Written, voiced, and produced by Shawn Fitzmaurice
Voiceover Nerd Productions, Inc.
© 2025 Voiceover Nerd Productions — All Rights Reserved.
A tale of skies as empty as promises: voices resonating across the threads of time
A production by Voiceover Nerd Productions, Inc. © 2025. All rights reserved.
Written, performed, and produced by Shawn Fitzmaurice
VoiceoverNerd.com
Featuring Shelly Fear as Mareen
https://www.voiceoverslayer.com/
“Dear Listener, fear not. Each solution is but a variable in another sum; each shifts the balance of the whole.”
— Author Unknown
A Letter from Mareen to Richard
I have visited you here every year on our anniversary. Gods… fourteen years.
Usually, Sara and I sit together by your headstone. I tell her about you — your curly red hair we could never tame, and that smile that never failed to tame me. I think of her as our child because I like to believe you made one of your crazy deals… this time with the universe… to bring her and me together. That would be you.
Caring for Sara is the only thing that lit my darkness and kept me from following you into the heavens.
Today I am here alone. And surprise — it isn’t even our anniversary. This week marks twelve years since she arrived. We’re calling it her eighteenth birthday.
I wanted to tell you more about her. I assume you already know, but what do you know, Richard?
You would have loved her. From the start, she was all quiet eyes and steady hands, watching everything. A week or so after she came to us, one of the chapel cats had a litter. We went to adopt one. There were only three left. She gathered all three against her chest and said they were family, and now they were her family too.
I let her keep them, of course. I remember thinking, even then, that she loved too much to separate them. And maybe she understood separation better than most, even if no one — not even her — could say who she had been taken from.
She eats like you did. Too much, too fast. I don’t know where she puts it. The baker still brings up the time she ate three honey twists before anyone else had even gotten theirs. She laughed so hard she sprayed the table with chewed-up pastry. You would have loved that… her laugh, I mean — the way she doesn’t hold anything back.
Lately it feels like she’s holding something back, and I can’t quite place it.
It was around that age that she started asking questions I couldn’t answer — about time, about space. About why we have no stars, but everyone Ilra meets seems to have their own. I swear on the Seven Children, Richard, everything she does seems to have its own kind of math built into it.
Sister Tephra is a math genius, and she seems to understand the things Sara asks about. So I brought her to the chapel, hoping someone who spoke her language could give her the answers I couldn’t. She did. Sara has been studying under Tephra ever since. I hope it was the right thing to do.
She has always been fascinated by how things are made, and how they become part of something new. When she was about nine, she told me once that the iron in a nail might hold pieces of a ship — and a sword — and another nail. She said it like she could see it happening right there in her hands. She was nine years old, Richard. Nine!
I’m worried about her. Our daughter. Sometimes I find her staring at a candle, a flower — anything, really. When she snaps to, sometimes she’s emotional… angry, sad, happy. But she says she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t remember anything at all.
She spends so much time training with Sister Tephra. And yes, she’s still odd. Like you said, she is preparing for something big. Whatever it is, let’s hope it never happens. But Sara has learned so much about things I can’t even imagine.
She asked me to keep this a secret, but I feel like you won’t tell anyone. She found a hidden library in the chapel. She said it looked like someone had tucked the door away and had forgotten to remember it — for decades, maybe more. She said the library is filled with books about mathemagic, old science. Richard, there are books about time travel.
Actual time travel.
Doesn’t it seem odd that she is so fascinated with these things? She is the only person The Moment has ever given us. She is smart and creative beyond anything you’ve seen.
And Tephra.
Sometimes I think it wasn’t really my idea for her to study with Tephra… and lately, I’m not sure if that should comfort or scare me.
Chapter 5 : My Page in Ilra’s Book (Don’t Throw it Away)
A hand-printed page, found stuffed into the chapel library’s copy of The Stitched Sky: An Assembly of Celestial Testimonies by Ilra Wint — along with pressed flowers. —by Sara, age 9
I like to listen to Ilra’s stories that the travelers tell her about stars. She says someday I’ll write new ones.
I already have.
