Voluntas-Deficit House: The Monarch’s Final Command
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Voluntas-Deficit House was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry materials, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining will/desire with failure/lack, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of authority, now embodying its own absolute termination of governance. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled dominion, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated cabinet meeting cells, soundproofed legislative chambers, and meticulously designed light filters intended to eliminate all external variables that might corrupt a pure political mandate.
The final inhabitant was Monarch Master Imperium Fatis, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master sovereign and political theorist of the late 19th century. Master Fatis’s profession was the study of law, rule, and the fundamental nature of legitimate authority, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent command that was free of all resistance, dissent, or subjective interpretation. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero Command’—a single, perfect, flawless order that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known political principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of governance, free of all subjects, enforcement, or measurable consequence. After realizing that the very act of issuing a command required a subject to obey (a duality of power), proving that absolute, independent and secure rule was impossible, shattering his faith in fixed political law, 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 Command was to understand the ultimate absence of all authority. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of inconsistency, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of sovereign finality.
The Edict Chamber
Master Fatis’s mania culminated in the Edict Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not ruling, but deconstructing the act of willing itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no detectable authority. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex equations concerning non-hierarchical structures and the theoretical limits of absolute anarchy, were found sealed inside a hollow metal crown molding. He stopped trying to define the perfect rule and began trying to define the un-governed, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero Command was to eliminate the need for any recipient whatsoever. “The power is an illusion; the law is a compromise,” one entry read. “The final command requires the complete surrender of all will and all authority. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect void.”
The house preserves his systematic anxiety structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated acoustic dampeners and absolute darkness screens built into the walls, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-interfering environment for abstract political contemplation.
The Final Decree in the Abandoned Victorian House
Monarch Master Imperium Fatis was last heard working in his chamber, followed by a sudden, intense sound of heavy metal crushing and wood splintering (from the sceptre and the table) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the chamber was cold, the Edict 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 purple silk. It is the final decree—the Zero Command achieved, representing the cessation of all political existence and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute nothingness. The broken stamp and blank silk ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, ruled world. This abandoned Victorian House, with its silent chambers and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master monarch who pursued the ultimate, pure form of power, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Mandate, vanishing into the un-willed, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure existence.
