Chapter 488: Patterns! I
There exists a brand of hope that infects the human consciousness...the belief that people can fundamentally change.
It’s the same optimism that makes someone date a serial cheater thinking "they’ll be different with me," or adopt a domesticated tiger that has sent three previous owners to the emergency room because "he just needs love."
Or the friend who insists their perpetually unemployed roommate will definitely start paying rent next month. They’ve been saying this for two years.
The roommate has, in that time, mastered seventeen video games, learned to juggle, and somehow acquired a PhD in avoiding responsibility, but has not, in fact, paid rent.
Or the spouse who remains convinced that their partner’s collection of stuffed frogs will stop expanding.
"They promised," they say, as another shelf is installed. The house now contains more frogs than a biblical plague, but surely, change is just around the corner.
Existence watches these exercises in optimism with the bemused fascination of a parent watching a child repeatedly try to pet a cactus. Some beings, it knows, are simply what they are.
The scorpion will sting the frog crossing the river not because it’s evil, but because that’s what scorpions do.
The cat will knock the glass off the table while maintaining eye contact.
The person who says "I’m not a drama person" will invariably be at the center of every conflict within a five-mile radius.
Sometimes, accepting that some beings cannot change isn’t pessimism...it’s simply pattern recognition!
—
In the stellar space where possibility had seemed infinite moments before, Achilles looked at Syl’thessara with eyes that held the last flickering ember of hope that this entity would finally make a choice for something beyond her established patterns.
Then his eyes widened in shock and incredulity, his head shaking as if he had sensed something approaching...a familiar weight, a narrative rhythm he recognized all too well.
Surely not. Surely, after everything...
Syl’thessara closed her eyes, her perfect features settling into lines of sorrowful determination.
When she shook her head, the gesture contained finality that had been rehearsed across millennia.
"No."
The word fell between them like a stone into still water, creating ripples that would spread far beyond this moment.
"No," she repeated, her voice carrying the stern sorrow of someone making the only choice they knew how to make. "I will not stand against the Nar’Thyss. I cannot. I will not pretend to be brave now when I have been a coward for so long."
She paused, her form solidifying as if drawing strength from accepting her nature.
"But... I will also not help them. I won’t tell them about you, about this meeting, about what you’ve become."
Her eyes opened, fixing on him with something that might have been the ghost of maternal protection.
"A Nar’Thyss came to me, telling me to check this Star Sea to ensure no Nexus Deviation Point had arisen here. I don’t know whether you are that deviation or not, but I won’t bring any of this up either."
She stood straighter, as if this minimal rebellion was all she could manage.
"That is my choice. My final choice. To do nothing, as I have always done, but at least this time my nothing might help rather than harm."
Achilles’s expression had grown cold during her speech, rage crystallizing into something more cutting than mere anger.
He shook his head with the disappointment of someone who had offered redemption only to watch it be refused for comfort.
"At least you stay true to who you are until the end," he said, his voice carrying edges that could have severed stars.
"Tell me, Ancestor, before you return to your comfortable prison of guilt...what exactly is a Nexus Deviation Point?"
Syl’thessara’s expression grew clinical, retreating into the safety of exposition rather than emotion.
"A Nexus Deviation Point is an anomaly in the narrative structure of reality," she explained, her tone taking on the quality of someone reciting facts to avoid feeling.
"It occurs when something arises that has the potential to fundamentally alter or threaten the established story patterns the Nar’Thyss maintain. A being who shouldn’t exist, an event that shouldn’t be possible, a choice that breaks the predetermined narrative flow."
She gestured vaguely at the cosmos around them.
"They’re rare...perhaps one every few centuries across all the Star Seas they monitor. And they’re dangerous to the Nar’Thyss because they represent uncertainty, the possibility that their carefully crafted Fables might develop beyond their control."
Her expression grew harder, colder.
"It matters not if you are one or not. The Nar’Thyss have collapsed every Nexus Deviation Point that has arisen. They have too many failsafes, too many contingencies. The moment they confirm your existence as a deviation, they will bring forces you cannot imagine to bear."
She turned partially away, her platinum-touched wings catching light that painted shadows across the void.
"Let me give you a warning, descendant. Do not even try to stand against the Nar’Thyss. Those above me...the true Constellation-class beings, exist in an entirely different Scale of Existence. What you’re contemplating would be akin to an ant trying to spit at the sun to extinguish it. Ridiculously, impossibly, laughably futile."
She shook her head with genuine sorrow, the gesture containing grief for losses that hadn’t happened yet but felt inevitable.
"They operate beyond the Null Scale you understand. Some have touched upon Level Zero, the Pre-Civilizational Existence. They write reality itself, not just the stories within it. Your assimilation abilities, your lineages, even that impossible authority you’ve manifested...to them, it would be like a child’s drawing trying to fight the artist who created it."
She turned her back to him fully, a gesture that contained dismissal and protection in equal measure.
"That is my advice, the only gift I can give to my lineage. Stop now. Hide. Survive. Let the cycles continue as they always have. If you continue on this path, if the Nar’Thyss find out about you through any other means..."
She paused at the edge of departure, her form already beginning to fade into the stellar void.
"You are on your own. As our lineage has always been."
With that, she began to move away, choosing once again the path of non-involvement, of survival through inaction, of guilt that was comfortable because it was familiar.
The Betrayer remained the Betrayer, the tragedy remained tragic, and the story continued exactly as it had been written.
Behind her, Achilles stood with his platinum wings spread, watching the woman who had started their lineage’s suffering choose to do nothing to end it. The pattern held. The scorpion had stung. The cat had knocked over the glass.
Some beings, it seemed, truly could not change!