The Fifth Gate – "Orris" Adam Ethan – The Remnants of What He Calls "Himself"
When he crossed the threshold, the white light closed upon him like a blind curtain.He no longer saw a corridor nor transparent walls.He no longer even felt his own weight.It was a moment outside of time.
Then the light receded gradually.He found himself in a fluid void, resembling space, yet filled with transparent threads drifting slowly around him.Each thread pulsed with something like the heartbeat of calmness.
He opened his eyes wider, and images began to fall upon his sight.Overlapping images—he could not tell whether they were memories, visions, or illusions:
— An image of his mother drawing on old paper.— An image of Neil smiling a mocking smile.— An image of the masked one watching him from the shadows.— An image of himself… faceless.
Voices swept through his head, sometimes faint, sometimes screaming:
(Orris… here you do not only recognize the mass, nor merely abstract it.Here you see its fragments—the ones you never realized.If you survive, you will carry them with you.If you fail… you will become of them, and into them.)
He tried to raise his hand.It did not move.He felt his weight return suddenly, along with a strange pain in his bones, as though they were turning into glass shards cracking beneath his skin.
— "Argh…"
He did not scream.But his lip trembled as if it wanted to.And he understood clearly:This was not just another step.Not just a passing gate.
(This phase is the one that separates those who emerge… from those who end.)
The threads now began to move toward him.One of them clung to his side.Inside it, he saw his childhood in its simplest moments…Playing alone beneath a broken tree, silently cutting leaves.He felt no longing.No emotion.
He whispered to himself:
— "…Just a fragment."
The next thread clung to his neck.It showed him a moment he had not known he remembered:His hand trembling as it clutched a piece of metal stained with his mother's blood.No emotions.Just a still image.
Then a third thread touched his chest.This time, he saw nothing.He felt something like absolute emptiness.As though that fragment contained nothing but void.
And that moment alone… frightened him.
He tried to push the thread away.It would not move.He extended his mind, sinking into the layers of cold thought that had always saved him:
(If every thread is a memory… then this void is a fragment I cannot endure.It is something I was not born with, something cut out of me.)
Then a strange question crossed his mind:
(If all this is preparation… then who creates these phases?Who decides that I am worthy of crossing them?Is this transparent world alive?Or merely a gear in the machinery of something greater…?)
In that moment, a voice appeared in his head—different from all the previous voices.A voice without tone, without gender, without features:
(Adam Ethan…Remember: this is only preparation.After Orris… you will no longer have the right to call what is inside you "you.")
Then a circular passage of calm white light opened in the void.He saw another radiance awaiting him.
He sighed slowly.Took a step.And left all the threads behind… except for the thread of void, which remained coiled around his chest.
And he walked toward the next phase.
What Adam Feels as He Leaves "Orris" with the Void-Thread Around His Chest
When he passed through the luminous passage, he felt as though his body lost all weight for a moment, then regained every burden he had ever known in life all at once.His knees nearly collapsed, but a will stripped of emotion kept him standing.
He did not know how much time had passed.Thoughts moved in his head with cautious slowness… with the slowness of one opening the door to a room full of secrets, knowing that entering would change him forever.
(If this thread remains with me… what does it mean?)He raised his hand, touched the place of void upon his chest.No pulse, no warmth, no pain.Just a stable emptiness.
He felt something strange, like a fleeting confession:That he could no longer pretend he knew himself.He could no longer say: "This is me."
(If I no longer know the nature of this void…then what remains of me at all?And if the transparent world still calls this "preparation"…then what awaits when it is complete?)
These questions did not drive him to madness nor to panic.But they suspended him in a cold state he could not name—a state halfway between being and nothingness.
For the first time in a long while, he felt closer to a state than to a person.
He breathed slowly.Then lifted his head toward the next passage.
🌑 Entering the Sixth Gate
⟁ The Sixth Gate – "Norma" ⟁
He advanced with silent steps.Every light around him withered until the world became nearly dark, broken only by whirls of fine ash.
