HooH is genuinely the most terrflying aeon
I was looking at the readable Flyer for The World in Swarm Disaster: Rebuilding Order Book Series*,* which talks about the aftermath of the swarm disaster. There’s one passage in it called “THEY Said, We Shall Divide Everything Evenly” that actually gave me chills. I know it sounds dramatic but it changed how I saw HooH.
The stii people are already done for. The swarm has eaten everything edible, exhausted everything usable, and left them stranded in this barren city. Then HooH appears out of nowhere and just says:
"not yet"
Suddenly people begin moving in perfect order and proceed to burn every building in sight. No one seems aware of what they're doing while their surroundings are being reduced to ashes.
But apparently burning the city isn’t enough for HooH, so they repeat “not yet” and everyone starts setting themselves on fire. Somehow even that still isn’t enough so HooH repeats it a third time. The city sinks into the planetary mantle, everyone's souls collapse inward, and several amber eras later, the planet is reduced to a black hole:
“Calm, silent, the same within as it is without.”
The final line here really captures what equilibrium is at its endpoint: perfect balance through total erasure. Other aeons bring destruction as a result of THEIR path. Nanook destroys because THEY view existence itself as a mistake. Oroboros devours everything to feed THEIR endless hunger. Tayzzyronth propagates until life collapses under the swarm. But with HooH, THEY'RE not malicious in the usual sense.
The stii people were stranded and probably prayed for the aeons to save them. So when HooH appears and declares "not yet" for the first time it feels like their call was finally answered. And for a second, you think THEY meant you're not dying yet but it turns out to be the complete opposite.
The phrase becomes more unsettling every time HooH repeats it because each calamity seems like the breaking point. You'd think the city burning down and people setting themselves on fire would be more than enough, but it's not. Instead THEY keep going until what's left of the planet is a black hole collapsing endlessly.
What makes the scene especially disturbing is not just HooH’s indifference, but the hollowness behind it. There's no sense of reward, punishment, or satisfaction you can immediately pick up on. HooH does not appear to want anything from the devastation which somehow makes it worse. Aeons are already impersonal in nature but most paths still have a human thread running through them. Preservation has the instinct to survive, erudition has the desire to know, harmony has the longing for unity, even nihility and finality can be understood through despair and inevitability.
Equilibrium on the other hand feels unreachable because there's no obvious emotional foothold. It simply demands balance even when the result is total erasure.