Chapter twelve: paradoxical past
Caelum's eyes snapped open, his mind was hazy with confusion. The sensation of weightlessness wrapped around him like a suffocating blanket.
"Where?" With his burry vision, caelum looked around. He wasn't in his room nor was he in the cosmos he had created.
Instead, he floated in a vast, pure white void. An endless expanse devoid of direction, depth, or anything remotely tangible.
'Where am i? This silence is deafening.' His pulse pounded in his ears as he tried to make sense of where he was.
Just when he was looking everywhere in a desperation, something brushed against his leg.
A small toddler, dashing past him with the careless energy of youth. His head snapped down, eyes widened at the sight before him.
A child looking no older than five years old ran across the empty void, his tiny footsteps echoed despite the lack of a ground.
Then the boy jumped into the open arms of a woman standing nearby. Her hair was tied back in a neat bun, streaks of white peeking through the familiar dark strands.
Her gentle features radiated warmth, her arms wrapped securely around the child as she lifted him up effortlessly.
Caelum stared at the fimilar woman dumbfounded.
"Mom?" His own voice was filled with disbelief, clinging to every syllable.
"And that child.....is that me?" It was Caelum, Caelum at five years old.
His mind was already sluggish, struggling to process the impossibility of what he was seeing. It wasn't just a memory. It was playing out in front of him like a scene unfolding in real-time.
The younger version of himself giggled, squirming in his mother's arms before holding up something small between his fingers. "Mom! Mom! Look! I caught a ladybug!"
His mother laughed softly, ruffling his hair.
"Cae, you're quite good at bug catching, huh?" she teased with her tender voice, this scene before him was something Caelum didn't recognise, he didn't remember a memory like this.
Caelum's whole existence froze, he felt his heart twisting into an unrecognizable knot.
"This memory....This has never happened, i have never seen mother smiling. Let alone smiling at me!" Caelum felt conflicted, in his memories his mother was never that warm to him.
She wasn't cruel, but she had always been distant and reserved, as though something invisible always stood between them.
'So why?'
"Is this really a memory…?" His own voice gripped his chest like a vice.
He swallowed hard, looking around, only to see more scenes unfolding before him.
One after another, familiar places and familiar voices of familiar figures. Yet all of them felt very wrong to Caelum's confused mind, but this wasn't the end.
A new memory formed in front of him, He was walking down a street, his tiny hands clutching onto both his mother and father's palms as they strolled along the sidewalk.
His childish voice rang through the air
"Mom, Dad! I want a big robot!"
"Of course, sweetie. We'll get you one." His father chucklet and His mother smiled.
Then another memory, one after another unrecognizable memory flashed by, laughter filled their family home.
"Are you kidding me? Who is playing a joke on me? Dammmit!" Caelum subconsciously knew he was alone in this place, but still choose to shout his thoughts out.
He saw himself playing with his older sister and brother, the three of them smiling and teasing each other as they played a board game together.
One after another, these happy moments flashed before his eyes, memories of warmth and of love. Memories Of a childhood where he was cherished, a childhood that had never existed.
"What the hell even is this…? Ha?"
his heart pounded in his chest, the overwhelming contradiction of these memories suffocated him.
"This all feels like someone edited my entire life to look happy. Ha…!?" His voice cracked at the end, disbelief creeping into his very being.
This wasn't just strange or unnerving, it made him feel an unexplainable existential crises. But between all those fabricated memories, one scene stood apart, one that felt painfully real.
His mother sat quietly in the middle of the white void. Unlike the other versions of her, this one looked tired.
Her usual elegance remained, but there was something weighing down her shoulders.
A small boy, himself at five years old lay curled up in her lap, sleeping peacefully as she gently stroked his hair.
Her facial expression soft. Yet, at the same time, her eyes were distant, as though she were looking at the real caelum far beyond time.
Slowly, she spoke.
"Caelum." The small child stirred, responding with a drowsy voice "Yes, Mom?"
With a small pause and a bit of hesitation. Her fingers stilled in his hair.
"I don't know how, nor do I know why…" she mumbled. "But…"
Her hand resumed stroking his head.
"I have a feeling that someday, someday soon, your dad, me, and even your siblings…" Her voice wavered.
"We will turn our backs on you."
The real Caelum stiffened all over. The small child in her lap looked up at her, seemingly confused.
"What do you mean, Mom?"
His mother forced a smile, but there was something painfully fragile about it. "I don't know, my child. You can call it a mother's gut feeling… but I feel like in the future, you will suffer a lot."
Her shaky breath was visible, her fingers tightening in his small tufts of hair. "We may not be there to support you."
"We may turn our backs on you." A small drop ran down her cheeks
The small Caelum trembled, his tiny hands gripped onto his mother's cheeks, his eyes brimming with tears. "Waaah! Mom, don't cry!"
His mother wipped away her tears with one hand, she gently cupped his cheek with the other. Her words came like a whisper against the void.
"But remember this… no matter what happens in the future..." Her lips trembled as she forced a warm smile.
"No matter what might change in us.." Tears fell onto her son's tiny hands.
"We will… I will always love you."
