Nothingness. Tranquil, sordid, bland, nothingness. How can nothingness be so paradoxically complex? The Book of Annihilation told me this was always meant to be. I was always meant to speak these words and utter a proclamation that would usher in the end of this world.

The end of this world? Such a grand, intimidating statement. All I was doing was returning to the origin, the essence of it all. I was smudging ink all over the story, pulling the reader out of their comfort zone, and hooking them on a steady diet of self-referential syllogisms that were barely rational and arguably cut into more than three parts.

What happens to a story when language is blown apart? Not the script or the sentences, those can still make sense, but the shared assumptions and conventions around language, genre, and tropes, what happens once those are blown apart and the story returns to nothingness? What if, for example, sentences stop in the middle, for a moment, and resume to make no point at all? Or what if paragraphs go from rational connections to seemingly random tangents that travel across genre, media, and even time?

Controversial French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp inverted a common porcelain urinal, signed it R.Mutt, titled it Fountain and submitted it to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in my hometown. It was rejected by the committee, who did not think an item so base, vulgar and common should be considered art, and Marcel Duchamp threw a fit and fought with the society that he had at one point quite respected. The Society had said they would accept any art piece as long as the artist paid the submission fee, but in the end, they decided Duchamp’s Fountain had gone too far. Duchamp would go on to destroy the original Fountain, but after the whole incident became a legendary event in New York art circles, he created more versions of his piece and submitted them to different galleries.

What was the point of the Fountain? Was it challenging our definition of art? Yes. Was it literally meant as a piece of ‘anti-art?’ Yes. Was it meant to stand out, to make the viewer stop and stare and question why this was in here and begin churning inside our heads questions about art, value, commonness and perhaps even, dare I say it, language?

Yes, because a urinal is not a fountain.

Groundbreaking piece of artistic criticism aside, as I was hanging in the void of nothingness my mind went back to the modern museums I had visited. The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and several more whose names I couldn’t remember. I’d always wondered why some of those pieces were considered ‘art’ while my own little doodles and sketches were worth nothing even to me.

When the famous painter Jackson Pollock splattered paint all over his canvas and called it art, many people said what he was doing wasn’t art at all. And yet now, every time I went to see his paintings, there would be a throng of visitors hanging about, almost more than those standing around van Gogh’s Starry Night, which, incidentally, was widely disregarded during its creator’s lifetime, quite possibly because the style was too avant-garde—playing too loosely with the conventions and norms of the art form.

Writers have played loosely with their art form too. Poets with form, rhythm, rhyme, meter and much more. Novelists with narrative, structure, narrative structure, characters and form. Think only of the hyper-modern style in which all of us type our social media posts and compare them to the long winded letters and essays of yore. But also, the stream of consciousness style of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, words written intentionally to be difficult to read as per convention but built to ease one’s immersion into the mind of a character meant to mimic real human consciousness. Long sentences, with strange breaks and pauses, meant to unsettle but also to invite the reader to read more closely the words that would otherwise have been brushed past as the eye glances over them either on paper or on digital screens.

This was the nothingness of the Book of Annihilation. It was not nothingness at all. It was a mirror, a mirror for the story to look at itself as a piece of art. A mirror for the great entity who had created the piece of art to look at itself and see its own reflection. And in its reflection were the beings inside the Book, beings given form and life inside the story. People like Noel, Kelser, Kol and the rest. All of them, seeming at once as real beings, were but pale imitations given life by words and thoughts and interplay between words and thoughts.

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But did that mean that I did not exist? No, of course I did. I was thinking these words, observing this nothingness, and observing the great being that was looking at me as if I was a reflection of itself. The Simurgh looked at me with a strange light in its eye, an eye full of fire and wisdom and even a little trepidation.

Trepidation, what a lovely word. Why did it come to mind? I didn’t feel like I had come up on its own. No, it had bubbled up from my subconscious, except it wasn’t my subconscious at all. Still, I said aloud my thoughts, knowing well that the Simurgh could already hear the voice inside my head.

“So you have found the truth of this world at last?” said the Simurgh, unfurling its wide wings to cast a shadow over the nothingness. There was no singular source of light in this world. Instead, light seemed to emit from everywhere, and yet the Simurgh cast a shadow as if the light was radiating from its eyes.

“Are you saying that world was your reflection?” I said, slowly.

“Yes, child,” said the rainbow colored bird towering over me like a skyscraper.

“And all of my friends? Kelser, Noel, Kol, Taoc, even the monsters like Paris?” I said.

“Glints in my eye, strands on my feathers, stray thoughts given form, whatever analogy you would like, although nothing could perfectly describe it,” said the Simurgh.

“But what about the other Immortals? They were as strong as you, were they not? Madness beat you twice, and the Evil Eye opposed you too. How could you have made beings inside your reflection that were more powerful than you?” I asked.

The Simurgh leaned forward, a great heat and pressure washing over me as it did so. “The Evil Eye was a servant of mine. I built him to be powerful, but not as powerful as me. He was meant to sow discord into the world, and thereby bring joy by way of contrast and comparison. He was to be the weak darkness scurrying away from my light, and giving the beings of this world something to strive against.”

“I see. He was your Satan?” I said, quietly.

“More like Angra Mainyu,” said the Simurgh.

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re referencing an ancient Zoroastrian spirit. Sounds like you know about my world? Do you fancy yourself an Ahura Mazda of sorts?”

The Simurgh smiled. Its smile made me consider its long pointed beak for the first time. The beak was lined with sharp spines on the inside where the tongue was supposed to be and a great and terrible darkness lay inside its mouth. I felt a chill creep up my back as the Simurgh extended its smile. The Simurgh let out a little birdsong. It was happy. “Do you know how long I have waited to speak with you, Caspian Holm?”

I took a step back. Or, I tried to. My body was frozen. Even my eyes did not blink. I could not wrench my gaze from the Simurgh for a moment. “I guess it must have been from the moment Noel led me into your tree.”

The Simurgh shook its head. “I have wanted to meet you since before you came to this world. It was why I dragged you in there in the first place.”

My eyes widened. “You brought me to that world? No, the Immortal of Evil, the Evil Eye, he said he had been the one to summon me!”

“And the Evil Eye is my servant, even when he acts like he is his own being. Remember, he is also merely a being confined to my reflection. Sometimes, when an action is too beneath the creator of this reflection, the red star must commit a little mischief,” said the Simurgh.

“No, wait, that still doesn’t make sense. You sound as if you’ve been waiting to meet me, but you met me inside that world when Noel brought me to the tree! You’ve intervened on my behalf before, saving me multiple times. If all you wanted to do was meet me, you would have just dropped by for a word or even spoken right into my head,” I said.

The Simurgh smiled but did not respond.

“And you still haven’t explained Madness!” I said.

The ground shook. My heart stopped. The Simurgh snarled. “Do not speak his name in my presence!”