NIKODEM WITKOWSKI

DAY ONE
Solve et Coagula - The Great Work Begins

Information entropy: H = 4.2 bits (lexical diversity + syntactic complexity + dyadic communication)
Astrological progression: h-ψ T-1 day
Dyadic coherence: Stable
Euler characteristic: χ = 2
Spatial integrity: Nominal

He discovered it on Tuesday. 

Franz Kellner woke at precisely 6:47 AM and prepared for another day that would unfold according to the same comfortable patterns that had governed his existence for the past seven years as a third-class insurance agent, amateur lepidopterist and a collector of Victorian-era postage stamps.  The wardrobe - that mahogany monstrosity which had presided over their bedroom's northeastern quadrant like some domesticated megalith, its brass handles worn smooth by the accumulated friction of ten thousand openings and closings - stood precisely where it had always stood, arranged with the same meticulous precision that characterized Franz's approach to all domestic arrangements. He approached it with the customary absence of expectation that accompanies any activity performed more than a thousand times. The door swung open on its well-oiled hinges - Marta - his wife of seven years, three months and sixteen years -  insisted on monthly applications of petroleum jelly to all household moving parts, a domestic ritual that had evolved from practical necessity into something approaching metaphysical compulsion - revealing not the familiar constellation of hanging garments, a predictable arrangement of shirts and jackets organized by color and frequency of use, submerged in a comforting smell of mothballs and cedar blocks, but rather something that resisted immediate comprehension: a ____  where his second-best tweed blazer should have hung. Not darkness. Not shadow. Not the mere absence of his blazer. This was (VOID), and (VOID) in its most mathematically precise sense: a topological hole punched through the manifold of ordinary existence, a region where the fundamental constants that governed the behavior of matter and energy had simply elected to pursue other interests.

"Franz!" Marta's voice penetrated the bedroom from the kitchen downstairs, carrying with it the familiar cadences of morning routine. "Your breakfast is getting cold!"

"Just a moment," Franz called back, though the words felt slightly unfamiliar in his mouth.

He extended his right hand toward the (VOID), his fingers encountering not resistance but something far more disturbing: the complete absence of resistance, a zone where the strong electromagnetic force that held atomic structures together had apparently taken early retirement. His index finger penetrated approximately two centimeters into the space before stopping not because it had contacted any surface but because his nervous system, faced with sensory input that violated every assumption about the nature of physical reality, had simply decided to cease processing the information entirely. The (VOID) measured - though measurement itself became problematic near its boundaries - approximately fifteen centimeters in diameter, its edges exhibiting the sort of mathematical precision that suggested phenomena operating according to principles that belonged to a different order of reality altogether. Franz retrieved his father's pocket watch (inherited three years prior following the elder Kellner's death from complications arising from what the attending physician had diplomatically termed "existential exhaustion") and noted the time: 7:23 AM, Central European Standard Time, though time itself seemed to flow differently in the void's immediate vicinity, as if the local space-time manifold had developed a subtle but persistent limp.

DAY TWO
Visita Interiora Terrae - The Descent

Information entropy: H = 3.8 bits (cognitive degradation accelerating)
Astrological progression: h☌ψ exact
Void expansion rate: Δd = +3.7cm
Growth pattern: Non-linear
Reality distortion: Detectable
Euler characteristic: χ = 1
Wardrobe integrity: Deteriorating

The ((VOID)) had undergone what could only be described as a process of ontological expansion, though expansion implied growth and growth implied life and life implied purpose, none of which seemed applicable to a phenomenon that appeared to exist primarily as a negation of the possibility of existence itself. Franz measured it again using the cloth tape measure from Marta's sewing kit: twenty-three centimeters in diameter, though the numbers on the tape seemed to lose their clarity as they approached the ((VOID))'s perimeter, becoming increasingly difficult to read, as if measurement itself was becoming unreliable. 

The blazer question had evolved into something more complex than mere misplacement. Franz found himself unable to reconstruct the precise sequence of events that had led to the blazer's acquisition - had he purchased it or had it been purchased from him? The temporal coordinates of the transaction remained fixed in his memory (Tuesday, March 15th, 2:47 PM), but the directionality of the exchange had become fluid, subject to revision depending on which angle of approach his consciousness employed when accessing the memory.

"Franz," Marta announced during breakfast, though something in her phrasing seemed slightly off, as if she were choosing her words more carefully than usual, "I've been contemplating the implications of your increasing a b s e n c e from our usual morning routine."

"Absence is perhaps too strong a term," Franz replied, though the words felt increasingly disconnected from their semantic foundations.

