Aster Gray sits in a small gray room, a locked box in front of him. He fiddles with the lock, toying with it for a moment. “Inside of this box sits my deepest desire. Something that fills my heart and soul with both joy and despair. However, much to my dismay, it’s been locked up tight. Whatever shall I do?” Aster chuckles, revealing a pile of keys in front of the box. He picks through them, comparing them to the lock itself.
“Imagine if I took the time to shove each and every last one of these into the lock before me? This pile is enormous, I’d be here for hours! Yet, I would find the solution eventually, right? Perhaps, perhaps not.” Aster throws mismatched keys over his shoulder, abandoning them as soon as he sees they won’t work. “It could be any of them, yet there’s one simple way to know the answer, isn’t there? Either find the lock maker himself, or find someone who has the knowledge you seek. It’s the simple solution to an overwhelmingly paradoxical situation, isn’t it?”
“What do I want more? What the lock has hidden away from me? Or the key that unlatches it?”
“Apokalpysis, my dear friends, why don’t you try and answer that question? You’ve spent months trying to brute force the problem in front of you. Forcing members of OSW against the locked door one by one in an ill-fated attempt at getting to the prize that lies beyond its shackles. And, unlike this box, it isn’t something you can simply smash open if you tried. The need for this key is so immense that, in reality, it likely outweighs your quest for what lies beyond.” Gray chuckles, smacking keys haphazardly to the floor.
“The key itself is so important that nothing could compare to it. Everything you want, everything you love, sits closed tightly behind those doors. And, yet, Narcissa claims to have the very thing you seek. Your whole journey, your goal, sits squarely upon her shoulders. For if she tells the truth, if she studied the lock enough, then she holds the solution. She has what you want in the palm of her hands.”
“Perhaps, even the Uprising has had the answer the whole damned time.”
With a small smirk, Aster pulls a key from his pocket, not one from the table. He inserts it into the lock, unlatching it and letting it drop with a thud in front of himself. “We hold your destiny, Apokalypsis. John knows it, and now you do too. So you can keep trying to brute force the lock, or you can come to the people that have the knowledge of the key’s location that you seek. Perhaps, even, to the lock maker himself.”
Gray flips the top of the box open, the inside revealed to be entirely empty. “Nothing is black and white. No matter how hard you try and separate the lock from the key they will always play into one another. The key and the prize, both alike in importance. At the end of the day…”
“Everything ends up gray.”