The stories give me something to remember, because I don’t have any memories from before I got here. People think I should be sad about that. But how can I be sad about something I don’t remember?
One story a traveler told is about a quiet house on a hill. I decided that me and my family lived there. The story says that Father came home every night, night after night. His family loved him, and he loved them. Nothing ever changed, and he didn’t know how to make changes. So he faded away into the stars. If I was there, I would never let him fade.
Chapter 6: Deaths to the Infinite Degree — As Journaled by The Stranger
Wake number… who cares anymore? Does it even matter? Does anything matter, when you don’t know who you are, where you’ve been, what you’re good at, or why you’re not yet nose-blind to the smell of pig shit? All I know is that I’m trapped in a joke the universe won’t stop telling—and I’m the punchline.
If I’m still alive when this nightmare ends, I think I’ll become a tax collector. Sounds a perfectly boring and pleasantly vengeful way to live out my days. Maybe that’s what I was.
It never stops. I wake up, I kill the crazy kid with the axe. I’m very good at it. I fight and kill the others. Sometimes I just take the axe in the skull and hope with every frayed fiber of whatever I am that I won’t wake up again. But the cycle won’t break.
I might, though. I’d say I’ve already cracked. Do you think it odd of me to giggle when I let death take me?
Occasionally I just block the axe so I can watch the magnificent, the absolutely breathtaking warrior nun-lady emerge to do her deadly dance—Tephra, lifted straight out of legend. And I just want a part in the stage version so I can wear my botched lines like a crown of love-sick devotion.
A few more rehearsals, and I’ll be numb enough to spar with her. Why not? I’m bored, I’m blind to the pain. I could use a little death by blunt-force trauma to see if I can still feel.
Usually there’s a girl with cats. And the Pig-Man. Jon, though I still call him Chris. You’d think the joke would get old, but here we are. It’s the little things.
Every time is the first time they’ve laid eyes on me. You can’t earn trust when you’re stuck forever repeating scene one, act one. I still haven’t the faintest clue who I am or why I’m here. It’s like I’m rehearsing for… something.
Something big. But there is no script. I’m improvising my lines one happy tragedy at a time, so some happy-fat-bastard can claim the work I’ve created.
If I could only figure out what my profession—what my skill-set—is, was, before I arrived, maybe I’d have material to pull from. Maybe I was a brilliant tax collector. Maybe I still could be.
We all need something to hold on to.
Sara
There’s a group of seven small stars that are very close together. The travelers call them the Seven Children. They are mad at a man with a sword who made a bad mistake. I don’t like that story.
When I was smaller, I thought those seven stars were my fluffy cat. Now I think my cat lives in a bigger part of the sky—the one some people say is a demon. That makes sense. She was probably a little demon. But she was mine, and she was cute, and I’m sure I had one. I have three now.
I don’t think the Seven Children are mad. I think they’re singing. I think the man is my father, and he’s teaching them a song he wrote for me.
Chapter 7: The Seven Children
From the Archive of Divergence History, kept in the MisArsesDolé cavern libraries beneath Bralith University of Mathmagics and Technomancy.
Read by Archivist Fr. Thed Crelith
“Let ye be warned: the cries of the innocent will never fade.”
— From the Fourth-Age revision of the Ash-Reckon Annals (Moon-Eclipsed Eye), Fragment III.
Widely regarded as propaganda, the revision was commissioned by King Baelshak XVI to sway his people. Yet it was not power he sought, but the favor of his beloved.
The Old Goat was not impressed. Still, a few un-poisoned truths remain.
Editor’s Note: No record confirms whether “the Old Goat” was metaphorical or a literal goat—said by some to be “not without beauty in her own way.”
The Seven Children are seven ghosts—each from a different noble race destroyed by a single flaw in Velmior’s resolve, when he was tempted by Trudón, the snake of glory. For but a moment he wavered, and in that breath his mission was lost.
They rise as one, slinging curses and venom like rotten
fruit and filth. They mock him without end for the moment he faltered. They scream the names of those he failed to save—lost not to malice, but to a breath of doubt when sacrifice came without glory.
