Time did not pass.
It disintegrated.
Each hour was less a tick of the clock and more a fraying of my mind. The days since that... event—if I dare to call it that—felt like pollen drifting into a black hole. Gentle. Useless. Annihilated before it could settle.
It's been a week. Seven days and nights, though I cannot verify that with confidence. Time has become speculative. Even now, I teeter at the brink—of something vast and nameless. Perhaps it's madness. Perhaps it's awakening.
Was it real?
Was it a hallucination constructed from stress, grief, sleeplessness?
No answer holds its shape for long.
But the feeling remains. That unbearable stillness. The echoing absence.
The screams still linger, not in my ears, but in the marrow of my bones.
I saw civilization rupture—not through fire or war, but through surrender. Intent buckled. Morality evaporated. Children crushed under concrete. Mothers releasing infants with hands that shook not from cowardice but from calculus. Humanity did not collapse.
It peeled.
Like skin from living bone.
And what remained was not silence, but something worse—
the sound of meaning breaking.
"The end of the world is not an explosion. It is the moment we can no longer explain what we are."
I still smell the betrayal in the air.
That kind of death is not loud. It is quiet. Intentional.
People devoured each other without teeth, without hunger—just necessity.
Not chaos.
Something colder.
Silence in reverse.
I haven't dreamt of that place since, and yet it follows me.
Every breath I take tastes like a lie.
The Forest of Ebonveil—that cursed mosaic of decay and entropy—has been on my mind constantly. Even with my highest security clearance, passage through its gates would require a wager of blood, sanity, and bureaucratic suicide. It's a suicide not by weapon, but by wandering.
And then… there's him.
That being on the throne.
I don't know what he was.
An entity beyond time?
A god that forgot it was divine?
He wasn't powerful in the way we understand power.
He was fundamental. Like friction. Like entropy. Like regret.
"Some truths do not illuminate. They extinguish."
Why did he summon me?
Why send me toward that forest, that glitch in geography, where logic strangles itself and nothing leaves unchanged?
My thoughts no longer obey me. They spiral. They unravel. They chase shadows without legs.
Even my sister—fragile, weary, and too observant for her own good—has noticed something.
She asked me yesterday, "Are you okay?"
That question—so simple, so useless. It made my throat clench.
I can't focus. I can't work. I can't eat without chewing on the memory of that throne.
My mind is cracked glass. Every thought echoes and refracts until I don't know what I believe.
I'm not someone who scares easily.
But this isn't fear.
It's recognition.
We humans don't fear pain.
We fear what we cannot define.
That's why we invented monsters and morals.
To bind the unknown with language.
To pretend the void has edges.
But the unknown has seen me.
And worse—
It has spoken.
"Monsters don't hide in the dark. They hide in certainty."
At night, I lie awake—not from insomnia, but from obsession. The need to understand has devoured every other instinct.
I've scoured mythologies, forbidden PDFs, dismantled old folklore, tried to stitch the impossible into something coherent.
Nothing I've read even comes close.
The event defies explanation. As if explanation itself is forbidden.
Sometimes I mutter equations that don't exist. Laugh at walls. Cry when the fan stops spinning. There's no pattern, just a deterioration of categories. The self unspooling.
This isn't a descent into madness.
It's something subtler.
More deliberate.
"Insanity is not the loss of reason. It is the overgrowth of meaning."
And what frightens me most is...
I've been here before.
Fourteen.
A storm without thunder.
I didn't care about life or death.
I researched suicide like a scholar.
Dosages. Methods. Failure rates.
I approached oblivion like an experiment.
But I never followed through.
Because I wasn't scared of dying.
I was scared of dying without knowing why I lived.
"The fox does not fear the hunter's bullet. It fears the silence before the shot."
I wanted to vanish.
But I wanted to be missed.
I wanted nothingness—but I wanted someone to name it after me.
And now… I've returned to that paradox.
Like clockwork.
Like fate with a cruel memory.
Days passed. Mechanically.
I slipped back into routine—not because I recovered, but because the body always seeks inertia. The tremor faded. I began to convince myself it was over. A breakdown, perhaps. A temporary hallucination.
Then came Monday.
The last one had happened on a Monday, past ten.
This time, I was reviewing mineral decay reports. Boring. Dry. Comforting.
At 9:45 PM, the universe blinked.
First came the headache.
Not pain—precision. A needle threading my neurons.
Then the light dimmed into static. My vision warped, not outward but inward.
I staggered toward the lounge. I never made it.
Sleep took me mid-step.
No.
Not sleep.
It was a summons.
My soul was dragged, peeled, repurposed through membranes not meant for life.
There was no resistance. No sensation of travel.
Only a shift—like being rewritten in real time.
When awareness returned, I stood again in that impossible place.
No up. No down. No distance.
Light existed without source. Space obeyed no logic. My thoughts felt like trespassers.
There was no gravity. But the throne pulled me.
It pulsed in the heart of that void.
Not made from matter, but from aborted timelines.
From histories that never occurred. From screams that never became sound.
The throne hovered—not in space, but in significance.
Eyes blinked across its surface. Not in unison. Not randomly. As if watching separate realities.
Some cried.
Some widened in horror.
Some blinked in spirals, falling into themselves.
And atop it, sat he.
The figure with no form.
No outline.
No face.
And yet he looked at me.
He looked into me.
His crown was not gold.
It was made from entropy braided with memory.
His silhouette was filled with stars and hollowed by absence.
He wasn't a god.
He was a question.
"Some things are not feared because they are unknown. They are unknown because they are feared."
This time, I didn't scream.
I did not collapse.
I did not run.
I stood firm.
I looked directly into his presence—the weight of all lost meanings pressing against my ribcage.
The one who reigned not with power, but with the absence of all meaning. The air itself recoiled around his presence.
And though my soul trembled, I spoke not as prey, but as prophecy:
And I said:
"We meet again, Mystery."