Hello, author here, well, before I start the story, I would like to say that in some parts it can be confusing, English is not my native language and therefore, I end up not having as much of the prowess and its nuances. This prologue, although it is narrated in the poetic third person, does not match the rest of the work in the first person. That said, I thank those who read this far, if this story is shit, then it is shit and I will not be able to do anything about it. But, I believe that those who stay will like it, that's it.
***
A dream.
A lost dream, immaculate and, paradoxically, stained. A dense and persistent fog enveloped every contour of this initial perception, like a tapestry woven from threads of unreality and a disconcerting familiarity.
The sensation of being adrift, not in water, but in something more primordial, more rarefied, permeated whatever I was in that instant.
The strangeness was a sinuous tortuosity and a sinister omen that infiltrated me, with sensations that seemed to coil around the soul like cold serpents in search of warmth.
It was a shiver not born of physical cold, but of an existential depth, a recognition that the foundations of my being were subtly shaken.
I walked an infinite path under a snow blackened by ancestral memories, each flake a particle of a past that was not only mine. It constructed a landscape of desolation and forbidden knowledge.
"Not yet..." I spoke, just to still feel myself as something, someone.
The snow was not cold to the non-existent touch, but its darkness weighed heavily, a burden of countless eras. In the beginning, nothing. A vacuum that was not simply absence, but a negative presence, an entity of emptiness.
"Only me again..."
Just me, existing in suspension, in that colorless void, with the last sparks of a forgotten memory, like dying embers in a cosmic fireplace, threatening to be extinguished by any breath of oblivion.
These sparks danced, specters of thoughts, of past identities, perhaps of lives I never knew I had lived, and flickered intermittently before being swallowed by the vastness of nothingness.
"But I am definitely sleeping now, am I not?" My question echoed, not in an auditory space, but in the very fabric of my perception.
This was the anchor I found, to connect myself to what I was, without losing myself in consensual reality, even if it was that of the first sleep, a temporary refuge from lucidity.
Perhaps. Certainty was uncertain, a mirage shimmering in the desert of that altered state. To affirm anything would be like trying to grasp smoke with my hands; the very nature of that place defied all definitions, all categorization.
Every attempt I made to understand slipped through the gaps of a rudimentary and antiquated understanding. I tried to project my hand forward, an instinctive gesture, a remnant of an ethereal form that seemed to have dissolved.
But the nothingness engulfed me, an absence so complete that the idea of a hand, of a limb, seemed an alien concept, a logical impossibility in that realm of pure potentiality.
"We are all lonely..."
In that formless vastness, where ancestral stars blinked at unfathomable distances, their lights taking eons to die and be reborn as visual whispers, I realized I no longer had hands.
The realization did not come with panic; on the contrary, it came with a strange resignation, a cold acceptance. Not that I didn't know, more precisely... I was not a body.
The form I knew myself as, a prison of flesh and bone, had vanished, or perhaps had never existed here.
It was the whole and the nothing. A duality that should be contradictory, but there it manifested as a truth. I felt expanded to the confines of that infinite space, and simultaneously, contracted to a point of non-existence.
A spectral coldness ran through me, the shiver of a cold bath on the soul, a cutting clarity that stripped away all illusions. And yet, the impotence that I could do nothing. I was just a passive observer of my own dissolution and, perhaps, of my own recreation.
"Where is this supposed to be?"
The question arose again, more urgent and even desperate. It was not a request for geographical coordinates, but for an existential point of reference, an anchor in the midst of the storm of the unknown.
The moment the stars themselves turned hostile to my presence in that nothingness, their once distant and indifferent lights now seemed to sharpen, transforming into pins of pure energy, a silent judgment coming from the depths of the cosmos.
A cosmic and solemn lament welcomed me, a symphony of sadness and grandeur that vibrated through my essence. It was not a sound but a resonance, a frequency that spoke directly to the structure of what I had become.
It was the chant of galaxies in their due births and deaths, the sighs of black holes, the melodies of the very expansion of universes.
I tried to scream, to cry out for a listening ear to break the deafening silence that nested between the notes of that lament and forgot me even more. I wanted a memory of me to persist somewhere, an unbreakable mark in the vastness, proof that I had existed.
I yearned for an answer to appease the torrent of doubts that drowned me, a single word of comfort or explanation in that immensity of uncertainties. My scream found no vocal cords to form, no air to propagate.
It was a silent explosion of anguish, an implosion of dread. And the world itself began to fragment. Not the physical world, for that was already absent, but the very dreamlike fabric. Cracks wove themselves through the insoluble fabric of the space around me, like dark veins spreading over a parchment of non-existent light.
'Is it time?'