They are memory made torture—Velmior’s eternal reminder: furious, grieving, unrelenting. Wherever his name is spoken, theirs rise with it in a chorus of blame and sorrow—a sound that cancels joy, unmaking song, unmaking peace.
They rise as one, slinging curses and venom like rotten fruit and filth. They mock him without end for the moment he faltered. They scream the names of those he failed to save—lost not to malice, but to a breath of doubt when sacrifice came without glory.
They are memory made torture—Velmior’s eternal reminder: furious, grieving, unrelenting. Wherever his name is spoken, theirs rise with it in a chorus of blame and sorrow, a sound that cancels joy—unmaking song, unmaking peace.
Sara:
I’m still waiting to find the right stars to be my mother. I imagine she’s as kind as Mareen and as pretty as Sister Tephra, and that if they all met, they’d be friends right away.
Ilra thinks that I will find a sky with real stars some day, and decide for myself which ones are my mother.
Chapter 8: A Balanced Equation. The Girl Who Stayed
In Gratch Hollow, we have lived with what we call The Moment for as long as I can remember. It comes precisely and predictably—just over every three days. When it arrives, figures appear among us: men, women, children, caught mid-step, mid-word, mid-thought. Then, as quickly as they come, they vanish.
Many believe they are souls passing from one life to the next. Perhaps. But I see them as if they had stepped out of a frame of life, only to be pulled back before we could reach them.
Our beloved outsider, Grutžon—or Jon, as most call him—was a Goreborn Piglet when he first came to us. His journey was both physical and tragic, yet in him Elira and “Big Jon” Vale were given a second chance to raise another beautiful soul. Another sprout. But this time, it bloomed.
From his earliest days with us, the people of The Moment fascinated him. He would come with blankets, pillows, food, and water, in case one of the flickering should remain. He grunted and squealed his worry aloud, that one day a soul might arrive who was enduring a difficult journey, and might need comfort and rest in this strange place, like he had.
Long after Elira and Big Jon had passed, one did stay.
She was a child of around six years, wide-eyed but silent, searching every face with wonder. She stood barefoot in the field where all others had flickered away. The people were still. The Moment had ended, but the girl remained.
Jon began to move slowly through the crowd—broad-shouldered, a head above the next tallest, soil-streaked, with a blanket and a bag of food and water slung over his shoulder. He cradled a clay pot as if it were precious. When Sara’s eyes found him, her face lit up—radiant and unguarded. Jon looked away, shy, lips twitching into a crooked smile; she would need the care kit he always brought. Their bond began there, as if they had always been meant to find each other.
Sara remembered nothing of her past, but the villagers were kind, if quietly uneasy. No one had ever stayed.
A young widow named Mareen stepped forward—thirty years old, with sharp eyes and quiet strength, who had lived alone since losing her husband two winters earlier. When she knelt and offered her hand, the girl took it as if it had always been hers to take. The bond between them formed quickly, deep and unbreakable—mother and daughter in all but name.
Sara
Mareen says my mother is special like me. Sometimes I hope she doesn’t remember me, because she would be sad that I was gone. Ilra says the stars are made of stories. I don’t have a full story, so I’ll put mine in a sky that my family can see… just in case they’re looking. They’ll know I am ok. Maybe they’ll want to come and live with me.
What the Pig Promised is written, performed, and produced by Shawn Fitzmaurice.
A production by Voiceover Nerd productions, Inc. © 2025. All rights reserved
A tale of skies as empty as promises: voices resonating across the threads of time
Post Credit : Noc’Thule Sermon
She found purpose in the loop. Failures corrected. Cycles perfected.
Kingdoms and Armies rose, fell, conquered, and were led by her holy calculus. Her equations bent TIME itself to her proof. She became closer [pause, rising] to balancing the Great Equation.
Every variable a PRAYER. Every solution SALVATION.
She carved her greatness upon the constellation Tansareth, the Panther. Hunter. Sovereign.
Silent in the dark, and waiting.
The filthy Swillborn equations BENT before her. Made HOLY by Noc’Thule’s Purity Constant.
Servant to the Silence. Prophet of Noc’Thule. The Nameless Empress.
NOC’THULE REMAINS. Remains.