At 11:43 AM (the pocket watch now ran four minutes slow, its mechanical precision apparently susceptible to whatever field effects emanated from the void), Franz observed the first clear evidence that the ((VOID)) was exercising gravitational influence on the surrounding environment. His ties - seventeen of them, arranged by color intensity from deepest burgundy to palest yellow - hung at angles that deviated from perfect verticality by amounts ranging from 2.3 to 4.7 degrees, all inclining toward the void's approximate center of mass. Franz spent thirty-seven minutes (pocket watch time) staring into the ((VOID)), during which he began to suspect that the ..VOID.. wasn't something that had appeared in his wardrobe but rather something that had always been there, and everything else - the wardrobe, the blazer, the bedroom, possibly existence itself - was simply temporary matter that had accumulated around the ..VOID..'s permanent absence like debris collecting around a drain. That evening, his wife stirred in the bed behind him, her breathing changing from the deep rhythms of sleep to the shallow patterns of approaching wakefulness. Franz had been standing before the wardrobe for the better part of an hour, though he couldn't explain what had drawn him there. The ((VOID))'s emanations seemed to respond to Marta's presence, the frequency shifting into harmonics that suggested not just emptiness but a kind of anticipatory emptiness, a ((VOID)) that was actively voiding itself in preparation for something that might never come.

 "What are you doing?" she mumbled, her voice thick with sleep and the residual sediment of dreams.

 "There's something in the closet," he said, though he immediately recognized how insufficient the words were. She sat up, her hair forming a halo around her head in the dim light filtering through the bedroom window.

"What kind of something?"

"Nothing," he said.

She padded across the room in her bare feet, her movement creating small disturbances in the air that seemed to d i s a p p e a r more quickly than they should have. When she reached the closet, she peered into the space where his shirts should have been hanging, and he watched her expression change from sleepy confusion to something approaching recognition.

"Oh," she said simply, as if the ((VOID)) were a neighbor she had been expecting but hoped wouldn't visit.

The ((VOID))'s behavior changed in her presence. Where Franz's attention had caused it to pulse with that impossible frequency, Marta's proximity seemed to make it fold inward, creating geometries that hurt to observe directly. The space warped in ways that suggested surfaces bending back upon themselves.

"Can you see it?" he asked.

"I can see what isn't there," she said. "It's like looking at a hole in a photograph, but the hole goes all the way through the wall behind the photograph, and the wall behind that wall, and..."

"And?"

"And I think it goes all the way through." Franz felt something in his chest tighten.

"Does it disturb you?" he asked.

"Everything disturbs me," she replied.

She extended her hand toward the ((VOID)), and Franz watched as her fingers seemed to disappear at the boundary - not violently, but gently, as if being carefully unmade. When she withdrew her hand, it reappeared intact, but she stared at her fingers with profound bewilderment. The skin looked somehow different, as if it had been briefly translated into another language and then translated back.

"It's not cold," she said quietly. "It's not anything. It's the absence of temperature, the absence of sensation."

Franz nodded, though he suspected her experience of the ..((VOID)).. was fundamentally different from his own. Where he encountered resistance and confusion, she seemed to find a kind of terrible clarity.

"What do you think it wants?" he asked.

"I don't think it wants anything," Marta said, settling back onto the bed with unusual carefulness, as if sudden movements might disturb something essential. "Wanting implies incompleteness, and this thing feels... perfectly complete. Perfectly sufficient unto itself."

DAY THREE
Rectificando Invenies Occultum - Finding the Hidden Stone

Information entropy: H = 2.9 bits (semantic degradation evident)
Astrological progression: h☌ψ waxing
Memory coherence: Fragmenting
Void fractal dimension: 1.847
Dyadic flux: Irregular
Euler characteristic: χ = 0
Reality status: Uncertain

Memory began to exhibit topological properties that Franz's consciousness was ill-equipped to navigate. The blazer had never existed - this much was becoming clear - but the absence of the blazer was somehow more real than the presence of things that demonstrably existed. The ..(((VOID))).. now measured  centimeters across, its boundary exhibiting fractal characteristics that suggested infinite complexity contained within finite space. 

