1
I
received the package early Monday morning, just after dawn, when the air still
shimmered with half-formed dreams. It was roughly the size of a large book,
dense and oddly warm to the touch, as if it had been held for a long time.
Inside, I found three items: a folded letter written in a delicate hand, a
faded photograph that stirred something forgotten, and an old coin that seemed
impossibly ancient—marked with a face I almost recognized.
*
It was a short letter, written in small, unadorned
handwriting, the kind that seemed to belong to someone used to silence. Only a
few lines, yet each word carried a kind of hesitant intimacy, as if the writer
were whispering across a vast gulf of time:
“Here I am with your mother. We just shared a small meal, something simple.
We've been talking—of course we’ve been talking—about our friendship, the long
road behind us, the days that have dissolved into memory. There’s still so much
left unsaid. So much we never found the words for. I miss many things. Too many.
I don’t even know how to explain them anymore. I don’t even know how to begin.”
The ink trembled slightly on the page.
*
The photograph shows two travelers standing side by side on a rocky
outcrop overlooking a small, silent bay. Both are dressed for cold weather,
wrapped in thick, worn jackets that seem to have known years of travel. The man
on the left has a long, wild beard and wears dark sunglasses that obscure his
eyes entirely; his left hand rests gently on the shoulder of the man beside
him, in a gesture both protective and familiar. The other man is clean-shaven,
with the fragile look of someone who carries songs instead of weapons—his
guitar slung in a soft black case, a wide-brimmed hat tilted over his brow, a
patterned scarf trailing down his chest like a ceremonial sash.
Behind them the water
lies still and gray, reflecting a sky swollen with clouds. Across the bay stand
white buildings, two stories high, window shutters painted the faded blue of
old dreams. No faces peer out. It’s as if the world paused for their portrait.
*
The coin looked ancient—its surface worn smooth in
places, nicked and darkened by age, as if it had passed through countless hands
in forgotten cities. On one side, a man’s face stared out, solemn beneath a
helmet crowned with great curving horns. His gaze was direct, almost
accusatory, as though he recognized me. Or perhaps it was the other way around.
There was something disturbingly familiar in the cast of his features.
*
On Tuesday, I visited the Shaman—a local man surrounded
by whispers, said to possess dominion over the weather, over animals, and over
the secret hungers of the human heart. They say he can call down lightning with
a flick of his fingers, stir winds from stillness, bring rain to parched roofs
with a breath. Insects, they claim, move according to his gestures, as if
following a silent rhythm only he can conduct. But most often, people seek him
for matters of love—for aching hearts, for desperate loneliness, for the
longing that keeps a person awake at night. He is known to find perfect matches
where none seemed possible, to bring together those who thought they were lost
forever. That is the main source of his fame and quiet fortune. There is always
someone in need of such help. Always someone who believes the old man still
communes with forces beyond the visible world.
*
I
knocked on the old wooden door, its paint chipped and softened by years of rain
and sun. An elderly woman answered almost immediately, as if she had been
standing just behind it, waiting. Her eyes met mine with a calm recognition
that unsettled me. She said nothing at first, only nodded and motioned for me
to enter, as if I were a guest returning after a long absence.
Inside, the house was low and narrow, a single-story structure that smelled
faintly of incense and something older—perhaps dried herbs or woodsmoke. The
living room was modest, but every object seemed deliberate. A long wooden table
dominated the space, its surface cluttered with curious items: an egg-shaped
candle half-melted into its saucer, a ceramic house painted a childish pink, a
squat beige lamp casting a muted light. The floor was covered by a light blue
rug stitched with delicate geometric patterns that hinted at forgotten
meanings.
At the far end, a smaller table held a spinning globe paused mid-revolution, a
glass lamp without a bulb, and a polished silver platter that reflected
nothing. A bouquet of dry flowers rested on the floor beneath it.
On the wall behind the main table hung four framed photographs—yellowed and
fading, spectral faces staring through time. Ancestors, perhaps. Or witnesses.
*
The
Shaman entered without ceremony. He walked slowly, deliberately, as though he
existed in a slightly different time stream than the rest of us. His face was a
map of long experience: deep wrinkles etched across his brow and cheeks,
sun-scars scattered like faded glyphs across thick, weathered skin. He took his
seat behind the long wooden table without greeting, without pretense. His eyes,
though shadowed, held a peculiar clarity.
He gestured for me to speak, and I did. I told him about the package. I laid
out its contents—the letter, the photograph, the coin—and pushed them gently
toward him. He touched each item with the tips of his fingers, not handling
them so much as listening to them, his fingertips acting as ears, or antennae.
Then he closed his eyes and sat still, breathing slowly. The silence between us
lengthened, turned dense. I found myself staring at the four faded photographs
behind him, the barely visible faces of long-gone ancestors. They seemed to be
watching too, their patience stretching into eternity.
When the Shaman finally spoke, his voice emerged like smoke, low and
deliberate, thick with meaning yet elusive in substance. I leaned forward
instinctively, as if proximity might bring understanding. His eyes were still
closed.
“If you want my help,” he said, “you must understand—what I give will not feel
like help. You may not even recognize it. In fact, it may look like the
opposite.”
He paused.
“What I offer is a
pattern, not a solution. A pathway littered with refuse and revelation. You
will receive at least one lie—mark this well, for it is crucial. A tape filled
with static and fractured voices. A memento from someone you have never met. A
photo from a party you no longer remember attending. A song about a boy who has
lost his way and wandered out of time. There will be broken promises. A single
scratch on your index finger, like a wound from an invisible thorn. A brief
journey to the center of the world, though you may not recognize it as such.
And, perhaps, if you’re lucky or damned—one moment of true awakening,
flickering like a candle, in the endless twilight of your habitual life.”
*
“All ancient images have a dual characteristic,” the
Shaman continued, his voice now less human than elemental—wind passing through
old reeds. “They have been seen before and will be seen again. Their power lies
not in their novelty but in their recurrence. Their echo. Their refusal to
disappear. What you see has already been seen a thousand times, by a thousand
forgotten eyes. What you will see has already been dreamt. And still, they are
waiting to be used again, to be awakened, called back from the gray, dreamless
fog where they have been sleeping. Waiting for someone—perhaps you—to remember
them.”
As he spoke, something shifted in the air, as if a veil had been pulled aside.
He tilted his head forward slightly, and in the center of his forehead I saw
it: a window, shaped like an inverted triangle made of burning light. It was
not a symbol or a metaphor. It was an actual opening, and through it I saw.
A room emerged. A mural of saturated blue and deep, blood-red hues stretched
behind a man seated on a plain dark wooden chair. He held a guitar like a
relic, cradled it the way one might hold an injured bird. His black hair was
slicked back, his thin goatee perfectly shaped. He wore a dark shirt rolled to
the elbows, a watch on his left wrist. His eyes were half-lidded in
concentration or pain. His fingers moved with grace—the right hand picking, the
left pressing chords into the neck of the instrument. The wood of the guitar
was old, scuffed in places, polished in others by years of play.
I found myself leaning closer into the triangle of fire.
“Who is he?” I asked.
The Shaman answered softly, almost reverently: “He is the fallen angel. The one
who defied the will of the One in the days before days, when humans were
briefly raised above the angels, when the order of things was still undecided.
He said no. He refused. He challenged his creator. And in doing so, he chose
solitude. He became the exile.”
I swallowed hard. “What is he singing?”
“Listen,” the Shaman whispered. “Listen closely.”
I closed my eyes and tried to absorb the melody, the words. Tried to hold them
in my mind. But they drifted, slippery as smoke. I focused harder, feeling
something shift inside me.
*
After what felt like an eternity of straining to hear,
of chasing fragments that dissolved as soon as they formed, something shifted.
A hush descended inside me. And then, like a whisper threading its way through
the marrow of my bones, I heard the song:
I love that song that rises raw
from the furnace of emotion,
from the cave of trembling hearts
where pain and wonder echo.
I love that song that tangles in the
mind,
like roots beneath forgotten soil,
twisting through the memory-web,
dripping with the sap of thought.
I love that song that walks the body,
through sinew, tendon, bone and breath,
a rhythm carved in muscle’s ache,
a dance of cells remembering death.
I love that song that doesn’t wait,
that springs from heat beneath the skin,
pure lust given accidental shape,
a hunger with no origin.
I love that song that won't be caught,
that slips away when I draw near—
a melody I never wrote,
yet somehow always hear.
I love that song that makes me ache,
not from sadness, not from joy,
but from the holy ache of longing
that no silence can destroy.
When
it ended, if it ended at all, I realized I hadn’t moved, hadn’t breathed. It
had passed through me like a ghost with no name. A song not meant to be sung,
only suffered. Or perhaps, only remembered.
*
I am the Beginning of the end,
the whisper before the first word,
the breath drawn in before the cry.
I rise at the apex of Infinity,
where time coils inward like a serpent,
and fall into the nameless stream
that knows no shape, no law, no name.
I carry endings in my bones,
yet I do not stop, I do not yield.
I move beyond the edge of form,
Endlessness clothed in fleeting skin.
I
am the song that eats itself,
the fire that remembers ice.
I am the limit of the limitless.
*
I listened to that strange song, its rhythm like the
pulse of an invisible wound, and I wasn’t sure whether I was truly hearing it
or simply inventing it out of the empty spaces between thoughts. The words
slipped away even as they arrived, like echoes of a forgotten language. At
times I believed it was real, at other times I suspected I was only mouthing
fragments from dreams I had once half-remembered. Maybe I was only singing to
myself, whispering nonsense with the conviction of revelation, alone in the
vast theater of my own illusions.
*
The Shaman remained still on the other side of the
table for what felt like an entire season compressed into a few minutes. He
hadn’t moved since the vision faded, since the song ended—if it ended. Then,
with the slow deliberation of someone who has lived through many versions of
this moment, he leaned back in his wooden chair, its frame creaking under the
shift of his weight. He stood, his joints moving like old machinery, and began
to walk toward me, not with menace but with gravity, like a priest approaching
an altar.
When
he spoke, it was barely above a whisper, yet it filled the room with a density
that made my skin tighten.
“Be
careful now,” he said. “We are about to feed something—something ancient and
hungry. You and I together. This meeting, though it may seem small and
accidental, is not. Through it, different worlds are brushing against each
other. They are bleeding into one another. The seams are loosening. You may not
understand what this means yet, but inside that overlap is the answer you’ve
been chasing. Though it remains hidden.”
He
lifted one hand and gently pressed two fingers to the center of my forehead.
The touch was cool and firm, and it lingered longer than expected.
“You
must find him,” he said, voice low. “The man you saw inside my mind—the fallen
angel. Seek him. He carries part of your answer. But I cannot promise you will
like what you find. Or even recognize it.”
*
I
heard a kind of ominous silence—not the silence of peace or pause, but
something heavier, waiting just beyond the reach of language. We were only two
men in a living room, in a modest house with low ceilings and uneven lighting.
That’s all. But it felt like the center of something vast, some intersection
where meaning accumulated like sediment, layer after invisible layer.
Beneath
our feet was an antique rug, worn thin in some spots, its intricate patterns
fading—gray wool bordered with faded bands of tan, rust red, and black. The
edges curled slightly at the corners, like a map trying to conceal its secrets.
I
let my eyes wander. On the shelves that lined the walls, I saw a series of
objects that felt like echoes from someone else's dream: a tan globe with its
oceans dulled to a pale greenish gray; a white plastic lamp in the shape of a
mushroom, humming faintly as if still warm from another time; a small, clear
crystal ball that caught a dull glint of light and offered it back reluctantly;
a deep blue porcelain egg, smooth and perfect; and a scattered assortment of
candles, some burned halfway down, others untouched, as if awaiting the right
invocation.
Above
the bookshelf were three framed photographs. Landscapes, yes, but not ordinary
ones. They shimmered faintly with a kind of reverence, as if they contained
something more than grass and sky. In one of them, I saw two figures—walking. A
young man and an older one, side by side, not in confrontation but in mutual
solitude. The younger man wore a gray long-sleeved shirt tucked into charcoal
trousers, his polished black shoes sunk slightly into the earth. The older man
wore white slacks and a patterned shirt the color of ash and dusk; he held a
white rolled-up paper like a scroll or decree.
The
younger man glanced over his shoulder at the older one, as though trying to
memorize something—his walk, his presence, his silence. Behind them rose a
sandy-colored temple at the foot of a low hill, part ruin, part myth. White
clouds floated like chalk dust across a bleached sky.
“Who
are they?” I asked.
The
Shaman looked at the photograph, then at me, and his eyes held something
between tenderness and disbelief.
“Don’t
you recognize him? You saw him only moments ago. He’s younger here, yes. But
unchanged. People once called him the Horned One. Then they forgot what that
meant.”
I
leaned in closer. The image blurred, then reformed. I could almost feel the
heat of that dry plain, the dust on their shoes, the hush around the temple.
“Think
how he would wish,” the Shaman said softly, “that we could know today how truly
nothing but our sadness can ever pass away.”
He
smiled then, gently, and the lines on his face gathered like birds returning to
a familiar tree.
“Think
of him as living. Always present. Just around the corner. For nothing loved is
ever lost. And he has loved so much…”
I
closed my eyes. And memory, like smoke, rose to meet me.
*
One afternoon—though I couldn’t tell you when, or even
how many years ago it might have been—my mother and I visited a strange little
house perched precariously on the edge of a cliff that looked out over the sea.
I remember the waves crashing below, their rhythm ancient and indifferent, and
the wind curling around the rocks with a kind of whispering voice, as if it
were speaking in a language only old stones could understand.
Two
women met us before we even reached the front door. They seemed to emerge from
the sea air itself, stepping forward with a grace that felt rehearsed,
ceremonial. Both were striking—tall and poised, with long, flowing black hair
and warm brown skin that gleamed in the sunlight. They smiled as though they
had been expecting us, though I could not recall how we came to know them, nor
even why we were there. Still, their presence stirred something old and soft
inside me, like the scent of a childhood room long emptied.
They
welcomed us silently and led us into the house. Once inside, the air changed.
Sound thinned. Time bent. A strange quiet descended, thick and still, like the
lull before a storm or the moment before waking from a powerful dream. The
women left us in what I can only describe as a waiting room, though it had no
clocks, no furniture apart from two cushioned seats, and no signs of any
purpose at all. It was a room that seemed to exist only to hold time.
My
mother and I sat in silence. I could feel her presence beside me—calm,
inscrutable. After a long while, she spoke, her voice barely more than a
breath:
“Have you noticed the dolls?”
I
looked up and around for the first time with true awareness. And I saw them. The
walls were covered with dolls—hundreds, maybe thousands of them—lined in neat
rows, perched on shelves, hung from hooks, even suspended from the ceiling.
There were African dolls carved from dark wood, tribal masks with glass eyes,
stick figures bound in straw and cloth, dolls that looked handmade, stitched
from scraps and buttons. There were also delicate porcelain dolls with wide,
unblinking eyes and painted mouths, their expressions frozen somewhere between
surprise and accusation.
As
I studied them, a certainty bloomed in me: the two women who had greeted us
were not women at all. They were dolls—dolls I had once played with, or at
least seen in some half-remembered room of my childhood. Somehow, impossibly,
they had stepped into flesh. And they had remembered me. That’s how they knew
who I was.
My
mother stood and walked over to a shelf. She reached out and picked up a small
doll—plastic, pretty, with long synthetic hair and a bright pink dress. She
cradled it for a moment, gazing down at its smiling face. I didn’t ask why she
did it. I didn’t need to.
We
stepped outside into the wind. The sea below us was vast, slate-gray and
flickering with light. Without a word, my mother raised her arm and threw the
doll from the edge of the cliff. It spun through the air, a blur of pink and
gold, before disappearing into the black water far below.
“Never to be seen again,” she whispered.
The
moment cracked.
A
massive figure appeared—an ugly, fearsome man with a grotesque face twisted in
fury. He burst from behind the house like a storm given form. His body seemed
too large for the world around him. He grunted and snarled, his breath
steaming, his eyes wild with rage. He rushed toward us. I froze. I couldn’t
move. I felt the nearness of death, close as a hand on the back of my neck.
Then,
just as he reached us, an old woman emerged from the doorway and called to him.
Her voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the wind like a bell. And just like
that, he stopped, turned obediently, and walked back into the house with the
clumsy grace of a trained beast.
We
said nothing.
We
never spoke of that day again.
*
“Who was that?” I asked. “The angry man... where did
he come from?”
The
Shaman didn’t answer immediately. He seemed to weigh the question in the air,
as though turning it over slowly in his mouth before allowing it to take shape.
When he finally spoke, his voice was calm, almost serene, yet charged with
something I couldn’t name—like a distant vibration running beneath his words.
