In the annals of forgotten kingdoms, there lived an astrologer whose name has slipped from the tongues of men, but whose arrogance remains etched in the memory of history’s most peculiar fables. He was not an astrologer in the traditional sense, for his craft did not concern the mere movements of planets or the transient whims of stars. No, his calculations went deeper, weaving through the fabric of time itself, mapping its end. He had once foretold the cessation of history, that the grand machinery of events, battles, revolutions, births, and deaths would grind to a halt, not in some distant apocalypse, but in a quiet and final act of cosmic exhaustion. The world, he claimed, had already reached its denouement, though few had yet noticed. His words were a balm to the ears of the king, who, weary of the vicissitudes of power, welcomed the notion that no more threats or upheavals would challenge his reign. Thus, the astrologer was elevated, not merely as a soothsayer, but as a confidant, a man whose vision of stasis resonated with the king’s deepest desires.

The astrologer’s rise to power was not marked by ambition or guile—those were the tools of lesser men, trapped in the cycles of time he had so effortlessly transcended. Instead, he moved through the court with a serene complacency, as if his very presence was a manifestation of the immutable truth he had divined. The king, charmed by the astrologer’s certainty, showered him with titles, lands, and favor, believing that the man had already seen the last page of the kingdom’s history, and found it blank. For years, the astrologer basked in the luxury of his position, wandering the palace gardens, sipping wine at royal banquets, all the while nursing a quiet satisfaction, smug in the belief that nothing more could ever happen. His prophecy had set the world in a perpetual stillness, and he, the harbinger of this eternal calm, reveled in the illusion that he had mastered time itself.

But time, like a serpent that slumbers before striking, was not so easily tamed. As the astrologer wandered the court in his velvet robes and heavy medallions, the world outside the palace walls continued its restless churn. Faint tremors of history—small rebellions, whispered betrayals, sudden plagues—began to creep back into the kingdom, though at first they were no more than rumors, barely enough to stir the king from his lethargy. The astrologer, however, was not immune to these tremors. They gnawed at the edges of his certainty, threatening the delicate fiction he had woven. Unwilling to acknowledge the possibility of error, he devised a solution both ingenious and absurd: he would conceal these new events, tuck them away from sight, and thus prevent them from ever entering the official record of history. With a needle and thread, he began sewing new pockets into the elaborate robes he wore, and into these pockets he stuffed every stray fragment of history he could not explain. A skirmish on the border, a plot against the queen, a comet that defied his calculations—into the pockets they went, hidden away from the gaze of the king and the court.

Soon, the astrologer’s once elegant robes became grotesque with their bulging cargo. The fabric sagged under the weight of hidden rebellions, untold famines, and unspoken conspiracies, but still, no one in the court dared question the increasingly monstrous appearance of the king’s favored soothsayer. His silhouette, once sleek and composed, now ballooned into a distorted caricature, the fabric of his robes groaning under the pressure of events he could no longer contain. The courtiers, long accustomed to his cryptic brilliance, averted their eyes, unwilling to confront the unraveling spectacle before them. And so, the astrologer continued to walk through the palace halls, a man burdened by the unbearable weight of denied history, yet still clinging to the hope that by hiding these events from view, he might still hold the key to stopping time itself.

Then came the night of the great royal reception, a celebration held in honor of a treaty whose details the astrologer had long since forgotten, though he had likely stuffed them into one of his many pockets. The ballroom glittered with light, the air thick with the scent of jasmine and the murmur of diplomatic pleasantries. The astrologer, now hunched under the weight of his robes, approached the king to offer his customary bow. But the gesture, simple as it was, proved to be his undoing. His overloaded garments—stitched together from a thousand patches, each concealing an unspeakable event—could take no more. As he bent at the waist, the seams split with a violent snap, and in an instant, his robes erupted in a whirlwind of catastrophe. Hidden wars, plagues, revolts, and dynasties long erased from memory exploded into the ballroom, swirling in a maelstrom of chaos that tore through the court. History, long suppressed, unleashed itself with a vengeance, consuming everything in its path.

The kingdom, once so serene in its belief that time had ended, was swallowed whole by the storm. The king, the courtiers, even the astrologer himself were swept into the vortex, as events long buried sought their rightful place in the annals of the world. And so, in the end, the astrologer was proven correct, though not in the way he had imagined. History did end, but only because it devoured everything that once stood. His final act of vanity, his futile attempt to contain time within his own robes, left behind a kingdom erased, a silence so deep it seemed that history had never existed at all. The palace, the people, and the astrologer were swallowed by time’s rebirth, leaving only the faintest whisper in the forgotten annals of a kingdom where history had once, and only briefly, dared to stop.