Franz discovered that he could no longer remember Marta's maiden name, though he could recall with perfect clarity the precise shade of green that her eyes became when she was angry (wavelength 530 nanometers, frequency 5.66 × 10¹⁴ Hz, though electromagnetic classification systems seemed increasingly arbitrary when applied to phenomena that existed primarily in the realm of memorymemorymemory). Their wedding photograph, which had occupied the bedside table for seven years, now showed two people he almost recognized standing in front of a church he was certain he had never visited, in a city whose name existed at the tip of his tongue but refused to resolve into actual syllables. More disturbing was the way his thoughts had begun to move in patterns that didn't correspond to any mental architecture he recognized. Ideas would begin in his conscious mind, spiral through a series of associations that seemed to follow their own logic, and arrive at conclusions he hadn't intended to reach. It was as if his consciousness were being slowly rewired according to principles that operated outside normal cognitive frameworks.

"Franz," Marta said during what had previously been called lunch but which now seemed to exist primarily as a temporal placeholder for the consumption of substances that may or may not have been food, "I find myself unable to r e c o l l e c t the specific circumstances of our initial encounter."

"Neither can I," Franz admitted, "though the emotional residue of the encounter persists with remarkable clarity."

This was troubling in ways that Franz struggled to articulate. The factual content of their shared history was becoming increasingly unreliable, but the emotional architecture remained intact. He could remember how Marta's laughter had affected his understanding of what laughter could accomplish, how her particular way of moving through space had taught him that movement itself could be a form of communication. But the circumstances under which these revelations had occurred were dissolving into something that felt more like shared mythology than documented experience. The ..(((VOID))).. had begun to exert influence on objects beyond the immediate wardrobe vicinity. Books in the bedroom bookshelf - primarily technical manuals related to insurance protocols and butterfly identification guides - showed signs of textual degradation, their words rearranging themselves into configurations that maintained grammatical plausibility while surrendering semantic coherence entirely. Page 160 of Kirby's „European Butterflies and Moths: Based Upon Berge's Schmetterlingsbuch" now read: "L. Hispanica (Bell.) Very similar to Pallens exhibits wing patterns that dissolve into mathematical abstractions when observed for periods exceeding seventeen minutes, suggesting that butterfly identification is fundamentally a temporal rather than taxonomic enterprise." Franz read this passage several times, uncertain whether the text had changed or whether his capacity to process textual information had been altered by exposure to the (((VOID))). The words seemed familiar yet wrong, as if someone had translated them into a language that resembled English but operated according to different syntactic principles. More concerning was his discovery that certain thoughts had become difficult to think. Not impossible, exactly, but requiring conscious effort in a way that suggested his mental processes were encountering some form of resistance. Specifically, thoughts that involved causal relationships - the idea that events had definite predecessors and reliable consequences - seemed to require increasing cognitive energy to maintain.

At 4:23 PM (pocket watch time, now running eleven minutes slow), Franz observed that the ..(((VOID))).. had developed what could only be described as respiratory characteristics. Not breathing, precisely - breathing implied the exchange of gases, the oxygenation of some circulatory system, the maintenance of biological processes that required metabolic energy. This was more like watching the universe itself inhale and exhale. Franz felt his thoughts becoming less reliable, each mental process requiring more effort to complete, as if his mind were operating through an increasingly thick medium that resisted the normal flow of consciousness. He would begin to formulate a concept, only to find that the concept had somehow transformed itself during the process of formulation, arriving at destinations that bore no resemblance to where it had begun. Marta, meanwhile, seemed to be adapting to these changes with a flexibility that Franz found both admirable and unsettling.

DAY FOUR
Lapidem The Philosopher's Stone Dissolving

Information entropy: H = 1.6 bits (communication breakdown critical)
Astrological progression: h☌ψ waning
Dyadic entropy: Minimal
Communication bandwidth: Nearly absent
Void topology: Non-orientable
Euler characteristic: χ = -1
Reality: Critical instability

Communication with Marta achieved what information theorists would recognize as maximum compression ratios. Their conversations now consisted primarily of s i l e n c e s punctuated by phonemes that had detached themselves from semantic grounding while retaining emotional resonance. The (((VOID))) measured

across, its boundary exhibiting characteristics that violated several fundamental principles of geometric topology. 

"Franz," Marta announced, or perhaps merely opened her mouth and allowed sound to emerge without conscious intention, "the spaces between words have become un nav i ga ble."

"Yes," Franz replied, though the word carried more semantic freight than language had previously been designed to transport.

The phenomenon had begun affecting more than just their marriage. Franz's relationship with his own thoughts had become increasingly unstable. Ideas would begin to form, achieve partial coherence, then dissolve back into constituent concepts that bore no obvious relationship to their origin. He found himself thinking in fragments: not complete thoughts but pieces of thoughts that had somehow become detached from the cognitive frameworks that were supposed to organize them into meaningful sequences. The bedroom had begun to exhibit properties that suggested it was no longer entirely located within conventional three-dimensional space. The northwest corner had developed a curvature that implied it was merely a three-dimensional projection of a multidimensional structure. Franz found that he could walk from the door to the wardrobe in twelve steps, but the return journey required either fifteen steps or nine steps, depending on the foot which made the first step.