“In
higher planes,” he said slowly, “we may sometimes meet strangers—beings we
cannot quite understand. Subtle devils. Entities we could never face in the
ordinary world, not without unraveling.”
He
paused, letting the silence fill with implication.
“They
are not evil as we have been taught to understand evil. They are complex,
radiant, terrifying. Creatures of beauty and presence. They may appear
monstrous, yes—furious, grotesque, overwhelming—but you must not be deceived by
appearances. They are messengers. They are thresholds. You may learn to
approach them, eventually. You may even find guidance in them.”
His
eyes met mine.
“But
you must be cautious. Always show respect. And never come empty-handed. Bring a
gift, even if it’s only a word, a memory, a truth. Then they will recognize
you. Then they will let you pass.”
2
“Head
east,” the Shaman had instructed, his voice low, as if reciting from a
forgotten scripture. “Then turn right. And again, turn right. You’ll find the
highway—take it without hesitation. You’ll cross a great bridge, long and pale,
suspended above dark water. Stay on the highway until the mountains rise in the
distance like sleeping gods. When they appear, leave the road. Watch carefully
for a fork—an old one, worn by time and use. There, hidden in plain sight, you
will find the station. That’s where your next path begins.”
*
I found the station without difficulty—it stood
exactly where the Shaman had said it would be, as if it had always been waiting
for me, hidden in the folds of the landscape until the moment I was ready to
see it. The building was small, half-forgotten, with peeling paint and a faint
scent of old wood and iron. Inside, I purchased a ticket from a silent man with
a long, expressionless face. He sat behind a clouded pane of glass, framed by
rusting metal bars that gave the whole place the air of a border crossing.
I
waited for hours. No announcements, no signs. Then, without warning, the train
arrived. It was the only train, and I boarded it without hesitation. As it
climbed into the highlands, I watched the mountains rise and dissolve through
the mist. Places I’d only seen in faded photographs now revealed themselves
with quiet solemnity, undeniable and real.
*
“Oh Lord,” I whispered inwardly, my hands folded in my
lap, my gaze fixed on the shifting light outside the train window. “You have
already given me so much. You gave me the Shaman’s words, wrapped in riddles
but burning with truth. You opened the path before me, lined it with signs. You
made promises I still don’t understand, and yet I live now within the bounty of
those promises, like a child in a garden he did not plant. I have no right to
ask for more.”
The
train slowed with a soft mechanical sigh, stopping at a small, nameless station
nestled high on the slope of the mountain. Outside the window, I saw a man
seated casually in the sun, arms draped over the sides of a white plastic
chair. His dark hair merged almost perfectly with the craggy black rocks behind
him, as if he were part of the landscape itself.
“You
gave me the instructions,” I continued, still praying. “And you gave him the horns. With those, he would
overcome all resistance. With those, he would walk through kingdoms as if
through shadows.”
The
man didn’t move, but something about the way he sat—the loose confidence, the
quiet stillness—sent a tremor through me. I noticed the design on his t-shirt:
black and white, sun-faded, the image unclear. But even its vagueness stirred
recognition.
It
could be him, I thought. It might as well be him.
“I
will magnify the gifts you’ve given me,” I vowed. “I will not let them rot in
forgetfulness. I will carry them forward, for as long as breath remains in me.”
Above
him, green vines hung like garlands. Dew clung to their leaves. Then the train
moved, and its shadow passed over the station’s pale yellow walls like a
blessing, or a warning.
*
A long time ago—so long that it no longer matters what
calendar you use to measure it—there was a city known only to the initiated as
the City of the Horned One. It stood at the confluence of winds and symbols,
built of dust, memory, and the sacred geometry of forgotten civilizations. It
was in that city, amid its twilight alleys and weather-worn towers, that a
series of tales was gathered. Tales not born there, but ones that had wandered
through many worlds before arriving—tattered, shifting, half-remembered.
Some
say these stories were first whispered in the land of the golden monkeys, where
the trees spoke in riddles and even the birds sang in code. Others claim they
were sung around fires in both the high deserts and the low, reshaped and
re-chanted a thousand times and then a thousand times more. With each telling,
names were changed—scrambled, merged, forgotten. Details were lost like flakes
of gold in rushing water. Meanings fractured and reassembled. But the tales
endured.
Eventually,
they were written down. First in fragments. Then in scrolls. Then as
illuminated manuscripts in languages that no one speaks anymore except in
dreams. Finally, they were translated—first into Latin by a priest who later
went mad, and then into English by a scholar who disappeared shortly after
publication. The translations became three separate volumes, each dark with
layered significance. Together, they came to be known as The Black Book of the Night.
(The
night in question was not a mere absence of sunlight, but the night—the one that stands forever just past the edge of time.
The one night that cannot be reached, no matter how many days we march toward
it.)
On
the cover of the first English edition, a young man stands alone on a stone
stairwell, his body turned away but his face glancing sharply over his right
shoulder. A pale half-moon hovers behind his head like a halo. He wears chain
mail, dull gray and unadorned, and a thick leather belt cinches his waist. His
features are stark—angular, ancient—thick eyebrows, a square jaw, and a gaze
that feels both prophetic and wounded. Upon his head, a massive helmet with
curving metal horns—symbols of division and union, strength and sacrifice.
In
the first volume, he is rendered as a conqueror—one who brings fire and
scripture, sword and sermon. In the second, he is a philosopher king, troubled
by dreams, weighed down by knowledge. In the third, he becomes a prophet,
wandering silently through a landscape of ruins, recognized only by orphans and
madmen.
Originally,
there were frequent references to a naked goddess who walked beside him. She
was said to be his sister, and also his consort—his adviser, his mirror, his
Muse. She gave him visions. She gave him madness.
Later,
the church scholars grew uneasy. Incestuous devotion was recast as metaphor,
then removed entirely. Where she could not be erased, she was renamed: a wife,
a witch, a stranger in the night.
In
time, the Horned One lost his horns. And then his name. And finally his body.
He disappeared into the deep sea of myth, where he now lies beside her—his
muse, his mirror—in the endless ocean of oblivion.
*
I drifted in and out of sleep as the train groaned its
way up and down the skeletal spine of the mountains, each curve of the track
accompanied by the tortured scream of steel against steel and the long,
mournful exhalation of the horn. It was a dirge disguised as motion, and
somewhere within that metallic lullaby, dreams took hold of me like old friends
returning in masks.
In
one of these dreams, I found myself in a dimly lit room—windowless, silent
except for the faint hum of electricity in the walls. Two men stood side by
side, as if posing for a photograph that would never be taken.
The
man on the left wore a black leather jacket that reflected the dim light like
oil on water. Beneath it, a crisp white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar. In his
right hand, he held a silver object—perhaps a camera, perhaps a watch, or
perhaps something else entirely. His skin was the color of warm sand, damp with
sweat. A sparse goatee framed his uneasy smile, a look halfway between
recognition and reluctance.
The
man on the right was more composed. His white shirt was perfectly pressed, and
he wore a patterned tie of muted blues and grays. Thin glasses rested on the
bridge of his nose, and his thick black beard ascended gently into a receding
hairline. His expression was unreadable.
Behind
them loomed a wall adorned with their sacred emblem: the peacock—radiant and
unnatural, the fearsome angel of the caves. Watching. Waiting.
*
When I awoke, I told myself it was just a projection—a
simple echo of recent memories, distorted by sleep and transformed into dream.
That explanation offered a kind of safety, a thin but comforting veil. It
allowed me to return, at least momentarily, to the idea of order.
There
is always, I believe, an underlying imaginary normal state. A baseline. A
symbolic architecture that stretches endlessly—into the past where memory
dissolves, and into the future where meaning hasn’t yet solidified. This
imagined normality is our anchor, even when the ground is shifting beneath us.
Always
and forever, there is this illusion of continuity. This myth of the unbroken
self.
But
beneath that thin illusion, he is always there. Whether named or not, he
watches from the threshold. And I am always with him—entangled in the same
spiral, companions through some long-forgotten agreement made before language,
before time.
*
Still aboard the train, somewhere between mountain
shadows and the dissolving outlines of forgotten towns, I slipped again into a
dream—or perhaps into something older than dreaming. In that liminal space, an
angel appeared above me, suspended in the air like a flame held perfectly
still. She was wrapped in a halo of unbearable light, radiating warmth and
distance in equal measure. Her presence was both terrifying and tender, like
the moment before revelation.
She
spoke in a voice that was unmistakably feminine—soft, melodic, yet carrying the
gravity of storms:
“I did not curse you by the name the
world gave you,
nor by the name your works have worn
like tattered robes.
You came to me, not with perfection, but
with longing.
And for that, I praised you.”
Then
her voice spread wider, as though echoing from every horizon:
“From east to west, from north to south—
from crowded cities to lands no map has
drawn—
the whole earth has been handed to you
like an unfinished story.
What you shape from it, what you carry
forward, what you burn or bless—
that choice is yours alone.”
And
then, I woke.
*
It was
early morning—cool, damp, and eerily quiet—when the train finally pulled into a
forgotten station at the very edge of the old city by the bay. The place felt
ancient, not in the sense of preserved history, but in the way neglected spaces
become heavy with their own silence. The platform was dimly lit by scattered
yellow bulbs that flickered inconsistently, casting long, hesitant shadows
across cracked tiles.
I
stepped off the train and immediately felt the change. The air here was
different—thicker, infused with salt, rust, and the residue of too many
departures. Above me, a rusted metal sign pointed toward a covered walkway that
led to the terminal. I followed it slowly, almost reluctantly, as if each step
pulled me further away from the world I’d known.
Shadows
danced along the walls, shaped by unseen movements. It felt like I was being
watched, not with menace but with the quiet curiosity of old ghosts.
Ahead,
beyond a set of smudged glass double doors, I could make out a few pools of
light, distant but inviting. And then, as I moved forward, something stirred
within me.
It’s him, I thought.
The one from the dream. The one who
spoke in riddles and hunger.
The fallen angel. The one whose desire
burned across aeons.
His body might be elsewhere, dispersed like smoke across lifetimes, but I felt
the strange certainty that his mind had nested inside me.
To
my right, sprayed across a rough concrete wall in luminous white paint, I saw a
phrase that looked both freshly written and ancient:
“that’s just how it is… some things will
never change.”
I
stopped. Read it twice. Then kept walking.
*
As I
passed through the glass doors and stepped into the dim half-light of the
street, a strange clarity descended upon me, like mist rolling back to reveal a
long-buried ruin. I realized—no, I remembered—that
the dry summers of my youth, the lifeless skies and cracked soil, the long
afternoons soaked in stillness and thirst, had all been symptoms of his
absence.
He
had descended during that time—withdrawn into the underworld beneath the city,
into tunnels where even the oldest maps failed. He had wandered through the
hidden chambers below our lives, where dust gathers in sacred spirals and
voices echo from walls that remember too much. The places of exile. The cold
corridors where even memory forgets itself.
And
I—though I hadn’t known it—had spent most of my life waiting. Watching shadows
for signs. Listening to static for patterns. Hoping for a return I couldn’t
name. The silence between us had never been empty; it had been filled with
preparation.
Now,
standing on the cracked pavement of that ghost-lit station, the sense grew
stronger: the air was shifting. The veil had thinned.
Maybe—just
maybe—the waiting was over.
Maybe the future had returned, bearing his face.
*
He was once known simply as the Horned One.
In
the pages of the Black Book, among
torn leaves and cryptic diagrams, there is a short but potent passage that has
echoed through centuries of whispered study. It reads:
“The sacred union consists of the
recombining of pure, separated substances into a new substance, a new form of
life. This process follows a clear and deliberate separation—a sundering—that
grants him mastery over the most essential elements of matter. With this power,
he shall become the secret key of the world. And in his hand, the dark mirror
shall shine forth, made visible by the presence of his flaming sword.”
The
words are not metaphor. They are blueprint, invocation, prophecy.
It
is said that through the sheer force of his relentless will—his refusal to
dissolve, his insistence on being—consciousness itself was made manifest. That he was the first light cast upon the
void. That he is still casting it. That he will
cast it again.
Will come forth. Has come forth. Comes
forth eternally.
The
grammar of prophecy never rests in one tense.
I
remember hearing those very words once—not in a book, but on an old recording I
found in a box of forgotten tapes. The voice on it was warped by time,
interrupted by static, as if the transmission had passed through layers of
interference: laughter, wind, bursts of white noise like distant storms. But
beneath the distortion, the voice was calm. Reverent. It spoke not as though it
were telling a story, but as though it were naming something that was still
unfolding.
And
I remember leaning close to the speaker, heart pounding, knowing somehow that I
was not just listening—but remembering.
*
How could I continue to deny these words, these
symbols, these impossibilities clothed in ritual language—when I had already
stood in the presence of forces that moved exactly as those mythical substances
were said to move? I had seen them shift the air, bend time, carve meaning into
silence.
These
were not metaphors. These were beings—not
imagined, not allegorical, but real in the way storms are real. They were alive
with intent, with a strange and luminous intelligence. They carried out their
own purposes, which I could barely comprehend, but could no longer doubt.
So
what point was there in skepticism now? What did I gain by clinging to the
brittle armor of disbelief?
They
were magical, yes—but only in the sense that life itself is magical when seen
without filters.
They
had emerged from a conscious, living universe.
And in that light, I began to see them.
And in that light, I began to see us.
*
Through
infinite grace—beyond all systems of reward or punishment, beyond reproach,
beyond even the logic of justice—the one who once fell has been pardoned. Not
by decree, but by something older than law: the silent absolution of the
universe itself. He will walk among us again, not as a god, not as a myth, but
as a man. Ordinary. Mortal. A brother among strangers.
And
it is my task—my burden and my longing—to find him. To cross the distance
between us, whether measured in miles or lifetimes. To stand before him and
remember what we once were.
*
I am trying, foolishly perhaps, to cross the same
river twice—to return to a place that may no longer exist, or never existed in
the way I remember. I listen for clues in the everyday chaos: the metallic
rattle of trains, the murmuring of overheard conversations, the uneven rhythm
of traffic lights blinking through fog. City noise becomes a language of signs.
Out in the countryside, I strain to decipher the wind in the grass, the distant
lowing of cattle, the hush between birdsong.
I
collect what I can: random images, half-finished thoughts, events that seem
both accidental and ordained. Flashes of vision that come without warning—some
sharp as blades, others soft and dissolving, fragments of a language I almost
understand.
Pure
or impure, broken or whole, these moments rise like bubbles from the bottom of
a deep well. I gather them. I follow them. They might lead me back to him.
*
I stood in
the dim, echoing lobby of the old train station, surrounded by the stale scent
of dust, rust, and rain long past. It was the dead middle of the night, that
strange hour when the world feels hollowed out and everything glows faintly
with unreality. Outside the glass doors, I saw taxis idling at the curb, their
drivers half-asleep behind the wheel. A few cars drifted lazily along the main
street beyond, their headlights cutting across the wet pavement like brief,
aimless thoughts.
Under
a flickering lamp post stood a tall man in a long overcoat, motionless, his
face obscured by the brim of his hat. Above him, in the distance, a
second-floor window burned with soft yellow light—someone still awake, or maybe
just a forgotten lamp left on through the night.
I
tilted my head back and saw the banner.
It
stretched across the high wall like a relic of a vanished world. In it, a young
woman and a young man stood at the edge of a beach, frozen in an artificial
summer. She was on his right, smiling with the full confidence of youth,
gripping his bicep with a playful ferocity. Her navy-blue swimsuit clung
tightly to her figure, cut in sleek curves around her waist like armor
disguised as seduction. The boy flexed his right arm dutifully, short black
athletic shorts showing off legs that would never grow old. Both had dark curly
hair, glistening under a sun that never set.
Below
them, in bold white letters:
“We refuse to be held prisoners. We
refuse to bow down to authority. We are young and free and it is impossible to
define us.”
The
image was perfect in its falseness. Behind them, stylized waves crashed along
the shore, too blue, too clean. Families frolicked in the background, water
sparkling around them, children digging through warm sand with their hands and
toes. You could almost smell the sweat and sunscreen, the salty tang of the
breeze, the sugary buzz of soda and heat. The kind of world that never existed
except in memory and marketing.
And
yet, for a moment, I wanted to believe it. I wanted to walk into that sunlit
lie and never return.
*
Later that night, sleep took me like a wave, and in
the dark sea of dream I saw her—the girl I had left behind. Once, she had meant
everything to me. Her presence had been a flame I revolved around without
question, without fear. Now she was little more than a blur at the edge of
memory, a shape I wasn’t sure I could still name.
In
the dream, she had become the girl from the poster. She wore the same navy-blue
swimsuit, her hair slicked back, her body glowing in the impossible sunlight.
But she wasn’t posing. She was alive, laughing as she ran barefoot across a
jungle path, ducking between vines and branches, her limbs agile with
childhood. We were back in the place we had all come from—a wild, humid
paradise of dust, sweat, green shadows, and watchful eyes.
