I opened my eyes.
But there was nothing to open them to.
No light. No shadow. No ceiling. No sky. No shape. No sound. No silence.
Only—
Existence.
A hum, not of sound, but of presence. A resonance that threaded through sinews I couldn't find, bones I couldn't name, organs I wasn't sure I still possessed. I wasn't falling. I wasn't rising. I wasn't anything—and still, I was aware.
It was not dark. Darkness implies contrast.
This was the absence of contrast.
Here, even void would be too full.
I tried to breathe.
There was no breath.
I tried to scream.
There was no throat.
I tried to move.
There were no directions to defy.
And then—
A shimmer.
Not in space. Not in sense. Not in anything you could name. It pulsed in the idea of forward, a location suggested by a memory that had not yet occurred. A glint—no, a knowing—uncoiled in a non-place that my awareness began to misinterpret as orientation.
From that shimmer came a thread.
Golden?
No.
Older than gold. Not metal. Not color.
It shimmered with the memory of shimmer.
It tangled, spiraled, spiraled again, split, rejoined. Not thread. Not line.
Moments.
Moments in motion.
Moments pretending to be motion.
A current that didn't flow, but spun.
A river—but not water.
A river—but not time.
A river, turning in on itself. Ouroboros current.
Something between.
A shimmer.
A wheel.
The Wheel.
It turned in no direction and in every direction at once. Its spokes were years. Its rim was breath. Its rotation made language bleed.
As I watched, it turned clockwise. Then counterclockwise. Then… something else.
I tried to follow it. I tried to place myself within it.
It rejected me.
Time wasn't flowing.
Time was folding.
Time was eating its own tail.
And it hissed.
"The past is the mold of the now.""The now is a falsehood.""You are the falsehood.""You are not.""You were never.""You will always."
Each line was not heard. It was inhaled.
Each syllable crawled into my marrow. Each beat carved a syllogism across my ribs.
The wheel turned. Clockwise. Counterclockwise. Clockwise again. Then—
Sideways.
The wheel of time turned sideways.
The chant continued. Its rhythm wrong. Its words stuttered.
"You remember the forgetting.""You forgot the remembering.""You arrived before you departed.""You departed before you became."
And beneath that spiraling crown of motionless collapse—stars.
Or what had once been stars.
Pinpricks in the distance.
Not light. Not brilliance.
Tears.
Like fingernails raked through the veil of a stage.
From them bled something—oily light, thick as ink, not glowing but leaking.
Fissures scraped through the skin of not-space, bleeding wrongness. They oozed light that did not illuminate, shimmer that refused color. It dripped, coiled, pooled in ways that denied geometry.
My mind folded to fit it.
And that's when I saw it.
Or rather—it saw me first. It saw through me.
A Presence.
Not above.
Not below.
Around.
Inside.
Through.
It was not shape. It was not face. It was not name. It was impossibility made flesh.
It was a silhouette made of subtraction. The idea of a figure rather than a figure. Its limbs didn't move, they revised. Its head didn't turn, it pivoted across assumptions.
A being of miscalculation. A silhouette of contradiction. Its limbs refused conclusion. Its spine disagreed with curvature. Its presence bent the idea of presence.
It wrapped around what I now mistook for a realm—a world, trembling at the center of a no-space cocoon. A bubble. A cradle. A trap.
The being circled the sphere like a scholar tracing the outline of a glyph it had almost—but not quite—forgotten.
It didn't orbit. It wound.
It didn't examine. It understood.
It didn't look at me.
And still—
I was seen.
And when it saw me, I was made. Unmade. Remade. Discarded.
Not with agony.
With notation.
As though I had become part of its hypothesis. A theory in its calculus.
Where its chest should have been—
A door.
Where its face should have been—
A mistake.
Where its eyes should have been—
Curiosity.
Its gaze—no, its query—passed over me like a librarian brushing dust from a page.
And I—
I screamed.
