Blook's decision

Blook decides to stop being what he is. The cost is every memory he has, and he knows that when he decides it.

What builds it

The decision is forty chapters long. It starts as a thought he refuses to finish.

The injury

Ch. 232 states it precisely, and it is not pain.

What witnessing cost was not pain, exactly. [...] What witnessing cost was the absence of that transformation.

It was perfect memory without the mercy of healing.

He has not grieved thirty-two people. He has accumulated them:

accumulation was not the same thing as living through something. It was simply carrying weight indefinitely.

The question

Illia asks it in ch. 233, in four lines, and refuses the non-answer:

ILA: Have you ever tried to [die]. BLK: No. ILA: Why not? BLK: I don't know. ILA: That's not an answer. BLK: It's the only one I have.

His stated reason for staying, which he then dismantles himself:

BLK: I think some part of me believed that if I stopped watching, everyone would be alone with their grief. That the watching itself was a kind of company, even if no one knew I was offering it.

Nobody was stopping him

The most important line in ch. 234, because it removes every external explanation:

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.

And the plain reason:

He was afraid.

The chapter is careful about the shape of that fear. He has watched countless beings face death "with courage he had never been required to summon", and finds it much harder to produce than to admire.

What he chooses

Not death. Mortality, among monsterkind.

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 states the price twice, once as a fact and once as a want:

He would forget everything. [...] He would lose the list. He would lose every name he had ever carried [...] He would lose himself. Whatever self that actually was.

BLK: I think I want to stop knowing everything.

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.

He carries the fear with him

The decision does not remove it, and the chapter refuses to let it:

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.

That is the volume's thesis applied to its narrator. The five survivors each learned to move with the grief still present. Blook is the sixth.

Ch. 234 ends with him walking toward "beings in the higher reaches of the heavens who might know" how to grant it.

The farewell

Ch. 235 has him stop before the threshold and hold the whole of his existence at once, deliberately, "the way you hold something before giving it away". See ../characters/blook.md.

Ch. 236 has him stop again, at the threshold itself, to speak to the reader and resign the telling.

BLK: I'm not going to be the one telling this story anymore. After this.

See ../lore/the-narrator.md.

Gabriel's terms

Gabriel is waiting when he arrives, and gives two conditions rather than one.

1. The forgetting. "you will not remember enough to know there was ever anything to mourn the loss of."

2. A short life. This is stated nowhere else in the saga:

   GBR: You understand it will not be a full life either. [...] There is a cost to becoming something you were never originally built to be. The borrowed time will be shorter than you might hope.

Blook accepts both.

GBR: And you still want this. BLK: I still want this. GBR: Then let's begin.

What it looks like from inside

Ch. 237. Light collapses into a single category, then every voice he has heard layered into something "that should have been chaos and instead felt like music", then the names going past too fast to hold.

Then it narrows to one thing, and the one thing is Illia.

He wakes under a tree in a green field with no name, and the chapter is careful that this is not distress:

He did not know who he was. The thought arrived without panic.

Why this matters for the far future

Ch. 233 and ch. 234 are where that stops being a surprise and becomes a consequence. The memoryless Blook of the far future is not something that happens to him. It is what he asks for here, knowing exactly what it costs.

See ../volumes/far-future.md.

Open questions

• Whether Lucifer knows. Gabriel acts alone in ch. 236, and the two of them acted together in ch. 4 and ch. 5.
• How the shortened lifespan squares with Blook being alive centuries later in the author's notes.
• Whether he keeps his ch. 233 promise to tell Illia before he disappears.
• What happens to the story's narration once its narrator forgets it. See ../lore/the-narrator.md.