And
the boy was there too. I knew him immediately. Not by his posture or his
clothes, but by the strange gravity he carried, even in dreams. It was him. But
younger. Fresher. Before the exile. Before the name. His eyes held none of the
weight I had come to associate with him. He hadn’t remembered yet. Not
everything. Not yet.
3
The station was plain in the way forgotten places
often are—white walls dulled by age, brown floors smudged with hundreds of
unrecorded stories, and glass doors so industrial in design they seemed almost
ashamed to be part of something human. There was a layer of carelessness on
every surface, as if time had passed without regard, leaving behind only faint
scuff marks and the graffiti of half-remembered rebellions. Some slogans hinted
at glories that never came. Others were private notes for people who no longer
existed—messages left in code for recipients who would never find them.
Ahead
of me stood a man, completely still, as if he were part of the architecture.
His gaze was fixed straight ahead, yet there was something alive in it, a
shadow of hesitation tucked just behind the certainty. As I looked at him, he
stepped forward once, slow and purposeful, toward the glass doors that led out
to the waking world.
It
was early Wednesday morning. The sky outside had just begun to burn with that
first pale light, and the station glowed faintly in reflection. Through the
smudged glass, I could see him more clearly: a dark grey suit, a white shirt
buttoned neatly, and a yellow-and-blue tie with a pattern like small waves or
forgotten runes. His brown eyes were open wide beneath heavy brows, alert yet
kind. A soft smile played at his lips, and the corners of his eyes wrinkled
like the folds of an old letter. A thin beard was beginning to form along his
jaw.
They
used to say his return in autumn would call down the rains—that he would bring
life back to dry places, coax the land into bloom with his mere presence.
He
took another step, and without thinking, I followed.
*
He conquered the land of black mud—rich, steaming, and
thick with the stench of life. It was a place where summer never truly ended,
where vines strangled stone and the air clung to skin like breath from the
earth itself. The swamps there pulsed with insects, fog, and ancient fertility.
The priests who presided over that wet, breathing kingdom recognized him not
merely as a conqueror, but as the long-prophesied son of the one God who stands
above all others: the God whose name is known in every tongue, even when
unspoken; the God who rules across tribes and territories, the King behind all
masks, the silent axis of the turning world.
In
those days, conquest was not violence alone—it was fusion. When two gods met,
their union was not metaphorical. It was flesh. It was hunger. Merging was
understood as a sacred erotic act, a torrent of lust and radiance and bodily
surrender. The divine did not shy from desire. It moved through it. Bodies met
with the thunder of inevitability. Fluids, cries, blood, and light. From such
unions came new forms—new gods, new ideas, new forces impossible to reverse.
And
so, through this sacred commingling, he was reborn. Not merely as a victor or
invader, but as a new entity altogether: a composite being, freshly shaped by
union, with new possibilities and new fates inscribed in his blood. He entered
myth not as one who destroyed, but as one who became—a figure destined to appear again and again in every story
that sought to understand the sacred boundary between matter and spirit.
To
conquer, then, is not to destroy, but to surrender and merge—to be transformed
by the land itself and, in return, to make it strange and new.
*
The Black Book
spoke often—though never plainly—of two primordial figures, twin forces
rendered as dolls in certain illustrations, as stars in others. One was hidden:
forged from pure spiritual gold, she emerged from the essential Fire, the
secret flame that pulses at the core of all living things. She was never fully
seen, only felt—a presence like warmth in the chest or the sudden spark of
intuition that changes everything. She was the breath of vision before
language. The one who lived in silence and yet shaped the world.
The
other was more familiar—apparent, brilliant, and dangerously clear. He was the
aether given form, the radiant sun as seen by mortal eyes. His body was made of
profane matter, and though it burned brightly in the sky, he was but a pale
echo of the deeper flame. A shadow cast by the true flower of fire, the black
rose that blooms in secret at the edge of the void.
Together,
they represented the paradox of creation: the visible born of the invisible,
the sacred concealed by the obvious. And in their dance—never quite touching,
always revolving—was hidden the secret architecture of the world.
*
He conquered the lands of magic, where reality bent at
the will of symbols, where the air was thick with rituals and every gesture
carried power. He also conquered the lands of knowledge, where logic reigned
and truth was dissected into clean, dissectible pieces. He walked through both
realms—spell and theorem, trance and text—and for a time, he held them in
balance within himself. But in the end, it wore him down. He grew weary,
fragmented. Sick with visions he could no longer interpret. Tired from carrying
contradictions that no longer resolved into meaning.
He
died in the old city of the tower, alone and confused. Not with fear, but with
a quiet estrangement—like a god who has forgotten his own name.
Yet
before his end, he accomplished something no other had dared: he brought
together the two great forces of the world—the two suns, twin engines of all
creation. One burned from above, the other from within. Their convergence was
not peaceful; it was a collision. But from that clash, something was born.
The
encounter remade him. It stripped away his human form, his human limits. By the
time his body expired, he was already gone. He was no longer one of us.
*
The ancient magicians—those obscure architects of myth
and meaning—eventually brought him into history as a god. Not merely a king,
not a prophet or poet, but a full divinity: crowned, feared, and invoked in
secret rites. Temples were named for him. Symbols etched into obsidian and
bone. And yet, while he lived, he remained unmistakably human. He slept on a
low bed with a long, heavy sword beneath one side of his pillow and the Black Book beneath the other—his body
pressed between weapon and scripture, violence and vision.
To
this day, I remain uncertain: did he learn all he knew from the Black Book? Was he a disciple of its
secrets, meticulously re-enacting its teachings with the fervor of a man trying
to make myth real? Or was it the other way around? Did he write it himself,
recording his dreams, his failures, his revelations—then hiding it among the
shadows of time?
There
is also the third possibility, more troubling still: that the book was written
long after his death, a collage of second-hand stories and misunderstood
glimpses. A text composed by strangers who never knew him, but felt haunted by
the echo of his presence.
The
distinction fades each time I try to hold it. The book, the man, the
legend—they fold into one another. Like petals on a flower blooming
simultaneously in every direction across time. Each version of the story
subdividing, fractaling, radiating outward. Forever growing, never complete.
*
Moments of intuition began to cross my path like
secret messengers—unexpected, fleeting, yet somehow unmistakable. I started to
catch them, to seize them with the same fervor I had once reserved for logic,
for carefully mapped conclusions. But logic had betrayed me. It had offered me
neat answers to the wrong questions. Somewhere along the way, I had come to
believe—deeply, stubbornly—that any investigation guided solely by intellect
would always lead to sterile ground. It would dissect meaning until nothing was
left alive.
What
revealed itself instead—what truly glimmered—came through accident, instinct,
dreams, and unreason. The most irrational gestures, the strangest detours, the
absurd coincidences—these were the ones that lit the path forward. The world
was speaking to me in symbols, not syllogisms.
Inside
the station, I passed a small newsstand and stopped without knowing why. I
grabbed a magazine at random, flipping it open to a page without looking. A
full-page advertisement stared back at me—glossy, overproduced, saturated in
bright artificial colors and unnatural contrast.
It
showed a young man arriving at a restaurant, mid-step, smirking slightly as he
leaned casually against the railing of a narrow outdoor stairwell. He wore
fleeced gray pants and a light gray button-up shirt with the sleeves cuffed.
One of the collar buttons was undone, as if in a subtle gesture of rebellion.
It
was him.
Him
again. The same face that had been appearing everywhere—on posters, in dreams,
across murals, in memories I hadn’t known were mine. The more he appeared, the
less I was able to dismiss it all as coincidence. The fabric of the world was
no longer random—it was patterned, pulsing with signs.
Each
sighting, each echo, each hidden mirror drew me further from the void of
madness and closer to something radiant: a new world, rebuilt not on reason,
but on intuition—where even the meaningless shimmered with secret purpose.
*
When I was a
teenager, I fell in love with his sister. Not the kind of love that announces
itself, not the kind that seeks validation or future promises. It was the quiet
kind, the absolute kind. To me, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever
seen—radiant not just in appearance, but in a softness that disarmed everyone
around her. She was kind in a way that seemed to come from somewhere far older
than she was. Her presence felt like a secret I could never fully understand.
One
morning, as we stood together outside their house, she told me she had heard a
song in her sleep.
“It was called Angel of the Morning,”
she said.
Her voice was light, but something behind it shimmered.
I nodded, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t know how to respond. I
couldn't find any deeper meaning in the name or the melody she hummed softly
under her breath.
It
was a warm morning. Thin clouds floated across a pale blue sky. A gentle wind
lifted her brown hair and scattered it across her face. She smiled, brushing it
aside.
People
passed by us—a vagrant swaying with sleep, a woman holding a bag of groceries,
a street vendor wheeling his cart past cracked concrete.
From
the house next door, a bolero played—a sad, nostalgic tune, thick with the ache
of lost love. The smell of warm tortillas drifted through the air, mingling
with the sounds of clinking dishes and distant laughter.
I
looked directly at her, just for a moment, and then I dropped my gaze. The
marble tiles beneath her sandals were marked with tan and gray veins, like a
map I would never learn to read.
*
A few days before the package arrived—before the
photograph, the letter, the coin—I had a strange dream about a song. It was Gloria, that feverish disco anthem from
the 1970s, echoing through a room I didn’t recognize. The lights were low, and
the bodies around me swayed in slow motion, like underwater dancers. The chorus
looped endlessly, and somehow the name—Gloria—took
on a sacred resonance, like a chant echoing through a cathedral made of sweat
and velvet.
Yesterday,
during the long train ride, the song returned. I didn’t look for it. It came on
faintly through a static-crackled radio at the station, someone humming along
nearby. Before I knew it, I was humming too. Something stirred. A veil lifted.
And suddenly, a long-buried pattern snapped into focus.
There
had been a song once—an invocation, sung during a secret ceremony held in the
basement of an old building downtown, not far from my childhood home. They sang
to call him, the Horned One. They sang under the full moon. I hadn’t known any
of this then. As a child, I’d been asleep just blocks away. Had I known, I
would have been terrified. And I would have listened, rapt, from the shadows.
I
tried to remember the melody. But what came wasn’t right—it slipped away each
time I reached for it. Instead, I found myself singing Angel of the Morning. Not my voice—his. I heard him singing it.
I
remember thinking, over and over: I must
record him. I must capture that voice. We’ll play together, explore the
farthest edges of music and magic. We’ll turn this broken world into something
strange and sacred. We’ll make a film. We’ll write its soundtrack with our
lives.
And
then I saw it clearly:
The Angel of the Morning.
The Star of the Morning.
Glory to the Fallen Angel.
Glory to the Horned One.
Gloria.
*
His sister was destined to become a great woman. You
could see it even then—in her posture, in the quiet way she watched the world,
as though she had already seen its end and chosen to love it anyway. She
carried something ancient inside her, something unshaken by the noise of
ordinary life.
And
yet, she met a challenge in me. I have never been simple. I resist what is good
for me, sabotage what I love, speak in circles when silence would be better.
Anyone who knows me would agree: I am not easy to be close to.
Still,
she did what almost no one could—no one except him. She cracked open the
foundation of my mind and let the questions pour in. She made me look twice at
everything I had built, everything I called certainty.
After
that brief, incandescent season in her presence—those days of her smooth,
unguarded loveliness—I had to stop. I had to turn inward and reckon with
myself. I began to examine the old machinery that ran me: the scripts, the
reflexes, the inherited mistakes. The dumb, avoidable choices I made again and
again. I tried to trace them back to their source. And for the first time, I
wanted to change.
*
They said he would be the world’s final conqueror—not
by sword alone, but by symbol. The one destined to claim the two horns: twin
powers of division and unity, chaos and law. With them, he would bridge the
unbridgeable—the lands of the rising sun and the lands where it dies, the
beginning and the end. His coming was foretold in fractured scrolls, in dreams
passed down through bloodlines, in the murmur of winds across ancient stone. He
would gather the broken pieces of the world and, through fire or mercy, make
them whole again. Or so the stories said.
*
United. The three of us—his sister, him, and me—we
carried something rare between us. A strange symmetry, a pulse that felt older
than our bodies. Together, we might have become something unique, something
almost mythological. Not a friendship. Not a love triangle. Something stranger.
Something sacred.
Maybe.
When
we were together, the limits dissolved. They didn’t simply vanish—they were
unspokenly revoked, as if we had crossed into a space where the old rules no
longer applied. There was a sense that the world could be reshaped by our
shared presence, that time itself curved to allow our gathering.
For
one fleeting moment, we were a dark trinity—a configuration of secret knowledge
and instinctual movement, a hidden geometry that no one else could see. That’s
how I remember it.
But
it didn’t last. It never could. Those moments were rare—delicate, almost impossible.
And then death came, not with cruelty, but with that most persistent illusion:
finality. Separation.
We
were children then, though we thought ourselves ancient. Naive explorers
pushing against the walls of reality with imagination as our only compass. When
we were together, there was strength. Not the strength of domination, but of
resonance. A stubborn, luminous will. A belief in possibility.
We
believed—honestly, wildly, without apology—that we were aligned with our
deepest desires. That we could touch something real just by reaching. That our
connection was a kind of spell.
And
for a brief time, nothing in the world could stop us.
And
nothing did. Except time.
*
Five
hundred years ago, in the city of horns—a city that no longer appears on any map,
if it ever truly did—a collection of fantastic tales was gathered and sealed
into a volume whose influence still flickers through hidden corners of the
world. These were no ordinary stories. They came with the weight of mystery,
carried across continents and generations like contraband or prophecy. Their
origin was shrouded in layers of retelling, each version wearing a different
mask.
They
were first whispered in the land of knowledge, wrapped tightly in mathematical
theorems, star charts, and magical diagrams rendered with obsessive precision.
There, they moved like clockwork—sacred gears turning within invisible
machines. But that was only their first form.
Later,
in the land of magic, the tales became something else entirely—wild,
kaleidoscopic things, clothed in riotous color and populated by a thousand
creatures: angels with broken wings, beasts with mirrored eyes, and
shadow-women who spoke in riddles. Good and evil no longer stood apart but
danced in confused embrace.
From
there, the stories migrated again—this time to the land of simple instructions.
There, they were straightened, domesticated. Bent into commandments, shaped
into arrows meant to fly true. But even here, something wild lingered in their
tips.
At
last, they were written down in the desert, where ink dried quickly under sun
and wind. The people of the black mud compiled them—not into doctrine, but into
enigma. They preserved the words, but not the meaning. What remained was a book
of floating riddles, their truths suspended in midair, defying resolution.
And
only then did they become what we now call The
Black Book of the Night—a Book of Magic Tales. Or perhaps more truthfully,
a book about magic. Because magic, by
its nature, resists capture. It is not belief. It is not faith. It is not a
creed.
Magic
is method. It is practice.
Magic
cannot be written. But sometimes, in the telling of tales, it waits. Hidden.
Listening. Ready.
*
I saw the two of us again, sitting cross-legged on the
warm pavement, playing chess outside—just kids, maybe eleven or twelve,
suspended in that strange age between innocence and something else. We sat in
front of the old school playground, where the metal slides were too hot to
touch and the swings creaked with ghostly persistence. Behind us were barred windows,
chipped with rust, and patches of uneven grass battling with dry, cracked dirt.
The air smelled faintly of chalk and sunburned plastic.
I
wore long brown pants and a white baseball shirt with a red collar. My belt was
too tight. I remember reaching for one of the white pieces, a knight maybe,
pausing as I weighed my options. It was just a game, and yet it felt like
more—a small ritual simulating lifetimes. Each move was a scene. Each
hesitation, a future delayed.
He
sat casually beside me, his right leg perched on the edge of the low concrete
wall. A tan shirt, simple and unremarkable. His short brown hair was neatly
parted, and the tops of his white socks peeked out above polished black shoes.
He studied the board with a quiet intensity.
The
game, like time, could never be repeated. Only remembered.
4
On Thursday, I arrived at what the Shaman had called
the City of Truth—a name that sounded like a warning. It was exactly as he had
described: a sprawling gray labyrinth stretching endlessly in every direction,
a city built not with logic but with contradiction, with alleys that folded
back on themselves and stairways that led to nowhere.
As
soon as I stepped across its threshold—if such a boundary could be named—I
began to see things moving through the streets that I had never seen before in
waking life. They weren’t people exactly, but they weren’t ghosts either. They
were memories in motion. Visions wrapped in flesh. Dreams that had taken shape
and wandered away from their sleeping hosts. Thoughts with limbs, eyes, and
teeth.
Everything
shimmered with the uncertainty of metaphor.
Even
my speech changed. I found myself talking in strange cadences, using words I
didn’t know I remembered, addressing people I couldn’t see, and sometimes
myself—as if I were narrating my own movement through this shifting landscape.
