Episode 3. The Door Cannot Choose Who Walks Through
Written, voiced, and produced by Shawn Fitzmaurice
Voiceover Nerd Productions, Inc.
© 2025 Voiceover Nerd Productions — All Rights Reserved.
Warning: What the Pig Promised is told through fragments recovered from multiple timelines. None are complete. Together they might almost tell a story.
Cold-Open Sermon – “On the Tusk Star”
SWILLBORN PRIEST: Heretics call the north star Truth! They say it never moves— a beacon to guide the lost! But the High Prelate of the Swillborn warns: Truth is a lie! The same star is the point of the Little Pig’s Tusk: the Tusk Star, holy and dangerous— its light pure, its gaze poison! Look not upon it! Feed its fire to the trough! Let the Divine Swine devour what we cannot bear!
CONGREGATION (chanting): We feed the fire with our flesh!
PRIEST (shouting over them): May the Tusk Star blind the proud and purify the faithful!
CONGREGATION (chanting): May the filth remember!
PRIEST
May the Filth remember.
What the Pig Promised
A tale of skies as empty as promises: voices resonating across the threads of time.
Written, performed, and produced by Shawn Fitzmaurice
VoiceoverNerd.com
Episode 3: The Door Cannot Choose Who Walks Through
Epigraph
“Dear listener, fear not. An equation does not balance until every variable is in place.”
Chapter 9. 🎙️ Sister Tephra — Constant & Variable
Gratch Hollow is constant.
I’ve been here seven lifetimes. Running the same circle. Trying to solve the same equation.
Three point one four… one five nine… two six five… Every digit a step forward. Every breath a function.
One mile in diameter, three point one four miles in circumference, marked with a worn-in dirt path; the sum of my own steps beside the great cylindrical wall, over and over.
And over. Three five eight nine seven nine.
The Hollow is constant.
Circles within a cylinder, the central Tower unbroken, center to sky—a perfect parallel to the wall. A cylinder within a cylinder. Geometric symmetry.
Kind of beautiful. If I can still calculate beauty.
Within these bounds, I hold control. Equations can be made into reality. Variables tested. Time repeated.
Three two three eight four six. The Hollow is constant.
Chapter 10. 📜 Brinna Swillborn: The Spiral Left Open
A response by Ilra Wint, seamstress and record-keeper of Gratch Hollow
“She mapped the Spiral Trace, and left it open. That was our invitation.” — High Prelate of the Swillborn Concord, from the Order of Great Convergence
It shakes me still. An unfinished spiral is a door left open—and doors do not choose who walks through them.
Lorekeeper Thaevelion names Brinna Swillborn prophet, madwoman, mother of spirals, as if naming were enough to contain her. But some lives don’t hold still long enough to be named. Some patterns don’t show until the cloth is stretched across old seams and pulled tight.
He says her cradle was a trough, her lullabies grunts and buzzing flies. He says pigs gathered when she wept. He calls this madness.
I call it family. In Gratch Hollow, we know what it means to be bound first by need—but it is choice that makes kin endure. Brinna’s pigs answered. They pressed close when she cried, they rooted and listened when no person would. She gave them names, and they gave her belonging. Brinna carried that family all her days, because family is not only the blood that claims you—it is the blood that refuses to leave.
For a time, she worked among scholars, seers, and mathemagicians. On parchment her spirals looked clean, ordered, almost merciful. But the scholars who demanded them were not.
So she left. Returned to her pigs. To mud, trough, and bone. She scrawled spirals where she had always belonged. Blood. Ash. Mud—even pigshit.
The lorekeeper calls it collapse. I call it clarity. And perhaps the two are not so different.
The Spiral is etched upon Porculon’s great spiral tusk, legend carved into stars. Enough heft to save the world… or to slaughter its people.
The Swillborn cult proved it. Her spirals endured—defiled with blasphemous variables, rebuilt into something she never intended. They say her spirals foretold disaster and called it holy. That is their faith. Their invitation.
Before she died, Brinna scrawled on the door to her sty: ‘I stepped into the swill. I do not return.’
I think she meant her work was finished—pressed into the filth: body, mud, madness, and memory. The Spiral an innovation with the power to change everything. How it is used, that was never hers to decide. That part was left to us—and to our variables.
—Ilra Wint, Gratch Hollow
Tephra
After a mile and a half, there is a slab of slate pressed against the wall. Upon it, I etched Brinna Swillborn’s great spiral equation. Fixed in stone. The equation is alive here. This is where I sum the value of my run.
Three two three eight four six.
The Hollow is constant.
A new variable was added, eight years ago. A girl.
Sara remains. The girl who stayed. The anomaly in the equation: unpredictably creative, capable of innovation where I can only refine.
I find Truth. She finds curiosity and wonder.
The Oinx to my Porculon.
Such wisdom in star legends.
Chapter 11. 🌟 The Father, the Son, and a Star Called Truth
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
There is one star that is constant, the faithful true-north star that never fails. It stays fixed while gods and heroes march beneath it in their endless parade of seasons. Mortals too spin their truths and tales beneath its fixed stillness.
Some call it the Pole Star, as though it were the tip of a great pillar holding the sky aloft. Most call it Truth, from the Old Common Trueth.
But Truth does not shine alone. In the heavens, two swine keep it lit.
