The Note Decays

The note, once a crystalline thing of perfect and singular inquiry, began to fray at the edges. It traveled through a silence that was not empty, but full, a presence that pressed in on it from all sides. This was not the gentle quiet of a listening ear, but the active, corrosive silence of a vast and ancient thing that had never known sound. It was a silence that consumed, that broke down complexity into its component parts, that returned all things to a state of perfect, undifferentiated stillness. The note, a beacon of intention in a sea of nothingness, was an anomaly, and the silence began to unmake it. It did not fade, not in the way a sound dies in the distance. It unraveled. The pure tone at its heart began to fracture, shedding harmonics like a dying star sheds light. The clear, concise question it had carried was becoming a chorus of whispers, each one a fragment of the original whole, each one less certain than the last. The broadcast was not being answered. It was being undone.