It wasn’t madness. It was something older. A different kind of grammar. The
language of a city that only tells the truth when no one is listening.
*
I met
an old witch in Mexico many years ago. It was during a time of wandering, when
I believed I was searching for something external, though I now know I was only
circling closer to myself. We sat together on the edge of a cliff that
overlooked the Pacific—waves crashing rhythmically far below like the pulsing
of some great animal heart.
We
talked for hours. Or maybe we didn’t talk at all. Time had a different texture
in her presence. I can still see it clearly in my mind: the rust-colored dust
on the path behind us, the sun slicing the ocean into gold and silver
fragments, the way her red hair caught the light like it was aflame. She wore a
long-sleeved blue blouse, loose and faded, which covered most of her slender
arms. She looked like she had lived many lives, and had decided to enjoy this
one slowly.
At
some point in the conversation—just when the wind shifted or the tide
turned—she made a strange, fluid gesture with her hands, as if pulling
invisible threads through the air. Suddenly, everything changed.
The
world around us began to dissolve into color. Not metaphor, not illusion—color. Pure violet poured outward from
the palm of her right hand, violet with a breath of blue inside it, and it
filled the space around us like ink spilling into water. It wasn’t light. It
was presence. A living hue. A pulse. We were no longer on a cliff. We were
inside something—something that vibrated between our minds like an electric
current, something that didn’t care about language or physics or memory.
Just
as I felt myself begin to vanish, I scratched the tip of my finger with my own
nail. A small sting. A reminder. I was still me. I was still here. Sitting on a
stone ledge with an old woman. There were no oceans of light. No clouds of
mind-fire. Only breath. Only wind.
But
when I looked back into her eyes, the violet returned, stronger than before.
And this time, I let it take me. There was no way back.
Her
voice reached me, thin and distant, as if echoing from inside the mountain
itself.
“This is a real invocation, boy,”
she said.
“It has begun. We are giving it our
energy now. It breathes with us. It grows in our breath. It surrounds us even
now…”
And
I remembered every word. Not because she said them, but because he had.
He
had spoken them to me once—long ago—while lying in his childhood bedroom, his
eyes fixed on the white ceiling, his voice calm and prophetic.
He
had called it the rising of the Fallen Angel.
And now, I knew exactly what he meant.
*
He spoke
of it again years later, back in the old city—the city of dead saints and broken
statues—on the night we shared the black weed and stayed up talking until the
sun peeled the sky open. We were in our twenties then, still convinced we were
eternal, still unaware of how time would wear us down.
We
sat on a narrow balcony bathed in sunlight, the dust swirling gently in the
breeze like particles of memory. He leaned back against the rusted railing,
half in shadow, half in light. Across the street, the docks waited in
stillness—wooden boats bobbing in place, tethered to silence.
He
wore a white crew neck shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, his skin glowing
faintly with sweat. In his left hand he held a black book, pressed tight
against his chest like a relic.
Then
he looked directly at me, eyes sharp and unflinching.
“This is what I have to say to you,” he began.
“We’ve opened it now. A direct channel.
We’re in contact with the creature of the night—the Red King. And right now,
brother, the Fallen Angel is you. That’s what I see. You’ve fallen. Holy fuck,
man. How far you’ve fallen.”
He
didn’t say it to wound me. He said it as a fact.
*
At the heart of all things, he said, there is a
fire—not bright, not golden, but dark and endlessly devouring. A fire that
shines inward, consuming not with destruction but with transformation. It is
the raw, churning core of matter itself—the vortex where form is born and
undone in the same breath.
He
called it the Dark Flame.
He called it the Black Sun.
Not
a sun that gives light, but one that reveals by burning away illusion. The
secret engine of becoming. The hunger beneath all creation. The center that
cannot be touched without being changed.
*
He was once depicted wearing a crown unlike any
other—a crown of horns, curved and immense. One horn reached toward the light,
radiant and ascendant. The other bent toward darkness, heavy with shadow.
Together, they formed a half-circle, an arc of paradox and power.
Within
that arc, they said, lay everything sacred: the hidden mountains where gods
whispered in stone, the ancient pyramids built to mirror the stars, and the
secret tower that rose beyond sight—a place where time knelt and truth took
shape.
The
horns were not decoration. They were the geometry of the world made visible.
*
The Shaman once told me that all ancient images carry
a dual nature. They are not fixed in time—they have both a past and a future,
both memory and prophecy encoded in their form. They have been used a thousand
times before and will be used a thousand times again, each time with a new
face, a new context, a new hunger.
Every
true symbol has two faces: one turned toward the light, gleaming with clarity
and hope; the other cloaked in shadow, heavy with mystery and danger.
It
is this duality that gives them power. That keeps them alive.
*
He looks to
the right, away from the camera, his gaze fixed on something just beyond the
edge of the frame. His eyes and neck are partially wrapped in long white
ribbons, delicate yet deliberate, trailing across the left shoulder of his worn
brown motorcycle jacket like ceremonial bindings.
Behind
him stands a woman—his sister. Her light brown hair falls just past her
shoulders, slightly tousled beneath a black knit hat. She wears a pink t-shirt
that clings softly to her frame, and low-rise blue jeans that expose the curve
of her hip with casual defiance.
We
both loved her. Fiercely. Silently. She belonged to neither of us, and yet
somehow, she shaped everything between us. Always just out of reach. Always
unforgettable.
*
Once, a
long time ago, I spied on them through the window of her room.
It
was late—how late, I no longer recall—but the sky was dark, and the air carried
that hushed stillness that settles just before something changes. I was drawn
there by instinct or jealousy or something older. I crouched beneath the
windowsill, half ashamed of myself, half compelled by forces I could not name.
Inside,
I saw them together.
They
sat in the tantric embrace, a posture that seemed more ancient than intimate.
Her long, pale legs were wrapped around his torso, her white robe fallen open just
enough to reveal the curve of her thighs, the hollow of her neck. His legs were
folded neatly beneath him, as though grounded in some sacred geometry. They
faced each other, their foreheads nearly touching, breathing in rhythm like one
creature made of two.
I
was flooded with desire—for her, yes, undeniably—but also with something
stranger. Envy. Reverence. A longing to understand what it was they shared in
that small, dim room.
His
voice came low and resonant, vibrating through the glass, through the stillness:
“By the decree of the One Who Waits, and
bearing his sacred rod, we appear before you—complete. The two of us as we are
meant to be. We are here to restore what was lost during your exile: your
horns. The horns that will allow the divided world to become one again.”
Their
breathing deepened, slow and tidal. I couldn’t move. His voice continued:
“Our practices require no faith. No
allegiance.”
“None at all,” she said, her voice like the end of a spell.
“We don’t need to believe. We don’t need
to hold anything sacred.”
“Nothing at all,” she echoed, her eyes locked to his.
He
was trying to unmoor her, to bring her beyond boundaries. I saw it in his
face—and in hers. The way she breathed in, slower than before. The way his hand
moved gently over her thigh. I knew then he was succeeding.
Then,
suddenly, I heard footsteps nearby. Someone approaching from the street. A jolt
of panic rushed through me. I slipped away before I could hear what came next.
Before I could watch them disappear into something I was never meant to
understand.
*
The
next day, I found her sitting alone by the edge of the sidewalk, where wild
grass had grown untamed between the cracks in the concrete. It was early, the
light soft and golden, the kind of morning that feels like it doesn’t belong to
the rest of the world. We were just a block away from their house, close enough
to hear the faint clang of someone washing dishes through an open window, yet
the moment felt entirely ours.
I
sat beside her without speaking at first. The silence between us was dense, but
not uncomfortable. A silence full of meaning, of things unspoken but
understood.
Then
I leaned closer, my mouth near her ear, and whispered carefully—afraid of
saying too much, but more afraid of saying nothing at all.
“You don’t have to say anything to
impress me,” I told her. “You don’t need to perform, or dress a
certain way. You don’t have to be anyone but who you are. I already like you…
as much as I’m capable of liking anyone. Maybe more than I should. Maybe more
than I’ll ever be able to explain.”
She
turned her head slightly, just enough to meet my eyes, and then smiled. Without
a word, she rested her head gently on my shoulder. My heart beat like a secret
drum, wild and rhythmic, as I felt her breath move softly across my neck. I
didn’t move. I didn’t want the moment to end.
*
The
farther I moved from the center—from the warm, well-lit heart of the human
world with its measured comforts and polished truths—the more alive I felt.
Each step away from that curated brightness peeled something false from me. I
began to sense a different kind of illumination, one that didn’t shine from
above but emerged quietly from within. A dim, flickering light I hadn’t known
was mine until I stood far enough outside the circle to see it.
It
was only in exile, only in distance, that I began to glow.
Freedom,
I realized, does not live at the center. It hides at the frayed edges of
things—beyond the borderlands of language, past the boundary lines of
acceptable thought. It waits in the unknown, where maps blur and reason thins.
It’s
out there. Far from safety. Deep in the shadows.
At the farthest edge of darkness—
That’s where freedom burns.
*
From her, I learned what it meant to be free—not just
in the moment, but across the span of time. Freedom as consequence, as echo.
She taught me that true freedom touches the past and reshapes the future. It
lives in motive, in unfiltered desire, in the refusal to be defined by anyone
else’s need for coherence.
From
him, I learned the opposite: the sacredness of structure. He taught me
discipline, the beauty of order, the dignity of repetition. From him, I learned
how to follow a strict and predetermined path—ritual as resistance, process as music.
*
When the
Shaman spoke to me about the many lines of work, the overlapping strands of
thought, I felt something unravel inside me—only to be rewoven into a new,
strange pattern. At first, it was overwhelming, chaotic. But then, slowly, it
began to cohere. I could see the hidden architecture, the way everything
connected: memory to symbol, desire to motion, dream to fact.
Later
that night, still aboard the train, the rhythm of steel against steel became my
heartbeat. The cabin swayed like a cradle, and I let my eyes close.
That’s
when it happened.
In
the darkness behind my lids, all the scattered pieces he had shown me—the
lines, the images, the contradictions—merged. Not into clarity, but into
resonance. They didn’t answer my questions, but they vibrated together in
harmony.
Outside,
the wind howled across the mountains. Inside, only the constant metallic
drumming, like a mantra recited by the machine.
*
The ancient conjunction—the trembling point where
chaos collides with order, where destiny meets chance—was once symbolized by
the bull, the labyrinth-dweller, the Horned One. He was the embodied paradox,
the creature who held both destruction and creation in his breath. His horns
weren’t just symbols of power—they were the two great forces of the world
bending toward union. Not merely opposites, but complements. Twins locked in
eternal embrace.
The
horns: the duality that seeks to become singular. Like him. Like me. Like us.
Once,
during a time of war—one that touched neither history books nor calendars—he
called upon unknown powers. He invoked forgotten names for our protection. For
knowledge. For strength. And something heard him.
Unlike
the god of the distant sky, who remains forever unreachable, the Horned One
moves through the world of men. He does not hover above. He intervenes. He
chooses his moments with care.
The
Sky God is infinite but indistinct, everywhere and nowhere. A concept. A
silence.
But
the Horned One is somewhere. Always somewhere.
He appears in the corner of a dream, on a street no one remembers, in the last
light before waking. You can miss him. Or meet him.
And
in that meeting—he is real.
*
In the City
of Truth, I wandered through ruins that felt more ancient than they could
possibly be. It was an industrial district, or what remained of one, fractured
and sun-bleached. Everything had been broken long ago—then rebuilt in haste,
then shattered again by time or indifference. This cycle of collapse seemed
almost intentional, as if the city itself had embraced destruction as part of
its architecture.
The
buildings around me leaned like tired men. Their windows were cracked or
missing entirely, facades covered in rust, graffiti, and creeping mold. The
sidewalks were fractured, splitting open like dry skin. Dust clung to every
surface, and great hunks of concrete lay scattered like fallen monuments,
half-buried in mounds of earth and industrial debris. The sun had barely risen,
casting a dull amber light over the hollowed streets. The wind stirred garbage
but no other signs of life.
And
then I saw her.
A
woman—no, more than that. A giantess. She was jogging through the wreckage with
the casual power of someone utterly at home in chaos. Nearly naked, dressed in
only a thin, sweat-drenched bodysuit and running shoes, her dark skin glistened
as though coated in oil. Her muscles were taut and sculpted, each movement a
poem of precision and strength.
I
approached her hesitantly, feeling absurd in my layered gray jacket, buttoned
shirt, and city-worn jeans. I looked like someone dressed for a different
reality. But she met me with warmth, her expression open, almost joyful. She
welcomed me without suspicion, without hesitation. We spoke, though the content
of our words quickly dissolved into the rhythm of presence. It wasn’t what we
said—it was that we spoke at all.
She
embraced me once as if we were old friends. And again, when we parted. Her arms
were vast and strong, easily capable of breaking me in half. But her touch was
gentle. Deliberate. As if I were something fragile. A porcelain doll someone
had left behind in the ruins, waiting to be remembered.
*
I kept walking through the ruins, drifting without
direction, letting the cracked concrete and bent girders lead me. The silence
of the place was not empty—it was layered with absence, humming with invisible
stories. Every broken wall felt like the end of a sentence I would never finish
reading.
Then,
some time later, I met a young girl—a teenager, no older than sixteen or
seventeen. She had the pale, sun-faded complexion of someone who had spent too
much time outside. Her brown hair was tied back, her clothes practical and
worn: a dark brown jacket, matching trousers, and a white undershirt stained
faintly at the collar. She said she was Spanish, though her accent had picked
up local inflections, like dust clinging to fabric.
She
told me she was just exploring the city, like me. Another wanderer without a
map or a mission.
She
pointed toward a collapsed building that looked like it had once been a school
or a library—its spine now broken, its windows like empty eye sockets.
“How
come you’re not taking photos?” she asked.
I
shrugged. “My camera’s broken. I left it behind.”
She
nodded slowly. “Too bad,” she said. “This would be the time to have it.”
We
walked together for a while. The conversation moved easily, unexpectedly so.
She told me about the city—what parts were safest, what ruins to avoid after
dusk, which stairwells collapsed under your weight if you stepped on them
wrong. She told me fragments of her life: where she used to live, who she used
to be with, what dreams had already stopped coming. Her words were quick,
precise, as if she'd rehearsed them in solitude. But they were sincere.
At
one point she stopped and turned to me.
“Here
in this city,” she said, “there are lots of stories about a man. People say
he’s died and returned more times than anyone can count. They say he was the
first one to make a mirror. A real one. The kind you don’t just look into—you
see through it. They say he spoke a
phrase when he made it: At the beginning,
no reflection comes truly. It is only with time that the truth finally appears.”
She
looked back toward the ruins. “So that’s why they call this place the City of
Truth. The reflection takes time. You have to wait for it to settle.”
We
kept walking, sometimes in silence, sometimes spilling every stray thought that
crossed our minds like coins onto a table. There was no destination—only
movement.
Then,
high up on a steep hill in the distance, we saw her again. The giant woman.
Running.
Her
stride was effortless, but her breathing was so loud we could hear it from far
below. The sound seemed to shake the dust off the ruins around us.
“I
know her,” I said. “I met her earlier today. We talked.”
The
girl beside me narrowed her eyes. She leaned close, her small frame brushing
against mine.
“Be
careful,” she whispered. “She’s a thief. And she’s dangerous. Very dangerous.
We know her very well.”
A
cold edge slid beneath her words.
I
instinctively checked my pockets, my bag. My wallet was still there. My notes.
My papers. Nothing missing.
But
as I looked again at the woman climbing the hill—her body gleaming with sweat,
her power unmistakable—I remembered the way she had hugged me.
And
the tenderness that didn’t belong in a city like this.
*
I remember a room—a modest hall with cream-colored
walls, the kind of place used for community gatherings, baptisms, and forgotten
birthdays. The walls were lined with tall, wood-framed windows, letting in soft
golden light that felt heavier than it should have been. One wall bore a
hand-painted mural: a bright blue sky, scattered yellow stars, and a single
pine tree rising tall and solitary. From the ceiling hung pastel paper
streamers, swaying gently with the breath of the room, about two feet above the
dancers’ heads.
In
the center of the room stood two men and a young girl, each wearing loose blue
jerseys and white pants. Wooden drums hung from their necks, resting against
their hips like ceremonial armor. They beat their drums in a steady, circular
rhythm—not aggressive, not celebratory, but something else. Something primal. A
sound without beginning or end.
And
he was there, in the middle of it all.
Dressed
entirely in black, his hair slicked back, his hands resting on his hips, eyes
lowered—not in shame, but in focus. He moved with precision, his body folding
and unfurling in time with the beat, not to impress, not to perform, but to
become. Around him, a loose circle of dancers clapped and swayed. They wore
jeans, khakis, t-shirts, sweatpants—nothing ceremonial, nothing sacred. Yet
they, too, had stepped into something ancient.
