Chapter Text
The Anti-Void was nothing. White, endless, like the dead glow of a computer screen frozen from a systematic error. There was no wind, yet no warmth, just silence which stretched into forever. The only living thing that lingered here was the skeleton who was often trapped in it.
Blue strings cut across the blank horizon, hanging their crafted puppets in rows. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of Sanses, all crooked, mismatched, stitched together from dyes and scraps of coats. None of them whole, none of them right. They were imperfect pieces of artwork. They dangled in still air that did not breathe, their buttons staring, their smiles cracked. Their mistakes matched with the life they represented.
Error was among them, sat on the white floor which was barely distinguishable. His needles clicked restlessly, a rhythm which was sharp enough to pierce the lonely quiet. A skeletal hand drifted upwards, tracing the smooth ridges of his cheekbone before curling into the string seeping from it. Error tugged. The blue thread quivered, connecting to his dark phalanges.
He did not look at the puppets. They were a revolting display of anomalies which should have never come to be. A gallery of mistakes. Each one wrong. Each one now gone.
Error’s sockets narrowed, eye-lights flickering like static caught between frames. He hated the quiet. Quiet meant thinking. Thinking meant remembering. Remembering meant thinking about Ink.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, strings tightening and loosening with the twitch of his hands. His mind itched with the thought of universes beyond this place, all of them messy, loud, alive. Experiences he could never have. Things worth pulling apart. Breaking.
Their existence meant that he had to find them, tear them, reduce them to scraps like the failed art pieces at his feet.
The void hummed faintly, like the static between corrupted frames. Error’s sockets stayed fixed on nothing, but his mind crawled freely. The multiverse. A system bloated with excess files, cluttered with useless copies, branching endlessly. All anomalies which were pretending to be art. Code that was written wrong from the very start of its creation.
He could almost hear it all, sometimes even feeling the alternate universes ticking, breathing, colliding in messy loops which smashed into each other when the universe was not stable or loved enough to be contained.
Too loud, too alive. He could almost imagine the silence if they were torn apart. Ordered like recently organised files.
His hands twitched, strings tugging taut, loosening, tugging again.
He wanted to cut them all just like the mere strings he held. Reduce everything into fragments, stripped back to nothing but static. No colour, no sound, no life. That was better. Anomalies should not be allowed to exist as they are mistakes made from perfection.
Yet the thing stopping him was the small, slender painter he detested so much. The thought slipped in like malware, uninvited. That walking palette, that guardian, protector of the multiverse. Ink was creation, noise made into form, every stroke of paint was disorder disguised as purpose. He was the opposite, the error of the multiverses code, the reason that silence could one day become permanent.
Error’s sockets narrowed, eye-lights glitching sharp. He hated the thought of him.
Ink was creation. Error was destruction. The balance was a lie. One of them had to overwrite the other.
Error flexed his fingers, strings shuddering as glitches became to appear more frantically around him as the anger grew. He would find him. Cut him down like the rest.
He wanted to know how much ink the artist would bleed before the silence took him.
The Anti-Void stuttered. Just for the smallest fraction of a second, the white static bled into colours. The unchanging horizon had cracked, not like glass but like a program freezing, lines duplicating and overlapping before the screen blinked back to normal.
Error froze with it, eye-lights shrinking into nothing at all. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Nothing in the Anti-Void was supposed to change unless he had willed it to.
And yet, he saw something which to him was nauseating. A flicker of paints, smeared across the void mixing digital with traditional mediums. Gold. Blue. Red. Colours the Guardian of Creation would adore, bleeding through a place it had no right to touch.
The vision vanished before he could process it, swallowed whole by the endless loneliness of white, but the afterimage burned in his sockets, clinging like a virus in his code.
Error’s strings twitched violently. His hand clenched until the bones creaked, his body jittering in small, sharp spasms. This wasn’t possible. He was control here. Nothing else reached in, especially not anything to do with creation.
He stood abruptly, needles scraping together in a rhythm too fast to be deliberate. His mind was supposed to be compartmentalized, firewalled. But something had breached. Something had reached, and Error for sure did not understand how.
Thoughts scratched like corrupted code against his skull. If the Anti-Void could flicker, what could be happening to the multiverse as a whole? Error didn’t care for universes, not truly. But the main timelines couldn’t fall. Their collapse meant the collapse of everything. That wasn’t the game he played. His targets were the anomalies, the clutter, the useless branches taking up space.
Error’s eye-lights glitched, flashing from jagged red to blank black, static swallowing the sockets before they reformed. He couldn’t stay here. He couldn’t think here. Not while colour lingered in his mind like a virus.
The strings around his arms snapped taut, pulling tight like lines of code executing a command. With a single motion, the Anti-Void collapsed inward, folding in on itself like a window being shut.
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When the void released him, colour hit his senses like a crash.
Bright sky, light so sharp it ached against his sockets, a world loud with sound and warmth.
Underswap, the pacifist timeline. The one place he never minded visiting. Error’s body jittered at the edges, strings buzzing as though his code hadn’t fully settled. He hadn’t come to play games. He came because he needed to see him. Blue. The only one who might understand what had just bled into his code.