Father to Oinx, Porculon is the god of what cannot stay buried. Never dipping below the horizon, he roots in muck and filth, dragging from the mire things some would rather remain hidden. His great Spiral Tusk points straight at Truth, and is etched with Brinna Swillborn’s Spiral Constant, said to be both prophecy of and salvation from an impending cataclysm of cosmic scale.
Wide-eyed and eager, Oinx, Porculon’s son, scampers among the stars, squealing his curiosity to every constellation. Who are they, and why do they shine so bright? He has a great tusk, like his father’s, which also points north. Upon its tip rests Truth itself. What Porculon drags from muck, Oinx looks upon with curiosity and wonder.
And thus, if we silence Oinx, we silence curiosity and wonder. What Porculon drags from the muck remains unclear, obscured by filth, and even Truth, faithful, constant, unmoved at the crown of the sky, remains unseen or ignored.
Without Truth, there is no center. And all who wander are lost.
WHAT’S THIS? It appears someone wrote on the back of the page… Let’s see…
[reading] “There’s a game that’s never been perfected—played throughout history, every age, every society. First invented by heroes and gods, later gifted to mortals. But no one has ever won. Not even the best parents. Not even a god could beat Oinx, who’s ignored the Quiet Game for most of infinity.”
[writes his own addition] Patience is sold in small bottles… Chloroform’s cheaper by the ounce.
Tephra
Two six four three three eight three two seven nine.
The Hollow is constant.
I breathe to calculate. I calculate to forget—that the history of all existence is in the balance, and I am, in part, the fulcrum.
I train my body and mind. Strength and intelligence: two halves of a whole.
Five zero two eight eight four.
The Hollow is constant.
Outside, much has already been solved. The two Worlds spin on their common axis—predictable. They revolve around a star—predictable. Stars orbit the galactic center—the solution inevitable.
But the galaxy itself drifts: asymptotic, infinite approach without arrival: success forever beyond calculation’s reach. One variable unaccounted for.
One nine seven one six…
The Hollow is constant.
Discipline is the constant. My only path to control.
Is love a variable—shifting, unreliable?
Perhaps it is fractal: chaos in coordination.
Seven recursive lifetimes. How many more before I allow attachment again? Before I unlock my heart with reckless abandon?
Perhaps love is a constant I should add to the equation.
No. It will draw my attention. Break my discipline.
Chapter 12. 🎨 The Light’s Good Here
CHAPEL SCRIPTORIUM ARCHIVE
Subject: MIRAN VALE / SISTER TEPHRA
Filed contents: — A letter, c. ten years before. — A journal page, c. ten years after. — Two portraits. Unanswered. No reply ever found.
Letter – Miran’s voice
Tephra, I don’t know if there will ever be a right time to give you this… You’ve already given your life to a higher calling. I’m not asking for anything. But I need to say it once: I love you.
Not for your words, though they’re always precise. Not for your movements, though you command a room without trying. It’s the way you never question what must be done — only how best to do it.
There’s power in your serenity. Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re at peace, or ready to strike. Maybe there’s no difference. It frightens me. And it’s beautiful.
You don’t notice when people love you. That’s not cruelty. It’s purity.
So if this letter stays with you for even a moment, let it ring like chapel bells. Like breathing.
— Miran
Archivist (note)
Recovered beneath Tephra’s annotated notes. Fold lines deep, smudged with oil and soil. Held longer than most such scraps. If she read it, no reply was ever found.
Journal – Miran’s voice, older, heavier
Painted Tephra today. Brother Havlor asked me for chapel portraits. But this one… this was not for the records.
She agreed, of course. “If it helps your work.” Always practical.
She sat in stillness. Not prayer, but the quiet before her staff strikes. Even sitting, she was ready. Always ready for something unnamed. If she spoke, I’d lose focus.
I kept painting her hands. Not chapel hands. Weapons folded in prayer. I wasn’t making mistakes. I just couldn’t look away.
Ten years I’ve painted frescoes, stealing glances at dawn. Ten years watching her move like every motion mattered. My hands still shake when she’s near. And we are always near.
When I finished, she studied it as she studies everything. Searching. “The light’s good here,” she said. “This is good work.”
Ten years between the letter and this moment. And still, I said nothing. She’s given her life to something unspoken. The way she trains, I pray that thing never comes.
— Miran Vale
The ribbon from her hair is still tied to my brush handle.
Archivist (note)
Journal fragment, ink-smudged. Pressed into Brother Havlor’s prayer book, closed in haste. The brush handle with ribbon remains in collection.
Archivist – closing file summary
The later portrait shows hesitation in her hands — as his journal describes. An older unsigned study suggests his attention began years earlier. But his first confession came only in writing.
Unanswered. No reply ever found.
Tephra
Six… nine… okay… three point one four one five nine.
With Sara’s mind—both rigorous and wild—I believe a solution is within reach. Without discipline, it could bring chaos.
She may align with the pattern—or fracture it. Save everything, or unmake it.
She is just a girl. Almost a woman. Cats at her heels. Art beyond her years. Safe. With a family.
I want to be—
The Hollow is constant.
She is variance embodied—unpredictable, creative. Where I refine, she invents. Where I calculate, she imagines. She is the variable I cannot resolve.
My model demands preparation for every outcome. Family is neither a constant nor a luxury available to me. There is a vector where she must be subtracted.
The Hollow is constant.
Sara is the variable.
I am the constant.
I train my body and mind.
I train Sara’s focus and discipline.
The Hollow is constant.