Some
were barefoot, some closed their eyes. All followed his motion.
And
I remember the thought rising in me, sudden and clear:
This is it.
This shapeless, ceaseless movement—this is what the world calls evil.
This is the call of the Other.
This is the dance that poisons the known.
This is the rhythm that leads beyond the gate.
This is the way in.
*
One time, during one of our long, circling
conversations, he paused and asked me, almost casually, “What do you mean by the work?”
I
didn’t hesitate. I answered the only way I knew how—honestly, instinctively.
“The work comes from order,” I said. “But
also from chaos. It comes from peace, and just as often from violence. It rises
out of me, yes—but also from something entirely other. Something I can’t name. The work is contradiction. The work
is balance. The work is otherwise.”
He
listened without interrupting, his eyes focused not on me but somewhere just
beyond. Then he smiled, slowly, as if I had confirmed something he already
suspected. He gave a single, thoughtful nod. And then, almost as a joke or a
blessing, he shook his head gently—signaling that the question had been
answered well enough, and that there was nothing more to say. Not now. Not yet.
5
Conjunction is the way of savage thought—the feral
logic that refuses obedience. It stitches together fragments of the past not to
preserve them, but to transform them, to conjure a world that never was yet
somehow always waited beneath the surface. Through conjunction, I uncover the
new hidden inside the old, like fire buried in ash. I forget what I believed,
and in forgetting, I begin to see. Conjunction is not reverent. It is not
polite. It is the vibrant golden path of sacred disrespect—the path that dares
to rewrite what was once held as truth.
*
On
Friday, as instructed, I arrived at what the Shaman had called the City at the
Root.
I
disembarked at a small cove: a lonely, half-forgotten place where water lapped
quietly against stone and the air carried the scent of moss and rust. I
remembered his words clearly: “Follow the
river as long as you can. It won’t lead you to the center, but it will help you
avoid getting lost.”
So
I obeyed. I walked slowly, deliberately, keeping the river to my right. The
current was steady and dark, full of silt and memory. The city that surrounded
it was a labyrinth of long, meandering passageways—some narrow, some gaping
like wounds. The buildings were broken, skeletal remnants of a time I couldn’t
place. Some looked medieval, others industrial, all of them abandoned,
reclaimed by dust, vines, and silence.
Eventually,
I arrived at the plaza he had described to me in careful detail. A circular
clearing ringed by what had once been municipal buildings or temples; it was
hard to say. I didn’t linger. I left the river behind and pressed northward,
deeper into uncertainty. I remembered his warning: “This city has no center. Don’t try to find it.”
Still,
something in me couldn’t help seeking.
The
weather was strangely beautiful. A warm summer breeze moved through the
corridors like a gentle whisper, stirring loose paper, lifting my collar. The
light was golden, forgiving. Across the river, on the opposite bank, I saw two
boys playing chess in the open air. Teenagers, maybe twelve or thirteen,
utterly absorbed in their game. One stood with his right leg crossed casually,
a white shirt with red trim tucked neatly into tan trousers. His hair was a
cascade of unruly curls. The other crouched slightly, balancing with his left
leg while his right foot rested in the groove of a crumbling concrete barrier.
He wore dark trousers, black leather shoes, and the brilliant whiteness of his socks
flashed in the sun.
I
wanted to stay and watch them. The symmetry, the stillness of their moment… it
pulled at something deep inside me. But I knew better. I remembered what this
journey was. I forced myself to look away. I kept walking.
Soon,
the pavement gave way to cracked asphalt, then to gravel, and finally to dirt.
The road thinned into a path carved by foot and wind, not machines. Weeds
overtook the edges. Stones shifted beneath my feet. When I turned around, the
city was gone. Not just obscured—gone.
No towers. No distant rooftops. Not even a faint silhouette.
I
walked for hours. The landscape grew emptier with each step. No houses. No
travelers. Just fields of rock and dust, the occasional crooked tree, the chirr
of unseen insects.
Eventually,
I reached the crossroads—the one the Shaman had marked for me in a rough
drawing. A signpost leaned sideways, illegible. I turned west, as instructed,
and entered what he had called the Golden City. There were no golden walls, no
statues. Just a quiet that felt older than stone.
I
walked straight ahead, no longer searching, no longer questioning.
I
knew where I was going. The Temple of Loneliness awaited. And I was ready to
arrive.
*
At the
summit of the stone temple, I saw them: two men seated face to face, a few feet
apart, locked in a silence that felt ceremonial. They did not move, and the
stillness between them seemed older than speech.
The
man on the left had dark, shoulder-length hair, and wore black from neck to
heel—simple long sleeves and loose pants, unadorned but dignified. He sat
cross-legged, his back straight, his hands wrapped gently around his feet. His
gaze was lowered, fixed intently on the stone beneath him as if reading
something only he could see, maybe a hidden pattern in the dust.
The
man on the right sat differently. His legs dangled freely off the temple’s
edge, one foot bouncing slightly with the breeze. His arms held the rock behind
him, keeping him anchored as he leaned forward ever so slightly, studying the
other’s face. He, too, wore dark clothing, but there was a casualness to him, a
looseness that contrasted with the other's ritual focus.
It
felt like a ritual or a standoff—or both. A meditation with no end, no winner.
But
I did not stop. I let the moment pass through me and continued onward. There
would be time to understand later.
*
They
called him the son of the Dragon—though no one could say for certain what that
meant. The name came with reverence, and sometimes with fear.
They
saw him often in visions and fragments of memory, playing a wooden flute before
a plain white wall. There was nothing grand about the setting—no altar, no
stage—but something sacred shimmered in the simplicity.
His
hands were large, rough from labor or time, but they moved with unexpected
grace. The music that rose from the flute was quiet, intricate, full of
longing—like a language older than words, older than sound itself.
*
They said
he once battled the Secret Serpent and the One with Seven Heads—beings older
than language, whose names could not be spoken without consequence. In these
stories, his face was never seen. He wore a golden mask at all times, smooth
and gleaming, hiding every feature except for his eyes—dark and steady,
watching everything. From a small opening at the mouth, he would breathe into a
flute, and the music that emerged was said to silence storms, charm beasts, and
open hidden doors.
Atop
his mask, two golden horns arched like crescent moons—majestic, radiant,
impossible to ignore. They crowned him not as a king, but as something
stranger. A bridge between beast and god. A walking enigma. A song in motion.
*
They
said he once journeyed deep into the desert to seek the Oracle—a figure older
than myth, buried in sand and silence, dwelling where the wind forgets its
name. When he arrived, he wore a long black collared shirt that hung from his
frame like ceremonial armor. The sun was merciless, but he walked as if under a
different sky.
It
was there, in the Oracle’s tent of bones and faded cloth, that he received the
revelation: his father was none other than the Old One of the Shadows—the
veiled architect of forgotten realms, the whisperer in dreams.
He
did not flinch. He accepted this truth as if he had always known it.
Afterward,
he did not return as a man. He returned as something more.
He
stood before the people and declared himself divine, not with rage, but with
inevitability. And those who saw him swore they witnessed a strange light
descend from above and to his left—casting two distinct shadows behind him.
*
They
said that when it was all over—after the battles, the revelations, the long
wandering—he leaned back in silence and rested on his right elbow against an
ornate stone balcony. The balcony was carved from white stone, decorated with
pointed arches and slender columns, weathered by centuries of wind and sun. His
body was mostly in the shade, cloaked in a calm that felt both earned and
distant, as though he now existed slightly outside of time.
In
his left hand, he held a bundle of ancient maps and worn grimoires—tools that
had guided him through countless lifetimes, across borders visible and unseen.
Pages filled with symbols, diagrams, and fragments of forgotten tongues. He
held them gently, like one holds old friends.
*
They said a
young woman with a light brown ponytail sat quietly on the ground to his left,
her back straight, her gaze fixed on something far beyond the horizon. Behind
them, the ocean stretched out in a wide, glistening expanse, its crisp blue
waters dotted with small boats that rocked gently with the tide. The wind moved
around them like a voice without words, rustling her clothes, lifting strands
of her hair.
Across
the bay, the silhouette of an ancient city rose along the water’s edge—its
domes, spires, and arched rooftops glowing faintly in the late light. It was a
city untouched by time, watching over them as if it remembered. They said
nothing. The moment did not ask for words.
*
They
said that after the Great Fall—when the old order crumbled and the hidden rites
were completed—he was anointed through a secret act, known only to a few. From
the fire of the Black Sun, he remade himself, not as he had been, but as
something newly forged, radiant and raw.
He
returned, not with fanfare, but with silence. He walked among us once
more—unmarked, unrecognized, except by those who had learned how to see.
Some
search for him still, driven by prophecy and hunger.
Others claim he is everywhere—his presence flickering in mirrors, in strangers’
eyes, in dreams that refuse to fade.
*
The Shaman
once told me, his voice low and steady, as if reciting from memory rather than
invention:
“On the higher roads, you may encounter
beings that are not human—creatures of immense beauty, presence, and power. Do
not fear them, but never mistake them for allies. Show respect. Always. Their
nature is ancient, and their attention is not easily won nor lightly held.
Their power is real—not symbolic, not metaphorical. Real. And if you act without
care, if you reach too quickly or speak too loudly, the consequences may come
swiftly, and they may be final.”
I
never forgot those words.
*
One time,
when I visited their home—a low, sun-stained building at the edge of the city,
where dust lingered like a second skin—his sister pulled me aside and said
something that stayed with me far longer than I expected.
“This place is evil,” she whispered, her voice flat but certain. “Evil to the core. Inherently dangerous and
dark.”
I
looked around, confused. The house was old, yes. Cracks lined the walls like
forgotten veins, and the light came in skewed through stained curtains. But
evil? I couldn’t see it. I tried to visualize what she meant. I tried to tune
into whatever vibration she was sensing, but nothing registered. Nothing
obvious. Her words left me unsettled, but without direction.
Now,
I understand. It wasn’t the house. It was him.
He
was the shadow she felt—the source of that unspoken wrongness. But what she
named as evil, I now recognize as something else entirely. A hidden light
wrapped in darkness. A presence that disrupted, unmade, restructured.
Terrifying, yes. But sacred.
She
had told me more that day, lowering her voice even further:
“There’s a man who comes over sometimes.
I don’t know his name. There’s something evil about him. My brother can’t see
it. They’ve never met. And I don’t think they ever can. It’s like the universe
bends to keep them apart. Like reality twists around itself just to make sure
they never share the same space.”
She
paused, then added:
“There’s a feeling that clings to him—of
things forgotten, abandoned. Of objects and people left to rot. Wherever he goes,
things fall into disrepair. He doesn’t break them. He simply allows them to
decay. And the more my brother allows it, the more often the man returns.”
I
listened. I said nothing at the time.
But
later, I felt a strange pull toward that unnamed man I had never met. I felt an
urge to thank him. For haunting them. For shaping him. For shaping me.
Because
without his presence—his quiet, rotting gravity—none of this would have
happened. None of this would be real.
*
Many years later, long after the house had fallen into
silence and the people in it had scattered to different kinds of exile, I asked
him what she had meant—his sister—when she told me the house was evil. What was
it she had felt moving through those rooms, behind the walls, inside the breath
of everyday things?
He
paused before answering, as if turning the question over in his hands like a
stone worn smooth by time.
Then
he said:
“To go against the established...
against the norm... that’s the gift of the shadows. That’s where the real force
lies. The sudden, unpredictable creative spark—that moment that tears a hole in
what everyone thinks is true. That’s what lives in the darkness.”
He
looked at me then, not with accusation, but with intensity.
“You were always trying to summon
something wild. The god of the forests. The jungle goddesses. Spirits waiting
on abandoned country roads, wrapped in wind and starlight. But what did you actually
want? Was it all just a game?”
He
leaned back, voice quieter now, almost tender.
“What were we doing back then—pretending
to be magicians, invoking old names? Were we just playing a role to feel
powerful? To feel alive? And then it ends. We go to sleep. We wake up. We go
visit our girlfriends. Go back to school. Nothing changes.”
He
shook his head slowly, emphatically.
“No. That’s not enough. That was never enough. If nothing changes, if the
game doesn’t break the world open... then what’s the point?”
*
In the
heart of the Stone Temple, amid the dry breath of broken stone and forgotten
echoes, I was told a legend. Not by any one person, but by the space itself, as
if the dust in the air had memory. It came to me like a chant that had once
been a poem, that had once been a prayer, that had once been a song. A dark
thread woven into the fabric of these industrial wastelands—twisted, weathered,
but still alive.
The
legend said that he—yes, he, the one
we had been seeking, the one we thought we remembered—was not simply a prophet,
not merely a rebel, not even just a man. He was something in-between. A
half-God. A faultline between two realms. He came not to rule, but to align the
higher spheres with this earth, now cracked and barren. His task was impossible:
to bring resonance between the stars and the dust. Between what once was and
what had been forgotten.
But
unlike other stories—those polished, canonical tales that end in death at
thirty-three, in betrayal and burial and slow mythologizing—this legend
followed another path. In this telling, he did not die in the City of Truth. He
did not ascend or vanish or give his final sermon. Instead, he was simply
separated—from his companions, from his purpose, from everything familiar. And
he wandered. Through deserts where nothing grew. Through forests choked with
silence. Through ruined lands so vast and still that time itself curled into a
spiral and began to forget its own forward motion.
He
wandered for many years. More than a lifetime. Long enough that people stopped
remembering his name and began remembering only the outline of his shadow.
Along
the way, he encountered many tribes. They were broken people, hidden people,
people who did not speak his name. But they welcomed him cautiously, and from
each of them, he learned something small—an image, a rhythm, a word. And to
each, he gave something in return. Not gifts of gold or prophecy, but fragments
of what he had carried from his earlier life: a gesture, a tuning, a story
spoken without explanation. He became a bridge without realizing it.
Then,
near the end of his exile, deep in a forest so dark it seemed to bleed around
the edges, he saw light. It wasn’t celestial. It was fire.
He
came upon a great bonfire burning at the center of a clearing, surrounded by
musicians—men with deep brown skin, their eyes painted with vivid patterns,
their faces unreadable in the flicker of the flames. The sound they made was
not music as he knew it. It was disjointed, fluid, unfamiliar. He stood at the
edge of their circle, watching, hesitant. They spoke to him. Their language
matched his in structure, but not in spirit. Their words began in the middle of
ideas and ended without closure. They offered no thesis, no resolution. They
moved like smoke—rising, dissipating, reforming.
He
tried to speak with them, to understand. But he quickly realized that
understanding was beside the point.
They
did not claim to comprehend who he was. They made no effort to define him, or
themselves. Their knowledge was not the kind that solidifies. It shimmered,
vanished, returned in new form. And yet, they welcomed him.
Because
above all else, he was a musician. At heart, in breath, in motion.
And
so he joined them—not to teach, not to lead, but to play. They sang, they chanted, they drummed with hands and bones
and voices. The rhythms were strange, nonlinear, bending around rules that were
never explained. But he didn’t need explanation. Music, like fire, communicates
through proximity.
They
did not instruct him in their art. They showed
him. With nods. With silences. With mistakes that became patterns. If he could
follow, he would follow. If he couldn’t, he would fall away.
He
stayed. For years, he learned their games—musical forms so ancient and so new
that they defied classification. He allowed himself to be broken open and
reassembled. The boundaries he once believed essential—between form and
formlessness, between structure and chaos—melted away. He learned that the
rules he once followed were only echoes of fear. Eventually, he understood what
he had to do. Not because someone told him, but because the rhythm made it
clear.
He
gathered a small group—those who had played beside him the longest. Together,
they prepared their instruments and tools. They said little. There was no
ceremony, no prophecy, just motion. They were going back. Back to the place he
had come from. Not to reclaim it, not to save it, but to bring the game to it.
He
did not know if he would survive. He no longer believed in survival as a goal.
He was willing to die in the act of return. He had seen the door. He had always
seen it. Now he was ready to walk through it.
He
had understood something fundamental: The savage game—the music that undoes and
remakes—was not meant to stay hidden. It had to return. And in returning, it
would change everything.
He
also understood the deeper truth: It is not evil
that defies nature. It is the past
that we mistake for nature. Because it is all we have ever known.
And the game— the savage, holy, improvised game— was made to begin where the
past ends.
*
When I
first heard this story, I realized something that settled deep inside me like a
seed. The game he discovered in that forest—the wild rhythms, the nameless
music, the men painted like myths—wasn’t just improvisation. It was a school. A
real one. Not built of stone or rules, but of presence, intuition, and
repetition beyond reason. A place to learn what can’t be explained, what
resists translation. The only kind of learning that truly transforms. The only
school that matters. Where the lesson is hidden inside the act itself. Where
the dance teaches what language never could.
