The Horned One

 

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.