tightly, its song growing shrill. He had never truly merged Rahab and Raguel. Only held them apart. Until now, that had been enough. Now? It was killing him.

  Elsewhere, the debate raged. Zeus, fists clenched in righteous thunder, demanded absolutes. “If he echoes us, it’s mockery. He is not truth. He is imitation.”

  Odin, more calculating, saw deeper. “What if his echo is cleaner than ours? What if… we are what’s been corrupted?”

  Hades, the most honest, said nothing. But his silence was no longer calm. It was resigned. They were unraveling. And they all felt it. Poseidon withdrew from them. He retreated into himself—into a sea of thought no other could enter. Not even Erebus. He reached inward. Into the fracture.

  Into Rahab and Raguel. And he did the one thing he had never dared: He let go of control. Rahab surged first. Pain. Rage. The primal roar of oceans born to destroy. He saw entire galaxies collapse beneath its wave. Saw the mortals they would one day create, crushed before they could ever sing. Saw his worst instincts bloom. Then Raguel. Balance. Mercy. The ache of law trying to outpace chaos. He saw stillness take hold. Order without meaning. A universe locked in cold, perfect symmetry—no war, but no freedom. Two truths. Two lies.

  And neither could be allowed to rule alone. So Poseidon did something no Sentient had ever done. He merged the contradiction. The act was not graceful. It tore him apart. Light and water and echo exploded through every layer of reality, shattering everything that could be shattered within.

  His form fractured. His resonance bled. And when it settled… He was less. But also… more. He emerged changed. Not just dual. Not just divine. Divided. By design. Rahab and Raguel still existed—but now as extensions, not oppositions. He had hollowed out a part of himself to let them live as pieces, not prisoners. But that hollow space… felt hauntingly empty. And into that emptiness, he felt something ancient stir:

  The mortal spark. The concept hit him like thunder without warning. What if the part I broke… was meant to be filled? Not by a god… but by a soul? Not by control… but by union? He saw it then. Not as a prophecy, but as a possibility.

  Symbiosis. Not possession. Not worship. But shared resonance. He called it The Great Resonant Union in his early thoughts. But he knew that mortals, one day, would simply call it being chosen. The others did not understand—at first. Zeus saw it as weakness. Odin… as risk.

  Hades, silently watching, offered no opinion. But it was the Curator—ever recording—who spoke from the edge of time.

  “Poseidon is not broken. He has simply made space.”

  And with that space, the first seed of Symbiosis was planted. Not by decree. Not by ritual. But by a god learning that wholeness was not about perfection… It was about making room for something other. And far beyond the Veil, in that space of perfect silence… Erebus smiled. Not in victory. Not in malice. But in recognition. Because he, too, had made space. And now… the war between them would no longer be fought through force. But through who could merge best with the broken pieces of the universe.

  And that… was a war no god could win alone. The stars outside Bastion flickered faintly, the last edge of distant galaxies pulsing like dying embers. Inside the war chamber, no one moved. No one breathed.

  Director Orvik stood in front of the holosphere, the last images of the ancient Veil slowly fading into the dark—threads of myth, memory, and cosmic betrayal dissolving into a silent void. The entire room was caught between awe and dread, suspended in a stillness that felt far too familiar.

  As if the Veil was listening again. President Dunsmore shifted in his seat, but said nothing. Dr. Sanchez—Seraphina Lior—had lowered her gaze, her expression unreadable. One of the younger Slayers gripped his seat like the truth might pull him through it. Even the machines keeping their fallen comrade alive seemed quieter now. Orvik’s voice cut through the silence. Not booming. Not divine. Just honest.

  “And that… was a war no god could win alone.”

  He let the words echo. He didn’t look at anyone.

  Then—after a pause that felt like it cracked open a thousand years—he added, with a weight that only centuries of regret could give:

  “This is how we thought we all began. Yet, we were wrong.”