Written, voiced, and produced by Shawn Fitzmaurice
Voiceover Nerd Productions, Inc.
© 2025 Voiceover Nerd Productions — All Rights Reserved.

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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 Sister Tephra – voiceoverslayer.com

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“Dear Listener, fear not. Each solution is but a variable in another sum; each shifts the balance of the whole.”
— Author Unknown

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Spiral Binding

Every life is a story—experience and lessons left behind. None are isolated. They overlap: sometimes by a word or a sentence, sometimes by whole passages shared between lives. Together, they form a single volume, its pages bound by a spiral spine—uneven, imperfect, tightened under strain, loosened by carelessness, often threaded through the same holes again and again.

Without that binding, all stories—across all time, on both Phenom and Earth—fall away at once. That spiral has a center, held by only a few. And at its heart is Sara.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Chapter 8: The Moment, the Girl Who Stayed, and an Equation Out of Balance

From the Stitched Chronicles of Ilra Wint

In Gratch Hollow, we have lived with what we call The Moment for as long as I can remember. It comes precisely and predictably—every three days, four hours, forty-two minutes, and three seconds.

When it arrives, figures appear among us: men, women, children, caught mid-step, mid-word, mid-thought. A man mid-stride. A child with a wooden sword raised. A woman leaning close, whispering to someone we cannot see. They hold for a breath. Then nothing.

We gather when the time draws near. No one needs speak of it beforehand, but we all know. The baker sets down his flour. Brother Havlor leaves his prayers half-finished. Even the pigs grow still. I have watched this for years now. The timing never shifts.

Nothing in life is so exact. Seasons wander. Death arrives early or late, never when expected. But The Moment keeps its rhythm like a loom that never stops—each figure appearing as though part of a pattern, one stitch after another.

Many believe they are souls passing from one life to the next. Perhaps. But waystation souls should not follow such precise timing. The dead do not keep schedules.

Travelers speak of machines—needles driven by wheels that sew without pause. I have never seen such a thing, but I imagine their rhythm would be like this: precise, tireless, without drift. But no seam holds forever. There must be a loose thread somewhere. I have not found it.

But I have watched one who holds the seams others forgot to mend, though he would never name it such himself. To him, it is just living.

Our beloved outsider, Grutžon—or Jon, as most call him—came to us years ago, not through The Moment, but on foot… presumably. A Goreborn Piglet, fleeing something he could not bear or would not name, he was found wandering the Hollow at night by Elira and Big Jon Vale, keepers of the chapel grounds. They took him in, and in raising him were given a second chance—not to replace the children they lost, but to nurture one they had found.

Another sprout. And this time, it bloomed.

From his earliest days with us, the people of The Moment fascinated him. He would come prepared: a heel of bread, a flask of milk, a folded blanket. He set them carefully on the grass, meant for the ones who appear—should one arrive hungry or in need of rest. He watched with wide eyes, caught between awe and fear, never certain which feeling to hold.

Long after Elira and Big Jon had passed, Jon, now a young man, remained prepared for a soul who did not vanish.

And this time, one did not.

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 Moment had ended. But the girl remained.

Jon moved first. Slowly, carefully—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 crossed the field. He cradled a clay pot as if it were precious.

When the girl’s eyes found him, her face lit up—radiant and unguarded. Jon looked away, shy, his mouth bending into a crooked, uncertain smile.

No one had ever stayed, and the village was not without unease. But 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, deeply—mother and daughter in all but name.

I once wrote that I wait for the day a figure does not vanish, or for the day they stop coming. I did not know which would be worse.

Now that one has stayed, I find myself wondering why the pattern has changed—and what that might mean for all of us.

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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.

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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

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Post Credit Scene: Noc’Thule Sermon