Beyond the stained-glass gate was not a realm. Not a world.
It was a thought.
A living, breathing, collapsing thought that had never been spoken aloud.
The ground beneath me whispered my name, but not in any voice I recognized.
And the sky—if it could be called that—shifted with every memory I had refused to feel.
I walked. Not because I trusted it. But because turning back would've been a kind of death.
---
The first thing I saw was a pillar. Floating. Endless. Covered in words carved backwards, as if the realm didn't want me to read them— Only to remember them.
I brushed my fingers against the surface.
The glyphs pulsed.
And I fell inward—
---
I stood in a ruined hall made of veins and stars. All around me, empty thrones watched.
One figure sat among them.
Not cloaked in majesty. But in absence.
A shadow given form, draped in strands of impossible color. It had no face. But the outline of a crown rested above where its head might be.
"You came too early," it said. "Or perhaps... exactly when I remembered you."
My mouth opened. But no sound came.
This being… It felt like pressure inside my ribs. Like remembering a name from a dream just before it fades.
"I was born of the thoughts that never finished." "Of all the questions that had no askers."
It stood.
And when it did, my vision blurred. The being's body didn't move through space. Space moved through it.
"You are Lyan," it said. "The Unresolved. The Witness born in a world too slow to understand itself."
I wanted to scream. But what came out was a vision.
A spiral of children singing a song that bent the sky. A machine that wept when no one watched. A girl whose eyes held constellations but no pupils.
> "Why are you showing me this?" I finally asked.
The being tilted its crownless head.
"Because I remember you."
"And memory here… shapes everything."
---
The hall vanished.
I was back before the pillar. Sweating. Heart racing.
The words on the pillar had changed. Now they read:
"You are not alone in remembering."
"Others have seen you from beyond the veil."
"And one of them… has never stopped calling your name."
The sky flickered. The bridge behind me vanished.
There was only forward now. Only the memory of what hasn't happened yet.
And something… someone… waiting at the end of it.
---