His eyes opened suddenly at the voice, first looking at the mirror in front of him that was supposed to reflect him—along with the countless other mirrors.
What he saw was a young man, apparently in his twenties, wearing something akin to a grey trench coat and a robe, adjusting his black, dignified monocle placed on his left eye while lying on his stomach on a grey-colored couch.
The black tassel shook on his black bachelor hat as he raised the small book he was reading, his legs raised playfully.
"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. That is, of course, according to Arthur Clarke."
Licking the edge of his index finger and flipping a page, the young man went on, not heeding any attention to the boy with wide eyes, still unable to register the man's words.
"The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life existing and the lack of conclusive evidence for it. There is also the Drake equation, a mathematical formula created by astronomer Frank Drake, that attempts to estimate the number of potentially communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy."
Sighing in disappointment, the young man closed the book with both hands, before his left eye changed in an instant—from his dark eyes to two pupils—the book suddenly disappearing.
"Humans really are boring creatures, going on and on about theories they have not an inkling of an idea of, yet speak like they've seen it themselves. Ironically, I was one of those creatures once-upon-a-time," he said, his voice dripping with bitter contempt.
"Endlessly spinning theories and stories about what might be out there, yet never daring to face what's already inside. They build walls of hope and belief to protect themselves from the void, but all it does is trap them." He leaned forward, his playful smile apparent on his face.
He sighed as he raised both hands, taking off his bachelor cap, settling it beside him, and stood up from his chair on the other side, cracking his neck. "Well, that's how they were made in the first place. That's how 'it' designed 'her' to think. No matter—it's not the time to talk about them."
Walking to somewhere the mirror didn't cover, the wall behind him revealed a symbol of a triangle with an eye in the middle. Atop the triangle was a half top hat, with thin stickman limbs for hands and legs on the triangle.
The pupil in the eye was vertical, making the boy's heart beat frantically—as if it were staring at him, directly into his soul.
The man's footsteps, however, came closer, making the boy break contact with the odd symbol on the wall. The man once again entered the image, adjusting the half top hat he wore, before sitting back in his chair, holding an odd-looking white cane.
"I liked you better during the seventh iteration. You laughed more before you screamed." The man stated coolly. What many would realize was that the man had not opened his mouth a single time, but rather, the words had been spoken directly out of the boy's mouth.
"Let me tell you this, however." Leaning his chin on his hand, the young man smiled as he watched the expressionless boy silently staring at him, unfocused.
Raising his left hand, he moved it up and down in a specific method, as if balancing a puppet on it. And to the boy's shock, something akin to a wooden humanoid doll appeared, its limbs controlled by each finger on the man's hand.
Whitish-silver tentacles with razors inside and on the edge appeared behind him, slowly moving in the room.
"You won't remember this, but I will say it anyway." The boy, seated in the chair, got an ominous premonition as he suddenly jumped from his chair, making distance between them, sweat gathering on his brows.
The young man's voice turned emotionlessly playful in a moment, making the boy's heart shiver uncontrollably.
"Don't"
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......."Believe" +++++++++++
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.................."The" +++++++
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.........................."Sun" +++
The moment he jumped, the chair turned into a white snake with two heads, yet the thing that put off the boy the most was that it had no eyes or mouth.
Furthermore, his premonition was further confirmed by how everything in the room melted—except the mirror the young man was speaking from and the snake that was slithering toward the mirror.
The young man looked around him for any method of escape, yet failed, before his heart jumped in his chest—his gaze slowly lowering toward the feeling that something had latched onto him.
A black hand had wrapped around his ankle. In a fit of panic, the boy attempted to shake it off by pulling his leg, yet he felt the same grip on his other leg.
Then another, and another, and another.
His whole lower body was wrapped in these hands, and the floor he was stepping on turned into a pale blue sea of shimmering thread-like paint, making him fall into it—the hands pulling him deep down. The young man started drowning—not in the sense of what water would do, but almost as if his soul were being pressed upon by a weight that not even outer gods could muster.
The boy thrashed in agony, but no voice came out of his throat. He scratched his face, neck, and body, yet to no avail. From the corner of his eye, he saw the mirror he had been speaking to falling into the water as well, his small body drowning in the threads that wriggled as if they were alive.
The mirror was falling on top of him, yet all he cared about was getting out of here alive.
His body was getting tired, his eyes were closing. He saw a young man wearing a tuxedo, long hair tied into a crown, and thin braids coming out of the mirror subtly, fixing his hair even amid the threads.
His eyes turned toward the boy being pulled deeper. The boy's eyes widened as the man reached his hand toward the boy's face—only two centimeters away—before he lost consciousness.
$+0 0 00 13 00 0 0+$
A young man stood with hands behind his back, standing on something tall in the midst of a circus performance, the starlight on him.
Laughing in insanity, the man opened his arms wide as he called out:
"Rut-tut, get ready," he ordered.
A fat clown with painted face smiled as he started playing a dark brown violin, all the other clowns and performers responding by playing their instruments.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce you to the World's Greatest Show..." He stopped for a moment, a frown etched upon his face as if he had forgotten the name.
Tapping his temple twice, his expression brightened, returning to his initial excited state.
"The Circus of the Fractured Circle!"
The image of the circus got smaller.
And smaller.
And smaller.
The circus was not grounded in earth or anchored in stone, but suspended upon a vast celestial bluish-grey dial adrift among the clouds—an ancient astrolabe turning in silence beneath a sky of endless twilight.
Its rings revolved beneath layers of glass and tarnished gold, inscribed with Roman numerals, forgotten calendars, and zodiac signs that shimmered like distant prophecy.
Dark yet greyish-blue arms stretched outward like the hands of a slumbering god's clock, casting slow, deliberate shadows across a mosaic of cosmic symbols. The surface gleamed with the soft sheen of starlight and memory, as if time itself had congealed into crystal.
Scattered across the dial lay fragments of parchment, a silver-dipped quill frozen mid-thought, and an inkpot marked with constellations and keys—relics of a script written not in ink, but in fate.
A leather-bound book, rimmed in iron and blooming with pressed white blossoms, rested half-open beside a drifting sphere of glass that held a miniature, swirling world.
Pale orbs—pearlescent, untethered—floated gently above the observatory, circling the golden globe at its heart. Beneath them, a compass of beaten brass pulsed once every lifetime, its rhythm older than kings, quieter than the stars.
It was not a structure of mortar and stone, but a cathedral of time—suspended in reverence between rotation and reverie, where silence hummed and the universe watched itself turning.