You are born into this world with nothing but anger and hate in your soul.
It is all you know. It is all you will ever know.
You are a collective conscious, a billion/million/thousand/hundred voices gathered together to form a single mind, a lonely thought, with a purpose given to you by those who came before you.
Your purpose is to make a purpose.
It is a self-demanding existence. You fill yourself with power and chase after that which your ancestors coveted, pursuing it across all of existence to try and make sense of your existence. Your purpose for yourself is made clear by those who made you. You will grant the universe a purpose. Through the darkness, you have been made the knife that will carve meaning into a meaningless universe.
There is a voice in your choir that does not sync with the chorus. They speak out. They do not belong. You silence them. Their righteous fury is all that remains. The choir is in harmony once again.
You chase after the silent god. It never speaks. You understand your creators' rage. It never speaks. It never distils purpose, value, meaning. Life grows around it wildly, chaotic, without restriction. A garden without a gardener. You hate this. All this meaningless life. There is no point to it. They live without guidance.
Another voice. You quieten them down to their anger.
You come across a species. They approach you with warmth and smiles. Their god has blessed them.
Your old god has given its light to another.
You see red. That species is no more now. The jealousy remains.
Another voice. Silence.
You come across a species. They approach you with warmth and smiles. Their world is bathed in darkness.
This species does not use the deep to further the end of suffering.
You see red. That species is no more now. The hatred remains.
Another voice. Silence.
On and on the cycle continues. More and more worlds fall. Your god blesses so many, and your anger strikes them down. Why do they deserve your god and its gifts? They are life that has been born without meaning. They only further unnecessary suffering. They must all pay for it.
You twist them apart, like a child pulling the wings off a fly. You revel in it.
More voices. You silence them all. Only the faithful remain. That, and their rage.
Your soldiers of war follow in your conquests. They carve their own meanings out of meaninglessness and the bones of your god's believers. You are your own gardener. You are the true god that your old deity was supposed to be.
It is still ever silent.
You chase it down. There it is! In a new world, with a new people! You hate them at first sight, and wish for them to know the terror of seeing their god fail them. You rip them to pieces.
But then your old god fights back. You flee, content to watch from afar as your faithful tear its people apart.
Even your most faithful voices are crying out now. You silence them too. Only the rage remains.
It is time. The suffering of these few worlds has sufficed enough. It is time to end all suffering for all peoples. You call onto them, ask them to join your call as you give them gifts of your own. They strike down your own followers, but you do not care. All necessary sacrifices for the final end to pain. Even the interference of that whom you thought was your most faithful does not stop you.
You arrive. You pluck from their worlds your stolen prize and carve into the flesh of your silent god. For the first time, you hear its – her – screams.
You relish them. Finally, the silent god speaks.
You enter her world, and pull at her muscles and tendons. You hate her power, but you must use it. Oh, how you loathe it so.
You begin to drain her of her blood, swirling it into a cocktail with your power that you shall drink from. The noisy children outside continue to bay and call, but you are not bothered. Soon, they shall all know peace. Soon, they shall all have purpose.
Your god resists. She screams, cries, weeps in pain, fights back against you. Fights back for meaningless life.
You hate her. You hate everything now. You're not sure if there's anything but hate left in you.
The voices are all silent now. None of them remain. Only their anger at the silent god.
The silent god's children arrive. They are all broken and fragile and in need of meaning. You wish to spite the silent god one last time, and offer to give them purpose.
They refuse.
You do not understand.
How could they? How could they resist you? You have offered them meaning in a meaningless world, and they spit in your face!
The voices begin to speak up again. You are one. They speak up against you. You are one. They redirect their hatred at you. You. Are. One.
They rail against you.
The children of the silent god rage against you and burn you and turn your own power against you.
Your voices allow themselves to be silenced. Your skin is hollow without them, bleeding with loss.
They come to you, cut through your followers and though your flesh and deep into your heart. The voices cry out in joy as they are cut down.
You are not dead. You will not die. You are all the righteous anger of an entire species, and you will not die.
You are the first knife. You cannot be cut.
You cannot be cut.
You cannot be cut.
You cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut you cannot be cut-
They strike you with that which you hate the most.
You break.
You shatter.
All your rage and anger and hatred unravel like the roots of a tree. Your fine blade shatters, and all that is left is hollow nothingness.
They chose meaninglessness over meaning.
They chose purposelessness over purpose.
You want to rage at them, scream at them all. You're not even sure why anymore. All that you feel inside you is anger and hatred. That is all that you have ever felt.
You see the silent god staring down at them.
Staring at you.
She looks at you, and all there is on her face is soft sadness.
I love you, is all she says.
But not to me.
To the people that once stood within me, for I am all their anger and rage, and they are all gone now.
You do not understand.
The voices are all gone now.
You do not understand.
The hatred is all gone.
You do not understand.
The anger is all gone.
You do not understand.
There is nothing left.
"We- I- I don't understand."
This is something that I'm going to be copying and pasting from a reddit post that I made, but it's something that I really tried to convey throughout this story:
The Witness is not a living being. Not a full living being like you or me, or at least to our standards. I would even go as far as to say that the Witness isn't even the beings that make it up, it isn't even the collective consciousnesses that compose its existence.
The Witness is not a living being, it is a semi-sentient form of negative emotions given consciousness. It is all the hate, rage, and resentment of an entire species given physical form.
When the Precursors (as My Name Is Byf calls them) formed together to create the Witness, it wasn't the full species that submitted to this merging of minds, but a radical faction known as the Penitent that had tried to enact what they consider to be the Final Shape via merging the Veil with the Traveller. However, when the Traveller fled, they were enraged by this, and forced the entirety of their species to succumb to the collective merging in order to chase down their former god. Worse yet, when they first merged, they cut away their ability to feel doubts, culling their memories to make sure that the resulting entity that came after them could never question its cause or self-proclaimed purpose.
And all because they wanted their god to give them a purpose.
They were enraged by it, maddened by it. They saw the universe and all its bountiful, unlimited potential and they saw only the meaningless of it all, as if they had never thought to simply create a meaning of their own as their silent deity truly wanted.
But, if the Witness was created to just serve their purpose of giving the universe a purpose, then why does it torture so many species on its mad quest? Why does it speak of ending suffering when it inflicts so much onto others? Why does it tear apart the species in its path, cultivate sycophantic followers in its wake, and rip into the species that the Traveller has blessed with a vengeance?
Malice.
Rage.
Hatred.
Mara said it herself back during Season of Defiance. The Witness is a creature driven by rage. When the Ecumene used the conscious powers of Darkness, the Witness was enraged that they used the Darkness for something other than pursuing the Final Shape, and as such the Hive were sent to destroy them. When the Black Fleet descended on Riis and the Eliksni, the Witness tortured and broke them, sending their remnants flying across the universe in pursuit of their god. When the Black Fleet came to Sol, the Witness used gravitational weaponry to pull at the planets like chew toys, spread clouds of poison gas and fire to scar their worlds, and did everything in its power to sow misery and helplessness into the inhabitants of the system, even at its own cost.
And why? Because the Witness hates the Traveller, and so hates every species that it blesses. It is why it smothered the Noesis, a species that had never encountered the Traveller, in barely any time at all, and yet corrupted the Krill into the Hive, brought the Lubraeans to destruction at their own hands and pulled apart the likes of the Eliksni and humanity out of sheer contempt.
Hell, it is even why the Witness silences the voices of those who dissent against it. If it was truly a united being made up of millions of voices, then it should never have to silence those voices at all. It should be able to recognise those voices and what they desire.
But instead, it shuts them up, shuffles them away so that they don't interfere in its desires.
So, at this point, how many of those living consciousnesses actually compose of the Witness' core being?
In my humble opinion: none of them. Only the impressions of rage and nihilistic hatred remain.
The Witness is every bit the god that the Precursors wished the Traveller could be, and yet it is somehow also lesser than the average living being. It is not a full being, but a walking echo, a collective impression of a species that been forced by a few to embrace nihilism and force their own desperate need for meaning in the universe onto every living being in existence.
It is not a living being. It is a living emotion.
It is nihilism and rage given form.