*
By the time
I arrived at the old train station, my thoughts had begun to shift in
unfamiliar ways. It was subtle at first—like a dream logic threading itself
into waking perception—but soon, everything felt altered, refracted. The
station did not feel like a place I had reached. It felt like a threshold I had
crossed.
That
arrival was, in some quiet and ineffable sense, a rebirth.
I
descended a narrow staircase painted in fading shades of blue and black, the
colors chipped and worn like they had been passed over by generations of silent
travelers. Each step felt impossibly steep, as if the stairs had been designed
for creatures with different bodies, different balances. With every movement, I
was gripped by the uncanny sensation that I had forgotten how to walk.
Not
just the motion—but the meaning of
walking.
I
reached for memory like a drowning man reaches for air, clinging to the few
fragments I could still name. My body moved forward, but my mind drifted
sideways.
I
wasn’t descending steps. I was descending into a new state of being.
And with each cautious footfall, I left behind the person I had once believed
myself to be.
*
When I
descended to the street, the light changed. It was as if I had passed through
some invisible membrane. The air thickened. The shadows grew longer, heavier. I
found myself in a part of the city that felt half-abandoned, not by people, but
by intention. The buildings leaned inward with suspicion. Windows were either
broken or boarded up, and strange stains marked the concrete like the remnants
of forgotten violence.
It
was very dark. Not just in the absence-of-sunlight sense, but in the
feeling—the density of loneliness, the quiet hum of danger. There was no map
for where I had landed, no signs I trusted, so I picked a direction at random
and began to walk. My steps were cautious but steady. I had the sense that
something was watching, waiting.
I
didn’t get far.
As
I reached the first corner, a voice rose from the ground—a calm, firm voice
that cut through the tension like a blade.
“No. Don’t go there.”
I
turned. A man sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, wrapped in layers of torn
clothing, his hair matted but his gaze piercing. He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t
rambling. He looked directly at me.
“There’s nothing over there,” he said again. “You
don’t want to go there. Only trouble waits in that direction.”
I
hesitated. Then I asked him plainly, “Which
way is the main road?”
He
nodded slightly, as if pleased by the question.
“Two streets over. Then turn left. But
be careful.”
He
leaned forward, one hand pressed flat to the pavement.
“The devil can get you from any hole
along the way. His horns represent the Moon—that’s why they call him the son of
the Moon. But his father, his true father, is Sin. Walk down the center. Stay
in the middle of the road. That’s the only safe place now.”
I
thanked him and started to walk again, but his words lingered. They echoed
strangely inside me, colliding with old thoughts, dormant ideas I thought I had
buried.
Something
about what he said struck a chord I couldn’t name. As I walked, I began to
think—obsessively—about the brain. About its shape, its coils, its symmetry. I
had always trusted it, revered it, built my identity around it. But now, I saw
it differently: a nest of paranoid spirals, a generator of elaborate fear. A
machine of division.
Wasn’t
it the brain that invented separation? The brain that created hierarchy,
anxiety, control? The brain that imagined God as a distant male
intelligence—disembodied, abstract, unreachable? My intellect, the thing I had
been most proud of, now seemed like a factory of black poison.
The
world reflected this shift. Everything around me was hard, angular, brutal. The
buildings were square-edged, the sidewalks cracked like fractured logic.
Everything pointed, stabbed, demanded clarity. And yet, somewhere in my
memory—or maybe in my body—I remembered another world.
A
world that curved. A world that softened, yielded. A world that forgave.
That
world had colors not found in this one—flesh tones, amber, the dark green of
jungle leaves wet with morning. That world was sensual, immediate, generous.
There were no hidden motives there. Desire moved freely. It was not used
against anyone. It was not weaponized.
I
kept walking, deciding to follow my original path, despite the vagabond’s
warning. He was a stranger. He knew nothing about me. Or so I told myself.
But
just as I reached the next intersection, I heard his voice again—louder now,
urgent, rising with intensity. I turned and saw him pointing at me with a
trembling hand.
“You need to open your eyes!” he shouted. “What
is happening right now is what they
want to happen. Don’t you understand? This moment, this choice—it’s the end for
you. For all of us. You think you’re protected? You think you’ve figured it
out?”
He
stood, barely, his bones shaking under the weight of something invisible.
“There is no protection. There are no
walls. The lines have been erased. All the limits are gone!” His voice
cracked.
“All the limits are over! The limits are
over!”
And
as I turned away, heart pounding but legs still moving, I heard those words as
if spoken by another. Not by the vagabond. But by him. The one I had known when
we were young. The one who first whispered it to me during those long nights in
his room, lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling like it might open.
“All the limits are over.”
He
had said it like it was a revelation.
And
now, hearing it again, I smiled—half in fear, half in awe.
Because somewhere inside me, I knew he had been right.
*
In the
early morning hours, as light spread softly across the broken contours of the
earth, two young men sat facing each other in the ruins of an ancient temple.
Their breath mingled with the wind, sharp and cold, blown in from the open sea.
Far off, white glaciers floated silently across a glass-blue ocean, drifting
like forgotten thoughts. The air was clean and unforgiving. It stung the skin
and cleared the mind.
They
sat cross-legged on opposite ends of a wide stone platform, once part of a
wall, now just another fragment among the sacred debris. Sand-colored bricks
crumbled beneath their weight, and cracks split the surface like old scars.
He
was speaking—calmly, confidently, as if reciting something he'd always known.
“What I believe in,” he said, “is
simple. It’s not ideology. It’s not a system. It’s how things are. The natural
state of things. The way the world really is, and always has been. The others…
they twist it. They invent projections, cast them onto reality like nets, and
then cry out when the world refuses to obey. They call it injustice. They call
it pain. But it’s just life.”
I
didn’t interrupt. I let his words drift over me like the wind—sharp in places,
cool in others. I didn’t agree or disagree. I listened with my whole body,
letting the meaning pass through me without trying to pin it down.
“It’s based on a dream,” he continued. “A
constructed tension of desire—systems built on fantasy. And they threaten to
destroy the real. The world as it actually is. The land, the breath, the body,
the wind. If nature is good, then they—by opposing it—are evil. Not
metaphorically. Actually.”
Above
us, the sky was impossibly clear. Wisps of white cloud drifted like faint
memories across the radiant dome of blue. A kind of silence settled in after he
spoke, a silence that wasn’t absence, but presence—the world pausing to
consider what had just been said.
Then,
he spoke again.
“To meet the gods,” he said, “you
must open a doorway. Not a metaphor. A real one. Evil waits outside that door.
Not as a devil, not as a villain, but as everything this world was never
designed to contain. The unsustainable. The excess.”
He
paused, looking out toward the distant icebergs, then back at me.
“Evil is what escapes. What exceeds. The
serpents. The frogs. The woman. The dark water. The endless river that flows
through the night. The Moon. The rhythm of chaos, the chaos of rhythm. It’s all
there. Outside. We—we’re just a flicker of fire, a small light in a vast dark.
And that fire can go out at any moment.”
His
voice didn’t shake. He wasn’t afraid. He said these things with the clarity of
someone who had sat alone for many nights beneath strange stars and returned
changed.
I
said nothing. Not yet. There was more to understand. Or maybe nothing at all to
understand—just something to witness.
We sat there as the wind moved between us, carrying no answers. Only breath.
Only cold. Only the rhythm of the world as it was.
*
When I look back on all that he said to me, I begin to
see the shape of something I couldn’t name at the time. His words weren’t
scattered thoughts or poetic whims—they were part of a larger structure, a
symbolic synthesis forged from something deep and unseen. It wasn’t random. It
wasn’t luck. He was following hidden patterns, ancient rhythms that most people
never sense, let alone understand. I remember feeling the edges of it, brushing
up against meaning I couldn’t hold. I could only barely grasp it then—and even
now, it slips through my fingers like smoke.
*
We sat
together in silence inside the crumbling temple, surrounded by time and stone.
An old, broken window let in the early morning light—soft and yellow, the color
of memory. I remember how it fell across his face, illuminating the curve of
his cheek, the quiet intensity in his eyes.
There
was peace in that moment, fragile and absolute.
We
were still alive. Still together. Two figures inside the ruins of something
older than either of us, on a clear, sunlit morning that felt like it had been
waiting just for us. The world, for a breath, was whole.
6
Early on
a quiet Saturday morning, I arrived at the Red Castle that rose above the river
like a watchful sentinel. The stone was worn but proud, touched by centuries of
wind and water. Just below it, in the shadow of the eastern wall, I saw two old
friends standing near the base of the Tower.
It
was a clear day. The sun shone gently, and a few white clouds drifted lazily
across the blue sky. The two of them stood still, as if waiting for something
to begin—or something to end. They wore simple clothes: grey jackets, beige
shirts, black pants. Their silhouettes merged almost seamlessly with the
rust-colored steel of the Tower behind them, their figures like moving parts in
a larger mechanism.
The
man on the right wore dark sunglasses, his face unreadable. The man on the left
cradled a book in his hand, fingers curled around it protectively.
That
book—yes, that book—he gave it to me
at the end of a long and silent journey. He said it belonged to all of us now,
though only one of us could keep it. He knew it would be lost if he held onto
it.
I’ve
kept it ever since.
I still have it.
*
In that
moment, I remembered the Shaman’s words:
“Find the source of the music.
Seek the dog that only comes out at
night.
Look for the man with long horns that
curve inward, meeting like a secret.
Listen for the giant turtle who speaks
in slow, whispering riddles.
Beware the white-faced widow of the
murdered king—her grief is alive.
Follow the band of headless musicians;
they remember melodies no one else can play.
And when all signs fail, go to the edge
of night. There you will find the Red King, waiting at the gates of darkness.
Beyond him lies the museum of vanished
dreams.”
*
While
walking through the overgrown grass near the castle walls, I spotted something
glinting in the morning light—a small ring, half-buried in the earth, as if it
had been waiting. It was simple, worn smooth by time, its metal dulled to a
soft, forgotten luster. Without thinking, I picked it up and slipped it into my
pocket.
And
then, just as quickly, I forgot it was there. It vanished from my thoughts like
a name lost in a dream… quiet, insignificant.
Only
later would I remember what it meant.
Only much later would I realize it had found me.
*
“I
will vanquish the creatures of the sea,” he said to me one afternoon, his voice
steady but strange, “and after that, they will regard me as the patron saint of
sailors… and other travelers who cross the unknown.”
He
stood facing the window, though there was nothing to see outside but shadows
and mist. I sat across from him, quiet, letting his words unfold. By then, we
had all quietly accepted that something inside him had shifted, tilted too far
from the center. There was no point in questioning him anymore, no logic to be
found in refutation. He had crossed into some other current of speech, a
language we no longer spoke.
Still,
I listened.
“My followers,” he continued, “will
not obey any Law, any Tradition, any tribal inheritance. My practices will
transcend every culture. Why? Because they are rooted in something real—actual altered states. Not myths. Not
symbols. Experience. Raw and burning.”
He
didn’t look at me. He wasn’t speaking to
me, not really. The words just moved through him, like he had become a vessel.
“My practices can’t be written. They
can’t be named. They can’t be turned into scripture or parables or
commandments. They reproduce in secret. They flicker in and out of sight. They
disappear when you look too hard. But they endure.
They are eternal because they are
ephemeral.”
I
nodded, not in agreement but in recognition. The rhythm of his speech was
familiar, like a trance returning.
And
then, his voice shifted. Louder. Fiercer.
“I will stand against all forms of
aggression. I will protect. I am the
fiery cock of the Fallen Angel. The pulsing, erect, lustful penis of the one who is pure
Light—unfiltered, unashamed. That is me. I am the cock.”
He
stared at me then, wild and unwavering. I said nothing.
What
could I say?
He
had entered the storm.
And I—I was just watching the waves.
*
When they rejected him, they stripped the world of its
pleasure—its warmth, its wild sweetness, its sacred intoxication. All of it was
cast out, exiled to a hidden chamber beneath the earth. A forbidden space
sealed in silence and myth. There, the fire still burns—ferocious and
unyielding—a furnace of raw passion, of unrestrained lust, of unbearable
yearning. Pain lives there too, tangled with pleasure, impossible to separate.
It is a place of anguish and desire, of endless repetition without relief. They
locked it away thinking they had defeated him, not knowing they had only buried
the world’s true heart alive.
*
The
farther we stepped from the center—from the orderly city soaked in artificial
light and brittle certainty—the more alive we became. Each movement away from
the familiar was a shedding, a quickening, a glow awakening from within. We
began to shine, not with borrowed brightness, but with something forged in
exile.
Out
there—beyond the perimeter of maps, far from the scripted world we had
inherited—was freedom. Real freedom. Not the kind offered by laws or names, but
the kind buried deep in the heart of darkness. It waited, silent and wild,
inside the void where shadows dance and meanings dissolve.
Only
by losing the center could we begin to find our own light.
*
Our
hidden chamber of pleasure—our furnace of breath and blood and unfiltered
desire—became, in their eyes, the ultimate crime. A punishment disguised as
ecstasy. A hot, forbidden place where something like real life could finally be felt.
But
we were never rebels in the way they expected. We didn’t rise in open defiance.
We weren’t chanting slogans or tearing down their statues.
We
were something far more dangerous. We were heretics.
Not
because we rejected their teachings—but because we took them seriously. Too
seriously. We traced their sacred words to their logical end and found fire at
the heart of them. Instead of rote obedience, we made their doctrines breathe.
Instead of blind ritual, we invoked the living spirit behind the mask.
And
that—that—was intolerable.
Not
our disobedience, but our understanding.
Not our rejection, but our illumination.
We weren’t cast out because we hated them.
We were banished because we saw too clearly what they had tried to hide.
*
In the
fifteenth century, in the veiled city of the Two Horns, a collection of strange
and shimmering tales was gathered. These were not ordinary stories—they had already
traveled far, passed through many mouths, changed shape many times. Their
history was as twisted and layered as the tales themselves.
They
were first whispered in the farthest East, where every sentence folded into
itself, tangled with riddles and veiled allusions, like dreams interpreting
other dreams. Later, they were told again in the birthplace of magic, where
their structure shifted—imbued with esoteric diagrams, impossible symbols, and
cryptic codes hidden between lines.
From
there, they made their way into the dry heart of the desert, where they took on
an unexpected tone—ironic, sharp, filled with laughter that masked something
deeper. They were then retold in the shadow of the pyramids, where the stories
absorbed the dust of the ancients and grew new skins of shifting meaning.
Finally,
they were written down—painstakingly, reverently—in the City of Truth. Ink met
parchment, and breath became text.
There,
the tales became something else entirely.
They
became what we now call The Black Book of
the Night—a book that does not explain, but reveals; a book that cannot be
finished, only entered.
*
Moments
of savage thought—raw, untamed flashes of vision. Free dreaming, wild
imaginings that break the spine of logic and leap into uncharted realms.
Memories become stories. Stories become new memories, reshaped in the telling.
Myths are born in that fire, flickering with half-truths and radiant lies.
And
from those myths, something stirs—something urgent, animal, awake.
It
inspires new thoughts, wilder still.
Thoughts that refuse to behave.
Thoughts that bite.
Thoughts that dance.
This
is the cycle.
The sacred loop.
Savage thought birthing savage myth, again and again, in beautiful defiance of
all that wants to stay still.
*
I
remember that night with a clarity that borders on hallucination. The details
remain etched in me—like a tattoo beneath the skin of memory, pulsing faintly
when the air changes.
There
were three of us in the taxi. A couple of friends and me. We were laughing
nervously, I think, making small talk to distract from the weight of the
curfew, the silence of the city after dark. The streets were empty, ghostlike.
The headlights lit up nothing but dust and closed shutters.
Then
it happened. The taxi stopped at a red light. And out of nowhere, a tall man
stepped into the front passenger seat. He didn’t ask. He didn’t hesitate. He
moved with the calm precision of someone who knew he belonged exactly where he
was. In one smooth motion, he flashed a badge—dark leather, silver crest—and in
a voice that could freeze your blood, he said:
“Go toward downtown. Now.”
The
driver didn’t flinch. He just nodded, shifted gears, and turned the taxi around
without a word. None of us in the back asked questions.
It
was the voice. It had that tone—firm,
practiced, shaped by authority and soaked in something deeper, something that
made the body obey before the mind even caught up. You didn’t question a voice
like that. You didn’t think of resisting. You simply followed.
We
leaned back in our seats, tense and silent. Our eyes darted between each other,
wide open and glassy. We didn’t speak, but the air was thick with thoughts. Our
hands were slick with sweat. Every small sound felt amplified—our breathing,
the hum of the engine, the occasional click of the turn signal. Fear wrapped
around us, slow and suffocating.
The
city had been under a strict curfew for weeks. No one was allowed on the
streets after 7 p.m. Not even dogs barked after dark. The patrols were relentless.
