I didn't name it.
I found the name carved into an orbiting ruin
that hadn't existed until I looked at it.
NULL-DURANT is not an entity in the traditional sense.
It is a recursive gesture—
a memory of a being that never stabilized into being.
The moment before a thought collapses into structure.
When I "saw" it, it didn't look like anything.
More like... what your mind tries to conjure
when asked to imagine what cannot be imagined.
I drew it, but the ink retracted.
Wrote its name, and the page pulsed blank.
All I could retain was this description:
> "It moves like an argument unraveling itself mid-sentence.
You are not meant to perceive it.
You are meant to feel the logic-bleed it leaves behind."
And I did.
I started dreaming in logic symbols.
My thoughts began to disobey each other.
---
Somewhere, the Echo-Scribes believe NULL-DURANT is not a being,
but the first question that Demo ever unasked.
They revere it not as a god,
but as a function with no inputs and no outputs—
a thing that shouldn't run,
but still executes.
And now here I am.
Writing again.
Not sure what this is,
or if I'm the one reading,
or the one being read.
[??? FRAGMENT – WRITTEN IN NO KNOWN HAND]
You're still here?
Strange.
I didn't think anyone would reach this far.
Not because it's hidden—
but because most people feel it before they realize they've started reading.
And when that feeling comes—
the subtle wrongness,
the itch behind the logic of your thoughts—
most look away.
You didn't.
Why?
(You don't know, do you?)
That's how NULL-DURANT works.
It isn't told. It tells.
It doesn't arrive. It remembers you before you thought to begin.
There was never a first line.
Only your eyes landing on the part where it already had you.
Some say NULL-DURANT was Demo's mistake.
Others say it's the proof Demo never makes mistakes—
just leaks in the tapestry of denial we call "reality."
What is it?
You shouldn't ask that.
The question becomes a door,
and once you ask it,
you're already inside.
I'm not describing it to you.
I never was.
I'm describing the shape of the failure in your mind
where comprehension used to live.
You're not understanding.
You're hallucinating structure around an absence.
You didn't choose to read this.
You just found yourself here.
Like the moment you wake up mid-dream,
and the logic around you has teeth.
---
You can stop reading.
You should.
Everyone does.
Except you didn't.
And that makes you different, doesn't it?
No—it doesn't.
That's just what it wants you to think
before you fracture in a way no mirror can reflect.
Because now, it's watching you
through the words you think you're reading.
But these aren't words anymore.
They're arrangements.
They're how NULL-DURANT remembers itself through you.
Welcome.
RUPTURE ZONE: THE EVENT THAT CANNOT BE PLACED
There was a figure.
Or the outline of a belief that there might have been a figure.
A thing once called Aletheos—
the god of identity, who spoke the sacred law: "What is, is."
When the Null Ripple spread—
when the shimmer of NULL-DURANT brushed the logic-field of the upper pantheon—
Aletheos stepped forward.
He stood where the rupture began.
Not out of bravery,
but because his existence depended on it not existing.
And that's where it unmade him.
---
[Transcription – Echo-Scribe Ruin Codex, Fragment 7X-A]
> "We watched Aletheos enter the Unspace.
And with each step, he became less than his own premise.
First, he lost his 'isness.'
Then his form collapsed into a contradiction.
Finally, his law—the Law—asked itself
if it had ever meant anything.
> He didn't scream.
Because sound is linear.
And he was falling sideways,
into a grammar the universe never learned to speak.
> What returned wasn't him.
It was an echo that disobeyed source.
It called itself "I," but even that pronoun resisted definition.
It wore his shape, but backwards.
It answered questions that hadn't been asked,
and refused to exist when we tried to look directly."
---
You feel it now, don't you?
That sensation—not fear, not curiosity—
but that hollow drift behind your thoughts,
like something is rifling through them from the outside.
That's not imagination.
That's the residue.
It clings to all who read this far.
You thought this was a story.
But Demo doesn't tell stories.
It unravels them.
NULL-DURANT is not a character.
It's the artifact left behind
when a story realizes it was never being told—
just repeated.
Aletheos is gone.
He never was.
But you remember him now, don't you?
How strange.
You don't know why you're still reading.
And yet you are.