"Franz," Marta said, though her voice seemed to arrive from distances that couldn't be measured in ordinary units, "I keep finding objects in our apartment that I don't remember acquiring."

This was concerning because Marta's memory for domestic details was famously flawless. She could reconstruct the provenance of every item in their apartment, trace the history of each purchase, explain the logic behind every arrangement. But now she would discover books on their shelves that she was certain she had never seen before, though the books bore evidence of long familiarity: dog-eared pages, marginal annotations in handwriting that resembled hers but spelled phrases she didn't recognize. Franz understood what she meant. He had begun finding entries in his butterfly observation journal written in his own handwriting but describing species that didn't exist in any field guide he could locate. The entries were meticulously detailed, complete with sketches that demonstrated intimate knowledge of lepidopteran anatomy, but they documented creatures that possessed wing patterns that seemed to operate according to mathematical principles rather than biological ones. Butterflies whose coloration followed fractal algorithms, whose flight patterns traced geometric shapes that hurt to contemplate directly. Franz spent forty-three minutes (pocket watch time, now running eighteen minutes slow and occasionally running backward) contemplating the ((VOID)), which contemplated him back with what could only be described as benevolent indifference.

At 7:47 PM (pocket watch reading 6:23 AM and showing signs of temporal confusion that mirrored Franz's own chronological disorientation), the (VOID) achieved what Franz recognized as critical mass. The wardrobe - which had been the void's initial manifestation point - dissolved into its constituent molecules, then into constituent atoms, then into constituent quarks, then into constituent mathematical relationships, then into pure possibility, then into ((VOID)). Franz watched this process with a fascination that felt increasingly detached from his ordinary emotional responses. The transformation didn't strike him as destructive but rather as revelatory, as if the wardrobe was finally acknowledging what it had always actually been underneath its temporary arrangement as furniture. The void wasn't consuming the wardrobe - it was allowing the wardrobe to express its true nature as a particular configuration of absence.

Franz was either going insane or reality was. He was no longer certain there was a difference.

DAY FIVE
Nigredo - The Great Blackening

Information entropy: H = 0.3 bits (linguistic collapse imminent)
Astrological progression: h☌ψ eclipse
Reality coherence: Absent
Void status: Complete
Consciousness: Dispersed
Euler characteristic: χ = -∞
Existence: Theoretical

The numbers would not stop changing. Franz had woken at what the pocket watch claimed was 3:17 AM, though the device now ran twenty-three minutes slow and occasionally displayed times that had never existed. He found himself compulsively counting everything in the bedroom. Forty-seven books. Then forty-three. Then fifty-one. Seventeen ties. Then nineteen. Then fourteen. Two hundred and thirty-one floorboard planks. Then two hundred and twenty-eight. Then two hundred and thirty-five. 

Each recount yielded different totals. The books multiplied and diminished according to principles that seemed to mock the very concept of stable quantities. Franz found himself scribbling calculations in the margins of newspapers, on the backs of insurance forms, across the condensation on the bathroom mirror, but the numbers changed even as he wrote them. The void had consumed everything that had ever pretended to be countable. What remained was a space where objects flickered in and out of existence according to rules that Franz's mind could no longer follow. Franz counted obsessively, desperately, knowing each enumeration was m e a n i n g l e s s before he completed it. Thirty-four years of believing that quantities remained stable, that objects maintained their numerical relationships, that counting was a m e a n i n g f u l activity. The dissolution felt like d r o w n i n g .

"Franz," Marta said, though her voice seemed to travel through i m p o s s i b l e distances, "I can no longer distinguish between my thoughts and the          ."

Franz wanted to respond, but words had become f o r e i g n objects that his mind could no longer manipulate with any c o n f i d e n c e . Language existed as scattered debris floating in a s e m a n t i c vacuum, each word disconnected from the g r a m m a t i c a l frameworks that were supposed to organize them into m e a n i n g .

Each word existed as mathematical point in s p a c e that no longer corresponded to physical space. The (((VOID))) encompassed e v e r y t h i n g . Franz began to understand that he had always been ..VOID.. and everything else was
temporary a c c u m u l a t i o n  of  m a t t e r and m e a n i n g around his

permanent a b s e n c e .