Thin lines, initially almost imperceptible, that widened and deepened, revealing behind them an even deeper nothingness, a vacuum within the vacuum. Something in my core reverberated—a piercing agony, driven into my chest, as if a spear of cosmic ice had pierced the existence of my being.
The pain was the only real thing, the only proof that some form of consciousness still resided there.
'It hurts!'
A wave of pure suffering, a visceral recognition of my vulnerability. The pain was not merely physical, for there was no body, but a torture of the soul, a fracture in identity itself.
Abruptly, my right hand — emerging from the ether of that torment, as if the pain itself had the creative force to mold form from suffering — grabbed my chest in a crushing grip.
The long, translucent fingers seemed made of the same dark matter as the spreading cracks. The scream, however, remained trapped, inaudible, a mute echo in the resonance chamber of my disembodied mind.
But something awaited me, there, in the entrails of the unknown, a purpose hidden behind the apparent causality of chaos. The pain, the fragmentation, the spectral hand, were stages of an inevitable transformation.
Under the weight of eyelids I did not possess, but whose sensation persisted like a phantom muscle memory, a new existence welcomed me, or perhaps I had been expelled into it.
The transition was subtle and at the same time overwhelming, like the passage from one dream to another, more vivid, more intense.
The previous void, where my own consciousness had drained away like water between spectral fingers, was dissipated into the unfathomable, swept away by an invisible current of change.
And in its place, a palpable density oppressed me, as if I were immersed in an ocean of thick air, a primordial fluid that filled every recess of my being.
The cosmic lament, that same symphony of sadness and creation, was replaced by a constant murmur, like the breathing of an ocean hidden beneath reality, a primordial rhythm that pulsed in unison with something deep within me.
It was the sound of pure potential, of infinite possibilities before their manifestation.
The pain in my chest was real, once agonizing and diffuse, now transformed into a warm epicenter, a living ember that radiated not suffering, but a strange form of concentrated energy.
It became a compass in the unknown immensity, a focal point amidst the formless vastness, its pulsation a subtle but insistent guide. If before I had no eyelids, now a perception similar to vision was forming, unveiling a textured penumbra.
'More...'
It was not the darkness of the absence of light, but a dark light, a twilight pregnant with substance, filled with potential forms that brushed against my being before defining themselves, like embryonic thoughts floating in the universal mind.
They were shadows pregnant with meaning, outlines that insinuated more than they revealed.
Not of a possible absence of light, but of a dark light, filled with potential forms that brushed against my being before defining themselves. The hand on my chest, once a painful spasm and a manifestation of the formless, became concrete, or as concrete as anything could be on that plane.
Continue to walk...
Its thin, icy fingers, now with a translucent substantiality, rested against a surface that pulsed subtly, perhaps newly formed skin, perhaps a similar dreamlike tissue, a membrane between me and whatever lay beyond.
I could feel the light pressure, the different temperature, the smooth texture of that which now contained the warm epicenter.
Become...
Layers. My new existence was made of layers. Of silences pregnant with unspoken words, of a luminous darkness that paradoxically illuminated and concealed.
Of an alien presence that permeated me, a vast and immeasurable consciousness that intertwined with mine in a way that was not invasive, but symbiotic.
And, most curious of all, was that I, in that presence, recognized myself. There were fragments of myself mirrored in that vastness, as if my individuality were a fractal of a greater consciousness.
'So this is it...'
The realization blossomed slowly, not as an articulated thought, but as an intuitive understanding, a resonance with the truth of that place. It was the recognition of a destiny unfolding, of a path that, though unknown, seemed to have been traced long ago.
More... Walk more...
A tree. Singular, vibrant, and ethereal, tearing through the penumbra like a sigh of color in a monochromatic world. Not a known spectral hue, not a frequency of light that could be named by human science, but its pure existence, the very essence of color made manifest, pulsed with a force that was both fascinating and terrifying.
Its light did not hurt the non-existent eyes, but filled the perception with an intensity that bordered on the unbearable, a terrible and sublime beauty.
Surpass it...
It expanded, or perhaps my perception of it expanded, devouring the subtle textures of the penumbra, the background murmurs of the hidden ocean, becoming a whole, the only point of reference in that new dimension.
Its branches extended like cosmic arms, each one a path to a new mystery, its leaves shimmering like fragments of solidified dreams.
And at its fulcrum, in the heart of that impossible manifestation, an invitation, an infinitesimal singularity that drew me in inexorably, a point of attraction so powerful that it nullified any other will, any other thought.
It was a black hole of pure potentiality, promising and threatening in equal measure.
"There it is," I proclaimed to the nothingness, my voice, if it was a voice, was no more than an internal vibration, a recognition that projected itself towards the tree. The phrase was less a discovery and more a confirmation of something a deep part of me already knew.