But this man—this stranger—wasn’t afraid. He was taking us deeper, into the quiet center of the forbidden. Into the belly of
it.
As
we sped down Alameda Roosevelt, he instructed the driver to take a narrow side
street.
“There will be others waiting,” he said, barely turning his head. “We’ll pick them up.”
The
driver nodded again, no hesitation. We didn’t understand what was happening—but
we knew enough to stay silent.
The
side street was impossibly narrow, flanked by tall buildings like blind walls.
It curved slowly, like a snake coiled in sleep. Once we entered, there was no
turning back. Literally. There was no space to reverse, no room to maneuver. It
was a tunnel of stone and silence.
I
remember hearing the stranger speak again—low, measured words directed to the
driver. I couldn’t catch all of it, but fragments drifted back to me. We were
going to pick up a man. We were going to deliver him to a military base. And we
all understood what that meant. No one needed to explain. He would be tortured.
He would be killed.
The
taxi slowed at a corner. The stranger stepped out. He didn’t slam the door. He
moved like water, calm and assured. The kind of calm that only violence knows.
The
driver looked at us in the rearview mirror. No one spoke. No one needed to.
We
had our orders. There would be no resistance. No questions. No doubts.
And
then—like a door cracking open—I knew. I knew
who we were supposed to pick up. I knew his name. I knew his face. And I knew
why it had to be us.
Because
he would trust us. He would see us and feel safe. He would step into the car
willingly, without fear, without suspicion. Because once—long ago—he had called
us his friends.
*
The
last letter he ever wrote to me came on pale yellow paper, the envelope soft at
the corners, as if it had already traveled too far. The ink was blue, the
handwriting cursive and full of flourishes—his characteristic style, somewhere
between elegance and haste.
He
wrote:
“I have great plans for the future. She
is the true love of my life. I know it now, with certainty. We’ll have
children—many children. It will all begin again next year. A fresh start. A new
cycle. Our connection, hers and mine, is vast, deeper than time. It stretches
beyond this life, beyond death. We’ve been together before—I can feel it. I’m
sure of it.
I hope I can come to see you next year.
We have to talk. Not briefly—long and in depth, the way we used to. I’ve also
been thinking that I want to write more often. Really write. Share things that
matter. How can we make that happen?”
He
ended it the way he always had, since we were boys:
“Your brother.”
I
remember folding the letter and placing it back in the envelope with care I
didn’t understand at the time. Something in me already knew it was the last.
*
We stood together in the shadowed curve of the narrow
street, the taxi idling behind us like a sleeping animal, its headlights
dimmed. The silence was thick, broken only by the occasional creak of distant
wind through branches, or the low hum of something mechanical humming far away,
out of reach.
We
had to decide. It was that simple. And that impossible.
Were
we going to follow orders—do what the stranger had commanded, what the badge
and the voice had demanded of us? Were we going to deliver a man we
knew—someone who trusted us—to a place where pain was guaranteed, where death
waited in the walls? Or were we going to risk everything and disobey?
My
first instinct was to protect the others. Get them out. Let them vanish into
the houses that lined the street, take refuge in the stillness of someone
else's life. I would go alone, carry the burden by myself. Maybe, just maybe, I
could find a way to save him.
We
went to the nearest gate—tall, iron, flanked by crumbling stone pillars—and
knocked. No response. So we knocked again, harder. We clapped. We called out.
We banged our fists against metal and concrete. Behind those high walls we
could see lush gardens overgrown with vines, windows flickering with faint
light. There was life inside. We could feel it. But no one came.
We
moved to the next house. Same routine. Same silence.
Then,
from behind one of the gates, I heard it—music. A slow, solemn tune, heavy with
stringed instruments and sorrow. The kind of music that folds around you like a
heavy coat in winter. Something old. Something from another time.
“Do you hear that?” I said, turning to the others. “My father used to play that kind of music. Do you remember?”
They
nodded, almost imperceptibly. We were all somewhere else now, floating between
past and present.
“Would we have opened the door back
then?” I asked. “If someone came knocking after curfew—banging, pleading—would we have
let them in?”
No
one answered. They didn’t have to.
“No,” I said, filling in the silence. “The
answer is no. We wouldn’t have opened the door. We wouldn’t have come out. We
would’ve stayed inside, where it was safe. Where the danger was on the other
side of the gate.”
I
looked around at the locked doors, the darkened windows, the invisible people
holding their breath.
“Now we’re the ones outside,” I said. “We’re
on the wrong side of the gates. And nobody is coming to help us.”
I
could feel the truth of it settling into my bones, cold and heavy.
We
had become the noise in someone else’s night. And no one wanted to listen.
*
According
to certain obscure and often disputed sources, The Black Book of the Night was written—start to finish—by a single
man. A nameless nomad. A wanderer who never stayed in one place long enough to
leave a trace, but who carried with him the burden of memory like a sacred
illness.
They
say he did not write the book all at once. Instead, he collected the stories
slowly, methodically, across decades of walking. In desert camps and forgotten
cities, by dying fires and under eclipsed moons, he listened to dreamers,
madmen, witches, soldiers, and saints. He took what they told him and wove it
into something larger—a tapestry of tales so vast it seemed to contain the very
shape of history itself.
Within
the thousands of stories that fill the book, there are those who claim to find
hidden things: secret invocations, whispered ritual procedures, strange and
nearly imperceptible visualizations. The lost magical practices of an ancient
desert lineage—long erased by the sand, and yet somehow still breathing between
the lines.
Later
generations of religious scholars approached the Black Book differently. They
spoke of it not as a collection of fables, but as a sophisticated linguistic
system—an intricate architecture of multivalent symbols and mirrored phrases.
For them, the Black Book was a code. A cipher. It was not just a book—it was a
map of all that had come before.
Its
symbols pointed toward the oldest stories. Tales of the Unspeakable Horror. The
thing that came before civilization. A doctrine of darkness, older than
language. A forgotten science of shadows, once wielded by the ancients as our
own scientists now harness the light.
But
where light reveals, the Book conceals. It does not teach. It invites.
*
“Since the virility and level of awakened consciousness
in beings of your kind are defined—and made visible—by the presence of their
horns,” the voice said, solemn and
precise, “we must, with your consent and
under the sacred authority of the God of the Four Quarters, begin the work of
restoration.
The horns you once bore have been
lost—through time, through silence, through betrayal. But with your help, they
can be returned. With your will, they can rise again. This is not merely a
symbol. It is a rite. A return to power. A return to form.”
*
“Conjunction,”
he said, “is the sacred act of
reunion—of taking pure, separated substances and merging them into a new and
unified compound.
But this can only occur after a true and
deliberate separation, one that reveals the essence hidden beneath form. The
Worker must first divide in order to know. Through this separation, the most
subtle and essential elements are drawn forth—finer than anything found in
nature, more refined than any substance known to exist.
Only then—when the essence is laid
bare—can the true conjunction begin, and something entirely new be born from
what was once torn apart.”
*
When I first
read those words—etched in ink that seemed to pulse with its own quiet
certainty—something shifted inside me. Not gradually. Not gently.
It
felt like an invasion. A wave of thought, not my own, crashed through the
interior of my mind. Something alien had entered. Not as a guest, but as a
force. It wasn’t violent. It was worse—it was calm. I could feel it beginning
to change me from within, not in ways I could name or defend against, but in
deeper layers I hadn’t known were vulnerable.
It
was an irrevocable change. A realignment. And I knew—somehow I knew—that when it was done, I wouldn’t
be able to trace it back. I wouldn’t remember where it started, or who I had
been before. The transformation would leave no scar. Just absence.
I
knew it. But I didn’t want to know it.
Because
this—this exact thing—was what we had been chasing for so long. Me and him.
This was the goal beneath the goals, the shadow beneath the ritual. This was
what we wanted to make happen.
And
now that it was finally happening… I hated it. I was afraid.
Not
because it hurt. But because it worked.
And
by the time I realized that, it was already too late to turn back. The gate had
opened. Something had crossed through. And I was no longer entirely myself.
*
The
years passed, as they always do, silently, with soft erosion. Time worked on
him like water works on stone—slow, patient, absolute. He forgot many things.
Whole chapters of his life faded like ink left in the sun.
And
in the end, he became something singular. A strange, solitary figure. The man
who plays the wooden flute. That was all. And it was enough.
His
old identity—whatever it had once been—was now buried beneath a golden mask,
smooth and polished, gleaming with the memory of forgotten light. Two bright
horns arched upward from the crown, wide and luminous, casting enormous shadows
behind him whenever he played. The horns caught the sun, caught the moon,
caught the attention of passing strangers who didn’t know his name but felt
they had seen him before.
The
shadows his headdress made would ripple across the temple walls like dancers,
each motion of his head releasing another wave of strange, mirrored
choreography. The shadows moved in time with the winding melodies that rose
from his flute—soft, spiraling sounds that seemed to come from nowhere,
melodies that circled and never resolved.
The
golden mask covered his entire face. Only three small openings—at the nostrils,
the eyes, and the lips—allowed breath and vision and song to pass through.
And
still the flute played, the spirals continued, and his silence deepened into
music.
*
After
countless years of flute songs and shifting shadows, a day finally came when
everything changed. It arrived without warning—no omen, no sound—just a
stillness in the air, as if the world had paused to listen. The melody
faltered. The shadows froze. And something old stirred awake within the
silence.
*
It was
a beautiful, chilly, overcast morning—the kind of morning that feels soaked in
omens. The sky was layered in soft gray clouds, and the light was diffuse and
gentle, like the world had been brushed in silver. Two young men stood side by
side at the edge of a long, narrow pier built of brown riverstone, damp with
the mist that hung over the water. They had just arrived after a long journey,
and now they stood in stillness, breathing in the quiet of their destination.
The
first man, standing on the right, looked to be in his early thirties. He was
wrapped against the cold in a black bubble jacket and thick black woven pants.
His leather knee boots were weathered from travel. Around his neck he wore a
scarf with a white and gray geometric pattern, and atop his head sat a black
wool hat embroidered with blue thread—symbols or constellations, it was hard to
tell. In his left hand, he carried a soft black guitar case. His fingers curled
around the handle like it was something he’d held in many lives.
The
second man, slightly older, wore ankle-high black boots, navy blue slacks made
of thick woven wool, and a dark navy coat that cut neatly at the waist. Black
oval sunglasses concealed his eyes, but his posture radiated calm. One arm was
draped across the shoulder of the first man, not in a gesture of possession,
but of recognition—an embrace born of long history.
Behind
them, the water stretched outward—gray and glasslike—and on its surface floated
several small boats tethered loosely to wooden posts. Across the river, a row
of white and blue houses and low hotels reflected faintly in the current, their
pastel shutters closed.
The
second man reached into his coat and pulled out a small bag of coins. He
rummaged for a moment, distracted, until his fingers touched something
unexpected. A coin—no, not a coin. A disc of metal unlike the others. He held
it in the palm of his hand, staring down at it as if it had spoken. Then he
turned to his companion.
“I
finally recognize you,” he said softly, the words falling into the space
between them like stones into still water. “I saw you once in an old
photograph—long before we met. You were an old man. Older than any man has the
right to be. Older than memory.”
The
first man didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
“This
coin,” the second man continued, “is not currency. It’s a medal. It was struck
in your name—after one of your victories, one of those legendary ones that
everyone half-remembers but no one dares to verify. You’ve worn many faces. But
before you were my friend, you were the one who played the flute. And before
that—before language—you were the Horned One. The one who bridges the two
worlds. The one who moves between night and day, between shadow and fire.
You’ve been walking this earth longer than I can imagine. And now I see it.”
His
voice trembled slightly.
“It
is an honor to walk beside you. Even if only briefly. Even if this is the only
moment we’re given. It’s a precious gift… to finally recognize you.”
And
then, something shifted. The first man lowered his head. His hand tightened on
the guitar case. His body swayed, like he had been struck by an invisible wave.
In that moment—brief and eternal—he remembered. Not one memory, but all of
them.
The
wind picked up. The clouds thinned slightly, letting a cold light shine down
onto the river. A long stretch of silence passed between them, dense and
electric. The world trembled, or seemed to. Not violently, but delicately—as
though everything around them was vibrating at a frequency just beyond hearing.
They
stared into each other’s eyes. No longer two young men on a journey, but two
ancient forces meeting at the threshold.
The
first man finally spoke.
“This
is the beginning,” he said. “A new beginning. But also the long-foretold end.
My path diverges here. Yours continues. For now, we must part.”
His
voice was steady, but there was sorrow in it.
“Wherever
we go,” he continued, “a part of each of us will remain inside the other. You
will carry me. I will carry you. In silence or in song, we will still walk
together.”
He
placed a hand briefly on his friend’s chest—over the heart—and then turned. And
as he walked away, he began to change. The air around him shimmered. His posture
shifted. His back straightened, his stride slowed. The outline of horns began
to rise from beneath his hat—not solid, but made of shadow and memory. The very
fabric of him rearranged itself.
I
watched him go. I tried to keep my eyes on him, but it became too much. The
longer I looked, the less I understood. His form blurred—not vanishing, but
transforming into something I could no longer hold.
And
by the time I looked away, I was already deep in the process of forgetting.
7
I saw him once—years ago—as a young man standing alone
in an airport. I remember it clearly, as if the image had been sealed in amber.
He
stood in front of a row of gleaming white doors beneath a suspended sign that
read: “Walkway to Terminal.” The air
around him was filled with the soft hum of distant announcements, the clatter
of luggage wheels, and the restless shuffle of strangers passing by.
He
wore a light tan sport coat, the kind that creased delicately at the elbows.
Every few moments, he would straighten it with both hands—an unconscious habit.
Beneath it, a crisp white dress shirt tucked into charcoal trousers. A sage
green tie hung neatly down the center of his chest, unwrinkled, carefully
chosen. A silver ring gleamed on the ring finger of his right hand, and on his left
wrist, a silver watch ticked in quiet rhythm. His dark hair was freshly cut,
neatly parted, the line sharp above his brow.
But
it was his face I remember most.
His
eyes were fixed to the right, gazing beyond the frame of the moment. His jaw
was tense. His expression knotted—tight with expectation, or fear. He was
waiting. For something. Or someone.
*
He
always carried with him a small deck of ten cards, neatly tucked into a
weathered tin box no larger than a cigarette case. The box was unadorned,
dented at the corners, but it clicked shut with a satisfying finality. He never
spoke of the cards unless asked directly, and even then, he offered only brief,
cryptic answers—as if the truth lay not in the explanation, but in the order of
the images themselves.
Each
card bore a different symbol. Together, they formed a private cosmology:
1. The center of the world—a dark swirling vortex ringed with fire.
2. The moment of awakening—depicted
as a man’s face, eyes stretched wide, filled with shock or revelation.
3. An outstretched finger—its tip
glistening with a single bead of blood.
4. A worn notebook—its pages filled
with promises no one remembered making.
5. A young boy—alone in the middle
of a luminous, chaotic city at night.
6. A crowded party—dancers spinning,
musicians howling in a storm of color and sound.
7. A miniature statue—weathered and
elegant, a forgotten Greek god.
8. A cassette tape—label faded,
contents unknown.
9. A handful of chess
pieces—scattered mid-game, no board in sight.
10. The final card bore only text, stark and unadorned. In clear Spanish script
it read:
El mal va contra la naturaleza. La
naturaleza es el enemigo.
Evil
goes against nature. Nature is the enemy.
*
He was known in whispers and half-forgotten songs as
the Young Horned One—the one who, against all odds and outside every known
prophecy, rose up and overthrew the old kings. One by one, he dismantled their
brittle thrones, toppled their golden statues, and scattered their dusty crowns
into the wind.
The
ancient prophets had seen him long before he arrived. In fevered visions, they
described a ram with two long, spiraling horns—horns that curved like galaxies
and shimmered with blood and light. This ram, they said, would not preserve the
world, but wreck it. Shatter it. And from its broken bones, make something
entirely new.
He
was that ram. The destroyer. The seed of a second creation.
And
though we had heard his name in a thousand forms, we did not truly know
him—until the moment he stood before us. Not as a symbol, not as a vision, not
as an echo through scripture. But real. Breathing. Human.
And
when we looked into his eyes, we saw it at last—the ancient force wearing a familiar
face. Not a god. Not a man. But something that walks between. The one the world
tried to forget, and failed.
*
Long
before it bore the name, he visited the City of Truth. Back then, it was just
another city of stone and silence, perched between the desert and the river,
ruled by men who spoke in measured tones and wore the weight of history like
robes.
There,
in a chamber lit by oil lamps and shadow, he was brought before the high priest
and the assembled counselors. They greeted him not with suspicion, but with
quiet awe. A heavy volume was placed before him—the Black Book, its pages
brittle with age.