With each step, he felt the thread coiled around his chest pulse faintly.As though the void within it was testing him as well.And for a brief moment…he felt as though the gate itself was watching him, knowing every fragment he had carried from the previous gates.
(Norma…The voice said it was the phase of fixing the "temporary identity."But what identity?)
As though the transparent world did not permit him to ask long.Twenty steps ahead, a glowing circle appeared, hovering in the gray void.From its center emerged white threads, slowly coiling.This time, they did not display images from his memory—but images he had never known:
— An image of his body covered with radiant cracks like glass fissures.— An image of massive shadows standing behind him, featureless.— An image of a beating heart, shattering with each throb, then reforming.
(…This is not me.)
He whispered soundlessly:
— "This… is a model. Something they want to shape out of me."
The threads advanced slowly toward him.He saw that each carried a part of an unfinished form:A hand, a face, a heart, a shadow…as though they were pieces of a mold waiting for his soul to be poured into.
(The temporary identity that will enable you to cross the next gates…will grant you something resembling strength.But it is not you.And it will leave in you a mark that cannot be erased.)
He remembered an echo of a sentence he once read in an old book about forbidden techniques:
"He who carves himself with a tool not of his own hand… loses the ability to discern what he made from what he was."
He did not resist.He did not raise his hand to drive the threads away.He felt something cold infiltrating his depths, until the void coiled on his chest fused with the white circles.And then he understood bitterly:
(After this gate…I will no longer be the one entering the transparent world.I will become something else… even if only partially.)
And for the first time since he had stepped into this place,he felt something resembling unease.
He took one final step, and his body dissolved into a field of shimmering gray light.
Inside the Sixth Gate – Norma
This time, Adam did not feel a sudden transition.It was as though his body disintegrated into ribbons of light slowly orbiting around his axis.He no longer saw himself clearly…no longer heard his heartbeat…nor knew if his eyes were open or closed.
All he found was a hazy presence surrounding him from every side,and a voice—without direction, without emotion, without even language.It spoke directly within him:
(From now on…a temporary identity will be constructed.)
He did not fully grasp what it meant until three transparent masses appeared before him, like giant glass panels, each containing a separate scene:
🔹 The first:An image of his own face… distorted, its features half-melting like wax.Its eyes stared back at him in silent defiance.
🔹 The second:An image of enormous hands, wrapped in a black band pulsing in concentric circles.He sensed with his heart's eye that this band was a forbidden energy, akin to the void that had seeped into his chest.
🔹 The third:An image of a strangely silver heart, beating slowly, sending small vibrations to the edges of the panel…With every pulse, he felt something within his chest contract.
He was not allowed to ask.He was not allowed to refuse.
One by one, the panels splintered into small shards,then floated toward him with dreadful slowness.
The shards of the face… entered his head.The shards of the hands… melted into his arms.The shards of the heart… vanished into the place of his heart.
He felt no pain.But the sensation was… terrifying in its coldness.
Like watching a piece of clear ice pierce into you,knowing that a part of you would never return to what it was.
Then the voice came again:
(This… is the fixation.Now you are able to store the models.)
Another voice—this time like a distant echo, perhaps from his own mind—whispered with mockery:
(Am I now capable… or merely emptied?)
No one answered.
After moments, he noticed his body slowly reassembling.His limbs, his chest, his neck, the bones of his face.But he felt that something strange had seeped into his frame with this "temporary identity":
– A faint sense that he could summon a power whose origin he did not know.– Another sense that he had become lighter… less tied to the "natural" world.– And a final sense, as though he were peering through a window inside his own body… touching everything from afar.
(If this is only the sixth step… then what will come after?)
He did not know.He no longer had the luxury of curiosity.
All he understood was that what he had received here was not merely "power,"but a new "form" of himself—a form he would not easily be able to rid himself of.
Then the gray wall split open before him,and a long passage appeared, streaked with lines of white lightning…
The Seventh Gate awaited.