No one remembered how Niklas Vorn had entered. There were no fissures in reality, no recorded interdimensional portals that could explain his arrival. Time itself seemed to refuse to admit his entry. There was no record of his fall, no sign in the celestial channels or in the dusty archives of oblivion. Not even his name resonated among the humans of the Dréaventh universe, those unfortunate souls whose lives consisted of living from stories claimed by the deepest of voids.
The most unsettling thing was that the Law of No-Return could be avoided by Niklas, because he was denying his own existence.
Niklas Vorn walked on Floor 99°. This was not a space with defined walls or a ceiling, but a vast immensity where matter and energy danced on the edge of creation. The ground beneath his feet was a macabre mosaic of broken clocks, groaning with every step. Each creak sounded like a second that never occurred, a muffled tick-tock, an instant frozen in time and space.
Below, a chasm of dark, dense clouds stretched out, not of water vapor, but of pure thought, of memories and stories twisting in silent storms. From these depths, gigantic crystalline formations emerged, needles of solidified light that shone with a golden and white intensity, as if the very essence of dreams had frozen into imposing structures. They were the luminous traces of thousands of past, present, and future realities, forgotten by all, but not by the realm Niklas had reached.
The walls, surfaces of a material that was neither stone nor metal, were covered with ancient symbols that danced and changed, altering their forms and meanings out of the corner of the eye, becoming illegible when one tried to decipher them directly. And the air… the air smelled of burnt paper and drowned memory, a melancholic fragrance that evoked burned libraries and lost recollections in the mists of time.
Niklas didn't speak. Not with other beings that might appear on this 99th floor, in his realm of non-existence, nor with himself in the silence of his mind. Language was alien to him, a useless tool for communication. He no longer used words; his existence had shed that need. He only looked. And wherever his eyes rested, things… forgot what they were. It was as if his gaze were a dissolving force, capable of erasing the essence of reality.
A creature crawled towards him from the gloom, an aberration born of nightmare, something halfway between woman, serpent, and wraith. Its maw opened, eager to devour him, to claim what it perceived as a void. But when Niklas's eyes saw it in the heart of the 99th floor, the entity stopped. Its predation broke, and in its place, a wave of profound sadness overwhelmed it. It began to weep, tears of blood flowing from its eyes until it died. Its dead bodies dissolved into the air of the same 99th floor.
"Who… what are you doing here?" the entity whispered, its voice a cascade of distorted echoes, just before its form shattered into a thousand floating letters, each a fragment of its existence dissolved in the vast space of the 99th. Niklas picked up one of them, an incomprehensible letter that radiated a pale energy. He observed it with a curiosity devoid of emotion, merely observing a phenomenon. When touched, the letter screamed, an inaudible yet sharp sound, a silent agony that only he seemed to perceive.
"You are not part of this story…" whispered a voiceless voice, a murmur that came from everywhere and nowhere, the voice of the tower itself, resonating in the immensity of the 99th floor, perplexed by the anomaly before it. Niklas, without turning, without the need for lips to articulate words, answered with a resonance that vibrated in the very fabric of reality of this threshold:
"I do not exist, my existence should not affect you. Do not involve me in your restoration."
Despite his declaration, the tower vibrated with a resonance that propagated through all floors, even at the apex of the 99th. The voiceless voice remained in stunned silence, as if Niklas's answer was a crack in its own logic. He, a being who was not, claimed not to affect, and furthermore, to know the true name of the tower. His mere presence on the 99th floor was an unbearable dissonance.
Niklas took another step. He wasn't heading to any particular point, just moving through the non-space of this final floor. Behind him, the floating letters of the dissolved creature disintegrated into motes of luminous dust, which in turn became minuscule tears that evaporated upon touching the floor of broken clocks on the 99th floor. His step left no trace, because the concept of "time" refused to adhere to him. Every second he lived was an eternal, unanchored present.
Suddenly, a faint light emanated from one of the walls of this elevated floor. It wasn't a common glow, but a kind of dark luminosity, as if light were being absorbed rather than emitted. Upon approaching, Niklas noticed that the ancient symbols that had previously danced chaotically were now aligned, forming a kind of mosaic of dead words. It wasn't a language Niklas recognized, for he recognized none, but the energy emanating from them was unequivocal: they were memories. Memories and stories torn from distant universes, stripped of their context, floating in this limbo like rudderless ships.
He extended a hand towards the wall. The stone, which was not stone, became malleable under his touch, yielding like clay in the hands of an invisible potter. Not a door opened, but a tunnel that should not exist on the plane of the 99th floor. A tunnel made of pure absence, where even the air felt less dense.
On the other side of the tunnel, the scene was unalterable. A chair, a table, and a map. It was an ancient map, possibly the same one Niklas had glimpsed before, but this time, its presence here on the 99th floor imbued it with a new and terrible relevance. It didn't show the 99 levels of the tower, but focused on its foundations, reaching up to Floor 32. However, on the next level, Floor 33, a disturbing symbol appeared: an inverted crown. And below it, written in calligraphy that seemed to bleed from the parchment, a name appeared: Elia. All of this, a final revelation, laid out in the ethereal heart of the 99th floor.
Niklas looked at the map, not with seeing eyes, but with a perception that transcended vision. The name resonated in the echo of his non-existence. And, against all logic, against the very will of the tower and the Law of No-Return, Niklas smiled.
It was not a smile of joy, nor of victory. It was a smile born from the violation of a fundamental rule, of a forbidden echo that resonated in the deepest part of his being. Because he remembered that name: Elia. And he shouldn't have. Remembering such a marked name in this realm of oblivion, especially one associated with the inverted crown seal at such a crucial point in the tower, was an impossibility, a sacrilege to the very essence of the 99th floor. His memory, the one Niklas should never have possessed, was a spark in the darkness of the Dréaventh universe.
And when Niklas Vorn remembered, the Dréaventh universe, the very Law of No-Return, and the imposing tower he was in, broke a little more. Every fragment of memory recovered by him was a wound in the very fabric of existence, a forgotten echo that began to resonate and destabilize reality itself. Niklas's presence was not a mistake, it was a catalyst, and his memory of Elia, a trigger. The tower, the voiceless entity, felt it.
A breaking was imminent, driven by a being who did not even exist, at the last threshold of its being.