When she said those words, the entire void trembled. The countless fabricated memories shattered like glass, crumbling into golden dust before fading into the abyss.
All that was left was Caelum, standing frozen in the middle of it all.
His mind reeled, his mother's voice echoed within him, it was haunting and unshakable to the core.
"We will turn our backs on you."
"We will… I will always love you."
"What are these paradoxical memories? Ughh i don't, i don't know what's going on anymore." Caelum had red eyes with his face lowered.
It was like a truth was buried beneath unknown circumstances.
Soon, the world around him collapsed, and he woke up.
His body jerked, his eyes snapped open, his chest heaved with labored breaths. Sweat drenched his skin, his fingers trembling as he gripped onto the solid ground beneath him.
"A dream? But it was so vivid.." The cold, white walls of the room he created stretched around him.
His body lay sprawled across the floor, exactly where he had collapsed after the willpower outburst from his breakthrough.
"Huguk!" Caelum pressed his hands against the floor, standing up. But the lingering fear of that vision was way too clear.
That memory which seemed like a impossible moment left him dumbfounded.
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Caelum stood still, but his mind raced.
"That paradoxical dream, if it even was one..." His uneasy thoughts clung to him, refusing to fade even when he brought himself back into reality.
The voice of his mother, that was unfamiliar to him by how gentle it sounded. Each of her words were sharp enough to carve itself into his skull.
The contradiction gnawed at him. 'Mother had never been cruel, but she had never been that warm either you know?'
'So what the hell was that? A lie crafted by my own subconscious?Or… what?'
'If it was just a hallucination, then why did it feel so real?' He wasn't the type to dwell on dreams. Normally, he would just shrug it off and move on.
But this, it wasn't something he could brush aside so easily. "Why the hell did I see that?"
It was obvious he felt uneasy. His entire childhood had been painted over with an illusion of happiness, a fabricated warmth that never even existed in his real memories.
And at the center of it all, his mother, smiling, saying things that felt both comforting and cruel.
As he was racking his brain over this, another thought struck him like a thunderclap out of nowhere.
"Wait!"
"I have collapsed inside the painting."
"It felt like my willpower had surged out of control, it was that? It overwhelmed my body until my consciousness snapped?"
His eyes widened as a realization swept through him. "Did I… break through?"
The unease in his chest and the lingering echoes of that dream took a back seat
Something more exhilarating rushed in to take its place. His thoughts moved away from the unsettling memories.
"Ahhhhhhhhh, Forget it. Just a useless dream anyways and it's over!"
"Whatever that dream was, whatever those false memories meant, i will deal with it later."
"Right now, there was something else i need to confirm." Caelum focused inward, reaching for the familiar thread of willpower that had always existed inside him.
And when he did-
Boom!
A massive surge of energy erupted from within. His body trembled, his skin buzzed like lightning had just crackled through his veins.
"This is…holy shit!" He shuddered. "This feels nothing like before. It's like, If before my willpower had felt like a vague force swirling inside my subconscious mind....now it was tangible."
To Caelum, it felt like a presence that responded to his thoughts with sharp precision. It moved aound him.
Like a thick energy with Layered presence, No longer just a mental force, but undeniably real.
"Amazing." He can't even describe his feelings in words, a small smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
His willpower had evolved in a way he couldn't even imagine.
Caelum's body felt oddly light, yet grounded like something fundamental about him had changed.
His eyes landed on the quill lying nearby. Without thinking, he reached for it.
"Ok, let's test this."
Then like a switch flipping in his brain, a new strange sensation flooded his body.
"Not only does my willpower feel fully recharged, but..."
"…It feels incomprehensible compared to before," he umbled, trying to grasp just how much it had changed.
"Isn't this insane? it had practically doubled." Excitement flared in his chest, He needed to test this.
With a quick motion, he pressed the quill to the empty space, towards the white walls and drew two large rectangles.
The ink gleamed. In an instant, two massive windows formed, cutting into the walls like portals. Beyond them, an endless sea of stars stretched out into a vast and breathtaking cosmos.
Caelum took a step back. Then another. His lips parted, and suddenly, a laugh erupted from his throat while admiring the sight.
A full-bodied, uncontrollable laugh that started deep in his gut and spilled out.
"Ha… Haha…!" His shoulders trembled, shaking his head in sheer disbelief.
It wasn't a simple he power boost. It was the fact that he felt Like his whole being had evolved overnight.
He felt Stronger than he had ever been before.
As he focused inward and let his willpower spread throughout his entire body, flowing from his fingertips to his toes, coating every inch of his skin, sinking into his very core.
But soon after, he froze. His jaw slackened as His pupils shrank to pinpricks. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Because what he saw broke his brain, It was his own body.
His muscles, his bones, his bloodstream. all was visible to him, like he had been peeled open like an anatomical model.
Caelum's mouth twitched violently, somewhere between a grimace and absolute horror. His eyes darted left and right.
"…You've got to be kidding me." A bead of sweat rolled down his temple.
He raised a hand, watching as his own tendons flexed beneath his skin in perfect detail.
"…What the actual hell is this?"
His face twisted into an expression so bizarre, a mix between amazement and mild horror, that if anyone had seen him, they probably would have laughed for hours.