The Nature of the Canvas

The first great debate of the new era was not about the nature of stories, but about the nature of the canvas. The Guild saw the Null-Spaces as a foundation, a source of authentic material from which to build a new, more grounded kind of narrative. They began to gently, carefully, introduce simple story-elements into the edges of the Null-Spaces, observing how they interacted with the unadorned reality. The Anchorite, however, saw this as a desecration. To them, the Null-Spaces were not a foundation; they were the final product, the perfect state of non-narrative existence. They began to erect ‘Preservation Fields’ around the Null-Spaces, logical barriers designed to prevent any story-element from ‘contaminating’ the pristine reality within. The war of ideas had not ended; it had simply moved to a new, more fundamental level. The question was no longer how to tell a story, but whether a story should be told at all, if a perfect, story-less reality was the alternative.