He sat alone for a long while after Illia left. The heavens held their pale endless quiet around him, the particular stillness of a place that had never needed to change because nothing within it ever truly ended, and Blook sat in the middle of that permanence with the question now fully spoken, no longer something he could pretend existed only in the abstract corners of his own avoidance.
Whether he wanted to keep existing like this. Or whether he had simply been too afraid to find out what happened if he didn't.
He turned the question over slowly, the way he turned over most things now, with the particular deliberate care of someone handling something that might break if mishandled. He thought of the list, the one that never finished, the names accumulating across more years than any single life should have to absorb. He thought of the graveyard, the morning after, the silence that had settled into the cracks of the world like dust after an earthquake.
He thought of the five of them.
Astra's portrait. Lisa's flower. Alexander's road. Noel's vow. Ivy's name spoken plainly to a child who had refused to let her hide.
Each of them had been given an ending. Not a happy one, necessarily, not even always a peaceful one, but an ending nonetheless, the particular mercy of grief eventually completing its cycle and depositing the person who carried it somewhere new, changed, capable of continuing because the carrying had finally been allowed to finish.
He had never been allowed that.
He understood, sitting in the pale endless light, that the not-allowing had never actually come from outside himself. No one had forbidden him from ending it. No law of his existence demanded the watching continue indefinitely. He had simply never asked, had told himself a story about the watching being a kind of company, had built an entire identity around the necessity of his own continuation without ever once testing whether the necessity was real or simply comfortable in its familiarity.
He was afraid.
That was the plain truth of it, sitting underneath every justification he had ever constructed. He was afraid of an ending the way mortal things were afraid of endings, despite never having earned the right to that particular fear through any of the vulnerability that usually accompanied it. He had watched countless beings face death with courage he had never been required to summon, and now, finally facing the possibility of his own, he found the courage considerably harder to locate than he had expected, having spent so long admiring it in others without ever needing to produce it himself.
BLK: I don't know if I can do this.
He said it to the pale light, to the formless place that had been the entirety of his existence for longer than he could measure, and the light, as it always did, offered no response, indifferent in the specific way that permanence was always indifferent to the small terrified creatures that occasionally found themselves trapped within it.
He thought about what waited on the other side of the decision.
Not an ending, precisely. He understood that much, at least, from the fragments of conversation he had absorbed across his existence about how mortality actually worked in places like the one Illia had described, monsterkind, where lives were lived and lost the ordinary way, where memory accumulated and was eventually lost entirely, where the watching he had done for so long would finally, mercifully, become something he no longer had the perspective to perform.
He would forget everything.
That was the cost, and he understood it fully, sitting in the heavens with the decision finally crystallizing into something he could no longer avoid looking at directly. He would lose the list. He would lose every name he had ever carried, every grief he had ever witnessed, every small private moment he had observed across more years than any single life could properly measure. He would lose Illia's particular brand of cheerful directness, the centuries of her checking on him without ever needing to be asked. He would lose the formless place between the story and the telling of it, the only home he had ever known, however imperfect a home it had been.
He would lose himself. Whatever self that actually was.
BLK: I think I want to stop knowing everything.
He said it slowly, testing the shape of the words in his mouth, and found that saying it aloud made it feel more real than thinking it had managed, the particular weight of language giving form to something that had previously existed only as pressure behind his ribs.
BLK: I think I want to find out what an ending feels like. Even if I don't get to keep the knowledge of having had one.
The heavens did not answer. They never did. But something in the silence felt different now, less like indifference and more like the particular quiet that arrived after a decision had finally settled into certainty, the kind of quiet that came not from absence but from completion.
He was afraid.
He remained afraid, sitting there with the decision now made, the fear not dissolving simply because the choice had finally crystallized into something solid enough to hold. He understood, with the particular clarity that sometimes arrived alongside difficult decisions, that the fear was not going to leave before the ending did. He would have to carry it the entire way, the way Astra had carried her grief into the cliff, the way Lisa had carried hers into the soil, the way all five of them had carried their fear and their grief simultaneously, neither one waiting politely for the other to finish before allowing the next step forward.
He stood, in the particular way he stood when he had somewhere, finally, to be.
He did not know exactly how this worked, the mechanics of unmaking something as old and persistent as what he currently was. He understood only that there were beings in the higher reaches of the heavens who might know, who might have the authority or the simple capacity to grant what he was finally, after more years than he could comfortably hold in mind at once, ready to ask for. He began walking toward them. The fear walked with him, the entire way, exactly as he had expected it would. He did not stop.