Praxis-Eremia House: The Craftsman’s Final Form

The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Praxis-Eremia House was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry metal, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining action/practice with isolation/desert, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of utility, now embodying its own absolute termination of creation. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled execution, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated assembly cells, soundproofed forging rooms, and meticulously designed vibration dampeners intended to eliminate all external variables that might compromise a pure execution of craft.
The final inhabitant was Artificer Master Faber Ultimus, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master craftsman and utilitarian theorist of the late 19th century. Artificer Ultimus’s profession was the study of function, material, and the art of physical construction, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent object that was free of all wear, failure, or imperfection. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero Object’—a single, perfect, flawless artifact that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known mechanical principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of purpose, free of all stress, friction, or need for maintenance. After realizing that the very act of creating an object introduced entropy (the certainty of decay and use), shattering his faith in absolute, permanent utility, he retreated to the manor. He dedicated his final years to resolving this single, terrifying goal, believing that the only way to achieve the Zero Object was to understand the ultimate absence of all material purpose. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of inconsistency, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of functional finality.

The Tolerance Chamber

Artificer Ultimus’s mania culminated in the Tolerance Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not building, but deconstructing the act of purpose itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no detectable function. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex equations concerning non-material mechanics and the theoretical limits of zero-point utility, were found sealed inside a hollow metal ruler. He stopped trying to define the perfect tool and began trying to define the un-purposed, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero Object was to eliminate the need for any physical utility whatsoever. “The design is a constraint; the function is a loss,” one entry read. “The final object requires the complete surrender of all material and all use. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect void.”
The house preserves his systematic rigor structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated leveling stabilizers and temperature neutralizers built into the concrete, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-decaying environment within the manor.

The Final Artifact in the Abandoned Victorian House

Artificer Master Faber Ultimus was last heard working in his workshop, followed by a sudden, intense sound of heavy metal snapping and wood crushing (from the caliper and the bench) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the workshop was cold, the tolerance chamber sealed, and the man was gone. No body was found, and the only evidence was the singular, physical alteration to his final philosophical work.
The ultimate chilling clue is the small hole in the millboard. It is the final creation—the Zero Object achieved, representing the cessation of all material function and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute nothingness. The broken hammer and blank millboard ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, utilized world. This abandoned Victorian House, with its silent chambers and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master craftsman who pursued the ultimate, pure form of utility, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Purpose, vanishing into the un-wrought, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure existence.