Inside,
he saw himself. His name. His story. The prophecy written long before his
birth.
“What is this?” he asked, voice shaking. “How can this be true?”
The
high priest only smiled.
“Do you not see what’s happening?” one counselor whispered.
“Open your eyes,” said another. “If
not now—then when?”
*
I saw him
vanquish death—right there, in front of me.
Not
metaphorically. Not in some dream or legend. It happened in real time, under
the open sky. Death stood before him, vast and cold, and he simply stepped
forward and shattered it, like someone breaking a mirror with their breath.
It
was after that moment they began to call him the divine king—not among men, but
among the immortal spirits, the Old Ones who linger behind the veil of time. A
ruler not of nations, but of thresholds. One who would never truly die.
He
stood among them, blinking, disoriented.
“What is happening?” he asked.
One
of the spirits approached, placing a hand gently on his chest.
“This,” they said, “is
what we’ve been working toward. All of us. Across lifetimes, through fire and
forgetting.”
“Now is the time,” another voice said.
“Open your eyes. Once and for all.”
*
Two men
sit side by side in a modest living room. I am one of them.
And
yet, when I look at the scene, I feel that uncanny sensation—the quiet vertigo
of seeing oneself from the outside. That strange dislocation that comes from
watching your own presence take shape in the world, as if you were a character
in someone else’s memory.
We
sit on a shiny brown leather couch that creaks softly beneath us. Between us
stands a low glass table, its surface clean, reflecting the pale afternoon
light and the uncertain shapes of two coffee cups, neither of them touched.
“The work,” the other man says, his voice calm and low, “comes from a determined process. But the
work also comes from chance.”
I
turn to him, and he’s no longer looking at me. He gazes into a mirror across
the room, not admiring, not searching—just witnessing. Then, wordlessly, he
stands. He crosses the space with quiet grace and leans back against the light
brown wall behind us.
His
black and white hat, old but well-kept, casts a narrow shadow behind his head. His
black curls brush the top of his shoulders, and his brown eyes carry a downward
slope—as if the weight of sorrow and joy have found a way to balance in him.
“The work,” he says again, softly this time, “comes from somewhere. But it also comes from nowhere. And eventually…
it returns.”
A
shaft of sunlight breaks through the blinds and dapples the bridge of his
nose—sun spots from another life, from countless afternoons spent outside,
under skies now long gone. His goatee is peppered with gray, and the corners of
his lips tug into a half-smile, not quite ironic, not quite sad.
I
lean back into the couch, listening, waiting. But for now, he has nothing more
to say.
And
so we sit in silence, the two of us, in that sacred and fragile space between
speech and understanding.
*
“For me, right now,” he said, his voice steady, his gaze fixed on mine, “the Fallen Angel is you, brother. That’s
how it is.”
He
let the words hang in the air between us like smoke from an unseen fire.
“You may not want to hear it. I wouldn’t
either, if I were you. But that doesn’t make it any less true.”
I
nodded, though something in me resisted. The meaning curled around my mind like
a vine—half-visible, half-felt. I didn’t fully understand. Not then. Not yet.
What could he possibly mean?
He
continued, eyes distant now, as if he were speaking to something beyond the
room.
“The magical art of conjunction—true
conjunction—was once symbolized by the minotaur. The man-beast. The one who
lives at the center of the maze, half-human, half-god. Half-cursed. He is the
Horned One. The two sides of the world—light and dark, order and chaos—folded
into one trembling form.”
His
voice lowered. I could barely hear him.
“That’s you now.”
I
leaned back in my chair, the weight of his words pressing against my chest. I
turned toward the window.
Outside,
the street shimmered in the midday heat. The sun had made the asphalt slick and
black, a river of tar stretching in both directions. It looked nothing like a
labyrinth.
And
yet, in that moment, I felt it: The floor of the maze was beneath me. And I was
about to start running.
*
“All ancient
images,” he said, almost in a
whisper, as if reciting something remembered from a book written long ago, “carry a dual nature. They’ve already been
used a thousand times—by priests, by poets, by madmen. And they’ll be used a
thousand more. Their meanings shift, yes, bend and twist with every age. But
the meanings don’t matter. What matters is the image itself. The image
remains.”
I
nodded slowly, not because I understood completely, but because I sensed the
weight of truth in his words. Outside, an old red Toyota passed down the
street, coughing through a gear change, the kind of sound that vibrates faintly
in your chest. The world kept moving.
He
turned toward me again.
“We’ve been performing a powerful
invocation, you and I. Stronger than either of us knew.”
His
voice grew firmer.
“We sang a song that should’ve stayed
buried. Forgotten. Lost to time. But we took the steps—we opened the door, lit
the candle, called the name. We let it through.”
I
looked at him, confused and unsettled, but something in me knew he wasn’t
wrong.
“This,” he said, gesturing gently around the room, at nothing
and everything, “this has been happening
for far longer than you realize. Maybe lifetimes. Maybe longer. And the moment
you begin to sing that song, even quietly, even in your sleep—it echoes.
Backward. Forward. Through time itself. You might not be able to stop. You
might not even remember starting.”
He
stood and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“We began something together,” he said. “A
true work. We fed it. With attention, with thought, with breath. It grows now.
You can feel it, can’t you? This thing standing between us—glimmering,
half-formed—it’s the very thing you used to speak about endlessly, not knowing
what it was. Now it has shape. Now it has hunger.”
He
leaned closer, eyes dark with recognition.
“We are raising the Fallen Angel. You
know it. I know it. We are calling back the one who has been exiled from
memory. The one who was never supposed to return.”
*
I began to
see things in those days. Things I don’t normally see. Subtle distortions in
the fabric of what I’d once called reality—flickers, echoes, intrusions. And I
began to think in a very strange way.
It
felt as though all the years I had known him—long, complicated years filled
with tangled words and laughter and silence—were suddenly compressed into a
single second. A blink. And in that same moment, each second stretched outward
into the size and weight of a full year.
Each
of those seconds became a door. And each door opened in all directions.
An
infinite maze. An impossible geometry. A center without a center, multiplying
endlessly.
And
I am running through it—always running—even when I appear to be still. Even
when I sit quietly, or lie in bed with my eyes closed, I am running. Not away,
not toward. Just through.
This,
I came to understand, was a kind of rebirth. But not the joyful kind sung about
in sacred texts. This was a birth into awareness, a violent emergence into the
unspeakable now.
I
saw scenes—one after another like slides from a dream projector. I was present
in each of them. And sometimes, he was there too. Watching. Or guiding. Or
lost.
One
moment from the past.
One moment from the future.
One moment that never happened—but should have.
They
came like waves.
And I no longer trusted the shore.
*
On the
far outskirts of the Golden City—where the broken streets gave way to gravel
and silence—I stumbled upon the scene of a recent death. The body hung like a forgotten
emblem from a rusted metal spire jutting out from the upper floor of a
half-collapsed building.
It
was fresh. Too fresh. The air still carried the weight of it.
The
figure swung gently in the breeze, limp and surrendered, his clothes fluttering
like tired flags. A sense of finality clung to the concrete, the dust, the
distant windows that stared down with glassy indifference.
I
turned my gaze and noticed a young man sitting nearby, cross-legged, on a low
brick wall. His arms wrapped tightly around his legs, hands tucked beneath his
feet as if trying to preserve the last of his warmth. He didn’t look up at the
corpse. He didn’t look at me.
His
eyes were locked downward, focused on the man sitting across from him.
The
older man had a full black beard and wore dark sunglasses, though there was no
sun. His jeans were stained, dusty, torn at the knees. He sat hunched forward,
elbows on thighs, speaking in a low, measured voice. I couldn’t make out the
words, but the rhythm was unmistakable; steady, coaxing, intimate.
A
sermon, perhaps.
A spell.
A farewell.
The
boy nodded occasionally, like someone being taught how to remember.
None
of them acknowledged me.
But I knew, somehow, that I had entered the middle of something ancient.
Something already in motion.
*
Later that
day, I saw a group of men arrive in a truck—an old industrial vehicle, painted
in dull white, the paint chipped and streaked with rust. In the back stood a
tall mechanical crane, folded like the wing of some mechanical bird. It groaned
as the engine idled, and for a moment I imagined it yawning before it would do
its work.
They
stepped out in silence—five or six of them, maybe more. All dressed in dark
gray uniforms, work-stained and dust-covered. They moved with a strange
deliberateness, not rushed, not hesitant. They didn’t look up at the hanging
body, but I could feel the gravity of their purpose. I assumed they had come to
retrieve the corpse, to bring it down from its perch on the metal spire. It was
the only logical thing.
I
approached them slowly, keeping my voice calm.
“Do you need help?” I asked.
No
one responded.
Not a word.
Not even a nod or a shift in posture.
I
tried again, louder this time. Still nothing. Their eyes moved past me as if I
were fog. As if I hadn’t spoken at all. I stood there for a while, just
watching.
They
went about their task with methodical grace—each gesture careful, as if the act
of retrieving the dead required more reverence than language could offer.
Or perhaps it had simply been happening for so long that they no longer needed
to speak.
*
Beside
the spire where the body swayed in the cold wind, there stood a tall pockmarked
wall, its surface blistered with time and corrosion. Just beyond it, in the
shadowed courtyard of the ruined building, a group of men had gathered in a
wide, deliberate circle. Their movements were slow, synchronized, as if pulled
by an unseen rhythm from the depths of something older than the city itself.
They
spoke no words. And yet I knew—without language, without explanation—what they
were preparing. A ritual. An invocation to Mother Death, the silent force that
births endings and waits in every shadow. The knowledge didn’t arrive in my
mind as thought but as certainty, as if it had been planted there long ago and
was only now sprouting into awareness.
The
men wore enormous masks carved from wood and bone; grotesque things that
covered their entire faces and fell down over their chests. On those masks were
the visages of the Old Ones, the pre-human gods. Their faces were vast and unnatural:
crooked jaws filled with needle-teeth, hollow eyes glowing faintly, long
curling horns and tongues twisted into sacred geometries. These were the
deities spoken of only in trembling whispers, the ones who ruled long before
the mind of man flickered into being.
Suddenly,
a deep, impossible sound echoed through the courtyard—a long, wet vibration
blown through the spiraled cavity of a massive seashell horn. It filled the air
like the voice of the ocean itself, reverberating up through the empty floors
of the ruined structure, until even the broken windows trembled with resonance.
Then
I saw them.
On
the topmost floor, in that skeletal ruin of what had once been a proud
building, stood the Old Gods themselves. Not statues. Not dreams. They were there—immense,
regal, their limbs wrapped in decayed finery, their faces shifting like smoke.
They shimmered at the edge of the visible world, existing just outside the
rules of shape and substance. Their eyes held no malice. Only inevitability.
Their
presence removed all doubt from my soul.
I
could not speak. I could not scream. My limbs betrayed me. I stood paralyzed,
my heart thundering with the rhythmic beat of ancient drums that weren’t
there—yet I heard them.
Then,
from the summit of the building, a tall man stepped forward, robed in gray. He
moved slowly, with no fear of the sheer drop at his feet. He stopped at the
very edge of the roof and looked directly at me.
His
gaze was more than sight. It was recognition. It was judgment. And in that
moment, something snapped into place.
This
ritual was not for the dead man on the spire. The circle. The masks. The gods.
The sound. The silence. It was all for me.
I
had not stumbled here by chance. I had not wandered into sacred ground by
accident. I had been called.
And
I had arrived exactly on time.
*
I had
been told more than one lie—softly, convincingly, and with just enough truth to
make me believe. I had heard a recording once, barely audible, drowned in
static and distortion. Beneath the white noise were fragments of broken
conversations, half-sentences whispered by people I would never meet again. I
had held in my hands a single lost memento from a person whose name I didn’t
know—a token so intimate it felt like memory itself. I had seen an old
photograph from a party long buried by time. A blur of faces. Glasses raised in
frozen laughter. Friends whose names I could barely recall, whose absence hung
heavier than their presence ever did. I had listened to a song—haunting,
aimless—about a boy who had lost his way and never found his home again. It
stayed with me. I had broken promises too, not all of them mine. I bore them
like debts unpaid. A single scratch ran across my index finger. Faint, but it
pulsed now and then, like it remembered something I didn’t.
And
once—just once—I had taken a journey to the very center of the world. Not a
place, but a moment. A still point. A breath between lifetimes.
Now,
I could feel it approaching. Not judgment. Not reward. Awakening.
At
last, it was my time. And whether I was ready or not, the door had already
begun to open.
*
The man on the roof raised a gleaming metal triangle
high above his head, its edges sharp and unnatural, humming faintly before even
a sound had been struck. In that moment—silent, suspended—I felt the world
tilt. No, not tilt—rupture.
Reality
itself shifted around his hands. My perception fractured and reassembled into
something else, something other. It
was as if a window had opened—not a window of glass, but a window cut into the
fabric of existence, and through it, I saw what no living creature was meant to
see. Not because it was forbidden, but because it was too vast, too real, too
unfiltered for the human mind to contain.
Waves
of energy rippled outward from him, expanding in perfect concentric circles
that folded over themselves like the movements of ancient machines. Each pulse
came in a blinding hue: blue, red, green, yellow, white—colors so intense they
seemed to bypass the eye entirely and press themselves directly into the folds
of my mind.
And
behind me, the horn still sounded—low, vast, infinite. A single note that was
not music but something deeper, more elemental. It vibrated not through the air
but through matter itself. It shook the skeleton of the buildings, rattled the
ground beneath my feet, and plunged directly into my chest. My heart began to
resonate with it, an involuntary instrument echoing back its impossible tone.
The
sound had no beginning. It had no end.
It had always been sounding.
It would always be sounding.
Tears
welled in my eyes, but I was not crying. My body simply reacted, overwhelmed by
a force I could not name. It was not sadness. Not joy. Not terror. Something
else. Something that existed outside the accepted range of emotions.
And
then, above the pockmarked wall, the Old Gods began to dance.
Their
forms—colossal and shifting, clad in smoke and time—moved in a perfect circle,
limbs extending and retracting, heads turning in unison, their mouths chanting
in frequencies too low for language. They moved like shadows at the edge of a
flame, both present and unreal, both ancient and newborn.
And
I… I began to dance as well.
Without
instruction. Without thought. My arms rose. My body bent and turned. I let
myself be carried by the rhythm all around me, by the secret currents of
movement I could hear, and those I could only feel; waves bursting from some
unseen dimension and passing straight through me.
I
was no longer separate from this ritual. I was inside it. I was a participant.
Or maybe I always had been.
I
looked up again at the man on the roof. The triangle now vibrated in his hands
like a tuning fork struck by an invisible hammer. And he looked at me—no, into me—with eyes that glowed not with
light, but with recognition.
And then I saw them. The horns.
Great and curved, luminous and solemn, rising from his head like ancient
instruments of judgment and clarity. They were not adorned. They were not
symbolic. They simply were. And in
seeing them, something inside me cracked open.
There were no more questions. No more doubts. Only knowing.
The dance continued. The horn droned. And the world, as I had known it, quietly
disappeared.
*
On
Sunday, I sat alone on the edge of a burnt, broken yellow wall, its surface
warm from the sun and scarred by time.
Across from me stood the hollow remains of an old abandoned house. Inside,
through a jagged opening where once there was a window, I saw what was left of
the living room, all dust-swept, silent. Two torn paintings still clung to the
cracked wall, half-ripped and weather-faded.
The one on the left caught my eye: jagged, flowing lines in shades of ochre and
gray, winding across the canvas in uneven loops; a single figure in the
distance.
Beneath it sat an empty brown wooden table with a chess set on top of it. It
looked as if someone might return to play soon. But no one ever would.
*
I no
longer think of him as gone. His journey, I now understand, has only just
begun.
What
we shared, this life, this narrow slice of the world, was only one of many
layers. One version of the truth. One dream among countless dreams. There were
facets of him I never knew, lives lived in places I would never reach, moments
scattered across time like stars that never formed a single constellation.
I
imagine him now at rest. Resting not in silence, but in stillness. Resting from
the burden of sorrow, from the weight of endless tears. Resting from the
blinding light and the crushing darkness.
So
many people gone. So many torn away from the thread of our days. I picture all
of us together in some warm, quiet place—a space beyond hours, beyond years. A
realm where the future holds no promise and the past no coherence. Where
stories do not resolve but unfold in shifting shapes, a fog of symbols and
memories that never quite settle into a single meaning. A mystery that resists
conclusion. A mist that changes with every breath and never allows itself to be
named.
Soon,
I will begin my long walk home. When I do, I know the story will begin again.
The memories will return—fragmented, luminous, aching.
And
perhaps this time, in the second telling or the seventh, I’ll see something I
missed before. A gesture. A glance. A moment that changes everything.
And
I will understand not the ending, but the beginning.