But not with a voice. Not from lungs. The scream came from the wheel. From the shimmer. From the non-stars peeling themselves backward into nothing.
I screamed like syntax breaking. Like grammar unwriting. Like sentence structure eaten by recursion.
The river buckled.
The wheel stuttered.
The chant unraveled:
"Forget.""Forget.""Forget.""Forget—"
But I remembered.
I remembered the pause before remembering. I remembered the question before the question was even asked.
And in that pause—
I began to fall.
Not fall.
Be drawn.
Dragged toward the realm I could not yet understand. The Wheel receded behind me, its final rotations pulsing like a heart that had learned to beat too late.
Below—above—around me:
A shimmer.
Not a veil.
Not a gate.
An answer.
An answer to a question I had not asked, shaped like hesitation pressed into the skin of the universe.
The boundary of the world.
The shimmer wavered.
And through it—I saw no world. Not yet.
Just color.
Green.
Blue.
Soil. Sky. Stone. Cloud.
Not as images.
As hints.
As promises.
The Presence did not follow.
But it watched.
The shimmer pulsed.
Not invitation. Not denial.
Recognition.
The tears bled sideways.
The chant wept backward.
The Wheel's last echo spun through me.
And the shimmer—
The shimmer opened.
Not outward. Not inward.
It opened toward me.
As if I had always been meant to pass through.
I reached out.
My fingers—if they still existed—brushed the surface of almost.
It curved around me like silk folding around a secret.
I did not pass through.
It let me through.
And the moment I crossed—
The stars vanished.
The tears sealed.
The Wheel froze.
And the Presence blinked.
The world waited.
I crossed.
But I did not move.
I crossed again.
Yet, I still did not move.
I cros-
Whamph!
I crossed like ink spilling across the edge of a page—like the end of a sentence unspooling into a paragraph that no longer remembered its beginning.
The shimmer accepted me.
Or it tolerated me.
And I—
I didn't breathe.
But something inside me sighed.
Not relief.
Not release.
Just... change.
There was no rupture. No surge of pain. No flash of transition. The gateway didn't blaze or shimmer or fracture with drama.
It simply was.
A soft threshold.
A still breath.
A pause in the song.
But it was no less absolute.
As I passed through, something peeled away from me. No—it was extracted. Peeled gently, like old skin, sloughed like a memory you didn't know you carried.
Something was taken.
Something I had never known I had.
No voice declared it. No chant resumed. No vision burst open to fill the nothing.
Only a single thought:
"This is the price."
I didn't know whose voice it was.
I didn't know what had been taken.
But I felt lighter.
And that terrified me more than anything.
Behind me, the void folded closed like an eye going blind.
The Wheel vanished. The chant fell silent.
The stars—those bleeding, broken pinpricks—were gone, as if they'd never been.
And the Presence?
Still watching.
I didn't turn to look. I couldn't have, even if I tried.
But I felt it.
A low heat. A weightless density. The press of meaning where no hand touched.
Its gaze carved itself into the curve of my back like a signature on a scroll never meant to be signed.
I was marked.
No symbol. No brand.
But known.
Somewhere deep beneath thought, something recorded the passage.
And as I drifted, floated, crossed—
I knew.
There would be no going back.
This gate did not swing both ways.
Not for me.
Not anymore.
There was no flare of light. No sudden ground beneath my feet. No sky to stretch above me in welcome.
There was only the moment after.
The moment after passage. The moment between.
A silence so sharp it cracked.
A breath so full it emptied.
A pause that waited to become a world.
The shimmer collapsed behind me. Not in noise, but in finality.
The threshold vanished.
And I—
I was gone.
Not from existence.
But from there.
And now, I was here.
Wherever here would be.
But not yet.
Not quite.
Just before the moment. Just before arrival.
Suspended in the hush.
In the instant before the world began again.
And the world—
the world I was not yet meant to see—
waited.
And I blacked out again