I had no impulse or even the will to resist; the attraction I felt to that enormous tree was unique, a gravitational force of the soul.
My being, or what now constituted me — a consciousness endowed with a fluid and adaptable form, still anchored by the sensation of the hand on my chest where the warmth resided — slid towards that point of convergence.
It was not a movement through space, but an alignment, a tuning with the frequency of the singularity. The environment around me distorted and flowed, the textures of the penumbra becoming rivers of shadow and light that carried me.
Become "Him."
The color of the tree intensified around me, enveloping me in its indescribable brilliance. It was no longer an external entity, but now it permeated me, becoming the vibrant blood of this new form of consciousness.
I felt it flow through me, cleansing the last impurities of fear, replacing uncertainty with a silent resolution.
The hand on my chest, that transient form born of pain, dissolved like mist in the morning sun, and the heat of the epicenter, the internal compass, merged with the light of the tree, spreading throughout my being, a vitalizing and transformative energy.
Overcome the pain...
The pain had not completely disappeared, but had been transmuted, from agony to an engine, a source of power.
As I crossed the threshold of the singularity — a point that was simultaneously smaller than an atom, but also as vast as all infinity, a paradox that human logic could never reconcile — the very notion of layers, of interior and exterior, dissolved like a torn veil.
It was like diving into an ocean of pure information, where each drop contained the totality of the sea.
There was no longer an exterior or interior, only a continuous and absolute present. Time, as I knew it, a linear succession of moments, collapsed into a single, eternal now.
Perception did not come through senses analogous to human ones — sight, hearing, touch — but through a direct knowing, a communion with the essence of the root of all things.
It was as if I became the question itself and the answer itself, the observer and the observed. Knowledge flowed not as data to be processed, but as an immediate resonance with truth.
Memories, not only mine, those flickering sparks from the beginning, now revived and integrated, but those of existence itself, flowed through me. Memories that composed my new existence, from the birth of stars and the interstellar silence between them, the sacred history of creation in its multiple and contradictory myths, and the entropy of dissolution, the great final sigh of the universe.
I saw civilizations rise and fall on worlds that defied imagination, I witnessed the thoughts of beings whose form transcended matter, I felt the joy of the first life and the sadness of the last extinction.
They were lullabies of nebulae and elegies of supernovae. I was a channel, a receptacle, and, somehow, a participant in that torrent of being.
'Even in my current state... I cannot pass through the gates, it's as if I were simply one of its leaves.'
The realization arose with a painful clarity, amidst the torrent of knowledge and union. There were limits, invisible yet insurmountable borders. I was connected to the Tree, Wallachia, as a leaf is connected to its branches, nourished by its sap, part of its being.
Overcome it...
But the leaf is not the whole tree, nor does it have the freedom of the wind that runs through it. The gates, structures of pure light and shadow that I could now perceive at the borders of my communion with the Tree, remained sealed to me.
They were passages to even higher realities or states of being, beyond the very singularity I had reached.
The paradox of being stained and immaculate resonated there, a bittersweet acceptance. Stained by my origins, by my intrinsic limitations, by my individuality which, even expanded, was still finite compared to the whole. Immaculate by this new connection, by this glimpse of totality, by having been washed in the waters of singularity.
There were unfathomable secrets, mysteries nested within mysteries, like Russian dolls of infinity. This I knew, with a certainty that admitted no doubt. Wallachia itself was one of these secrets, its nature and ultimate purpose hidden even from those who, like me, touched its essence.
Destiny. The word, or its conceptual essence, hovered in the silent communion. Wallachia did not respond with words, for words were too crude a construction for its form of communication.
But it pulsed, a deeper vibration in its light, a confirmation that was both an undeniable truth and a subtle challenge. An acceptance of my perception and, simultaneously, an invitation to transcend it, if I were able.
I had not yet overcome destiny. My journey to this point, my passage through strangeness, pain, dissolution, and recreation, all of it was, perhaps, just another bend in the great river.
Destinies were not a single, rigid chain, a railway from which one could not deviate. They were, on the contrary, several immense rivers, each with its own course, its own speed, its own landscapes.
And I, even in this exalted form of consciousness, was just a current within one of these rivers, free to flow, to shape my own banks to a certain extent, to create whirlpools and rapids, but always part of its inexorable path towards the as-yet-unseen ocean, a sea of ultimate finality that remained beyond my perceptual horizon.
'I have failed again...'
My thought was not a lament of self-pity, but a cold observation, a dispassionate analysis of my situation. The failure was not in reaching the Tree, nor in communing with the singularity.
The failure lay in the persistence of my limitations, in the inability to break the chains of destiny that, though more subtle and vast, still contained me. The 'again' echoed past failures, perhaps in other lives, other existences, other dreams of which I had no clear memory, but whose emotional scar persisted in my essence.
