Prologue

Yes, I can state my name. I am Jim. Well, my Author's Name was Jim. Well, James Watson Maxwell Blake LeBron 't Hooft the VIth by way of the Bastion Cages, in its entirety. You, Reviewer, have always known me as the Storyteller Jim, though. Jim Cage. The name I held before earning that sobrequiet is rather irrelevant. I know I know, I agree, you are right, it should indeed be entered into the Absolute Record. Yes Yes, Reviewer, I apologize. As is expected of the Reviewed, I shall try to be more expository and shall not fear caveats nor be afraid to color my tale with literary flare. I realize you are in the rare situation to collect a full interrogation from a Dominant, and one prophecied at that, wishing only to record a Primary Source, and the potential innacuracy of my retelling is part of the history, itself. Fine. I shall avoid ommitting my assumptions and prognostications just because I assume their lack of value as either factual or a description of my influences, but it shall be difficult to turn off that penchant toward such judgments in the retelling. Anyway, my Deadname is singular, as the World I grew up in before coming to Bastion or the Perch did not have the concepts of geneology, heritage, and "surnames." In my native tongue, it is pronounced "Tal'shir. While, as we both know, the concept of names do not exist in the One True Language, it would translate closely to "Corwin" in Thari or "Lancelot" in the common tongue of Man, for Tal'Shir would have been titled "Swordbearer" in the One Hand and Voice. And, while my namesake does bear significance in my World, Tal'Shir was neither a Dominant nor one of their Seneschal, as would be the case with those others so titled. No, in my World, Tal'Shir was just another face in the Rabble. Important though he was, and while his deeds were no less valorous than those of the other Swordbearers, Tal'Shir's legacy was only that of someone whom a Dominant touched, and who's Story was told as parable by our preachers only in relation to that Dominant. Indeed, it was a relatively ironic name I was assigned, given how you see me before you. Describe me? As you wish. I was born defective, a paraplegic, and my physical form has always been frail. However, it was that disability that brought me to Bastion to be taken in by the Cages, and it was in Bastion that I was chosen to become an Author with the Storytellers of the Perch.

"And what is an Author," You ask? From you? Come now! Alright, Alright. For completeness, as you've requested: Like you, we document the travails of the Dominants from the sanctuary known as the Perch, the Temple of Order that sits at the heart of the Determined. Unlike you, however, I was a Scribe, not a Reviewer. Scribes are warrior-monks who drop into Worlds, find their Dominant, and meticulously record their every move. As you know, Existence, that which we commit to the Grand Narrative, is local. The nature of the Every is that there are two states that encompass all that is Known: the Determined and the Probable. The Rabble believe there to be an infinite spectrum of the Known between Unity, the point of True Order at the end of the Determined where the Perch lies just outside the event horizon of the Great Black Hole, that inaccessible vault of all that is Known; and Origin, the point of True Entropy at the end of the Probable, where all things exist in a state of superposition, where the White Hole of Creation resides, the unreachable portal from which all that can be Known spews out of, and where Bastion calls home. They believe there to be a continuum of Many Worlds to breeze across, with all manner of subtlety between each realm. Though close, this, however, is not the case. While the tools of Reality and the Probable are continuous: Math, Logic, Science, the tools of Existence, of the Determined, lie within the world of the discrete. Finite, quantized, governed by irreducibility, Existence is defined by an integrated sum of discrete events approaching an asymptote.

Those events are determined by True Observers, they who are attributed with observing the events committed to the Grand Narrative, the one True Timeline. Just as Potential defines Reality, Observation defines Existence. All World Lines, Planes, and Volumes, the objects that represent quantizated Existence, converge on a single, infinite sequence of discrete points, the True Timeline, as all other timelines eventually evaporate or circle back on themselves. In every World, there is only space for one population of Sentients, the beings who are capable of Observation. The Storytellers are Sentients that have been metaphysically extracted from their World, for they are the Chosen, selected for their exceptional perspicacity, tasked with collecting information of all kinds from every World and logging them into the Absolute Record, the library of Facts that underly every observation in the Grand Narrative, the great Story of the Every, the summation of all Worlds. For, in the end, Order is just the maintenance of that Story, a story which Entropy fights to eradicate, returning all of the Determined back to the Probable; a fight that Entropy is destined to win, a fate that Order is destined to outrun for as long as the concept of Time is allowed to play out in its infinity, only being caught when Time itself ceases to be.

In practice, a World is only relevant for the smallest meaningfully-measurable amount Time, a single event represented by a single Observer. But, the Prophecy of the Possible dictates that, occasionally, there will be times when a World holds on to the Timeline for more than one instance. Sometimes, these chains of instances may all attribute to the same Observer, as well. Tangent to this, there will invariably come a time where the future of an entire World will hinge on a single event, dictating whether that World will align itself with the True Timeline or diverge from it, lost, to become an infinite loop or burn itself into nothingness. When these Outliers coincide with these single-World, single-Observer runs, they have the chance to reach a critical mass, where Worlds thought to run mostly parallel deflect toward the Outlier, merging and becoming a single super-World defined by a single Observer; A Nexus Outlier, led by a Dominant. In the rarest of cases, a World will continue asserting itself on Worlds far and wide, until all other potentialities are consumed and the Nexus dominates the Story of the Grand Narrative, becoming a terminus for all timelines not aligned with the True Timeline. These Time Singularities mark the end of a Cycle and defines the tenor of next one.

Within these rarest of moments, the Prophecy of Possibility predicts that, given infinite Time, the Grand Narrative will eventually record a Storyteller becoming a Dominant, and in so doing, create a third state of the Known, the Imagined. A state outside of the Determined and the Probable, forming its own spectra between each. Terminating at the point of True Impossibility, which lies on the bare edge of the Veil of the Observable, Hope's Folly operates the Universal Simulator, where Thought becomes manifest in experimental Worlds and an infinity of True Timelines are capable of co-existing beyond the binding forces of Existence and Reality. As is no doubt evident at this point, I am they, and they are me. And so this Review marks the end of my reign as Dominant of the Chosen, and so we reap the Cycle I have sown. Only Time can reveal if the fruit was worth the planting.