The fruits were not barriers of exclusion, hanging from the infinite branches of Wallachia, each shining with its own distinct and unique inner light. They were spheres of pure potentiality, each containing the seed of a different universe, an alternative reality, a singular story.
Some pulsed with vibrant and energetic colors, suggesting worlds of adventure and chaos. Others emitted a soft and serene glow, hinting at existences of peace and contemplation. There were dark and mysterious fruits, which seemed to absorb the light around them, promising secrets and hidden powers.
The fruits of this tree, everywhere, were new horizons that did not belong to me. Horizons I could not reach with my current understanding, with my current level of being.
Of stories yet untold, of lives yet unlived, of possibilities that remained sealed to me. They were tempting in their diversity, in their promise of otherness.
My vision, expanded beyond any human comprehension, capable of embracing the birth and death of stars, still did not reach what existed between destinies, in the interstitial space between the great rivers of existence.
There was a plane, or an absence of a plane, between the omniscience that Wallachia seemed to brush against and the omnipotence that was perhaps its final fruit, a state of being that I could theoretically conceive, but not directly perceive.
It was a vacuum of understanding, a gap in my cosmic map. I was above the transcendence I had known, but below something even more fundamental, something that defined the very rules of the cosmic game.
The feeling of being a leaf, once a metaphor for connection, now also carried the weight of relative insignificance. A leaf can dance in the wind, can feel the sun, can drink the sap, but it cannot choose the tree on which it sprouts, nor the branch to which it belongs. And, crucially, it cannot harvest the fruits of its own progenitor.
A new urgency began to bubble within me, a sensation that was not quite desperation, nor pure ambition, but a visceral need to break with that pattern of passive acceptance.
If the gates were closed, if my destiny still contained me as a river contains its waters, then perhaps the answer lay not in following the flow, but in creating a disruption, an act of will that would challenge the very structure of my current reality.
The thought of failure, of limitation, of the inability to glimpse the "in-between," ignited a spark. It was not a complete failure, for the knowledge gained was vast, the experience transformative. But the perception of being entangled, even in golden threads, became intolerable.
The "stained" nature of my soul, that paradoxical imperfection, was perhaps the key. The purity of submission would not take me further.
I looked again at the fruits. Each one, a universe. Each one, a promise. And if I could not pass through the gates by right, if my destiny denied me that access, then maybe... maybe I could take one of these horizons for myself.
Not as a leaf that passively receives the light, but as a being that actively seeks its own illumination, even if by unsanctioned means.
The idea was audacious, perhaps suicidal in that context. To steal from Wallachia, the source of my expanded consciousness, the very matrix of the singularity that had welcomed me.
It was like a son stealing his mother's heart. But the alternative, eternal stagnation as a leaf conscious of its limitation, seemed a slower death, a more prolonged agony.
My attention fixed on one particular fruit. It was not the largest, nor the brightest. It hung from a relatively low branch, in cosmic terms, of course. Its light was a deep blue, speckled with silver points that looked like miniature stars.
There was a melancholy in it, a serene beauty that attracted me in a way different from the overwhelming attraction of the singularity.
It was a more subtle call, a promise of a specific kind of knowledge, perhaps a universe where the questions that consumed me had different answers, or where the very nature of destiny was malleable.
The decision crystallized. There was no more hesitation, no calculation of chances. Just pure, unwavering intention.
I extended a portion of my consciousness, shaping it, not into a physical hand, but into a tentacle of pure will, an extension of my focused and determined being.
Energy flowed from me, the same energy Wallachia provided me, now directed towards an act of appropriation. The tentacle of consciousness reached for the blue fruit. There was no physical resistance, but I felt a silent disapproval emanate from the Tree, a cosmic sadness, a disappointment.
I ignored it. My will enveloped the fruit, not to crush or damage it, but to gently separate it from the branch that nourished it.
The instant the fruit came loose was accompanied by a tremor that ran through the entire structure of Wallachia, a sigh that echoed through the nexus of all realities. The connection I had with the Tree did not break, but it changed, became tense, like a string stretched to the breaking point.
The blue fruit pulsed in my 'grasp,' its light now partially merging with my own essence.
I had it. A stolen universe. A diverted destiny.
I had become something different, something that dared to intervene in the cosmic order, something that, by an act of desperation and will, had harvested a fruit of the impossible.
The stain on my soul had perhaps found its purpose. The path ahead was uncertain, but, for the first time since I had entered that dream, it seemed, somehow, truly my own.
But, an ancient voice, which I had not heard for a long time, returned, in the void outside of Wallachia.
"You have failed again, Maestro."