Silas awoke to the sound of dripping water.
Not rain. It hadn't rained in days. These drops were slow and rhythmic, like something measured—like the ticking of a grandfather clock without hands.
He opened his eyes. The cabin ceiling stared down at him, greyed with time, the lines of old wood running like veins above. The sound continued.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
He sat up.
The notebook was still beside him. The words on the last page had not faded. "You may ask. But you will not be spared the answer."
He hadn't dared write anything since. Not out of fear—Silas didn't scare easily—but because writing seemed suddenly sacred. Like carving a name on a tombstone before the burial.
He rose. The sound came from the back room.
There was no back room.
And yet—
He stepped into the shadowed corridor where only the wall had been before.
The hallway shouldn't have existed. The cabin was a one-room shack, old and bare. But the corridor was narrow and long, its walls papered with yellowed script in languages he didn't recognize. Some lines looked burned in. Others bled ink.
He didn't question it. Not yet. Silas had learned that the world didn't follow rules when it came to him.
As he walked, the sound grew louder. Not just dripping now—but tapping, scratching, ticking. Like the universe had developed a pulse and didn't know how to regulate it.
He reached a door.
It was made of obsidian. Black, smooth, almost liquid. No handle. No lock. Only a single phrase carved into its surface in deep, neat grooves:
"Behind every question is a silence that has waited longer than time."
Silas breathed in.
Then out.
And touched the door.
It opened.
What lay beyond was not a room.
It was space.
Not outer space. Not void. But the strange, suspended silence of a room unformed—where walls floated in and out of existence, where staircases led to nowhere, and books opened to pages that fluttered without wind.
And standing at the center of it all was a figure cloaked in colors Silas's eyes could not fully perceive.
It didn't have a face. Or maybe it had too many.
It turned toward him, though it had no front.
And spoke, though no sound came out.
Yet Silas heard it.
"You called out."
He swallowed. "I didn't mean to."
"You did not need to mean it. You simply needed to mean."
"Who are you?"
"A breath in a silence. A footstep in a void. I am not the one you seek. I am only the one that answered."
Silas stepped forward. "Then tell me—why? Why all of it? Why do I suffer? Why was I born to be alone?"
The figure tilted its head.
"Why is the wrong question. It implies design. You seek meaning, not motive."
Silas's fists clenched. "Then give me meaning. Tell me what all this is. What I am."
The figure stepped aside.
Behind it was a mirror.
In it, Silas saw himself.
But older. Eyes hollow. Shoulders bent. Alone on a throne made of his own memories.
"This is who you will become," the figure said. "Unless you climb."
"Climb what?"
"The shape of reality. The first layer."
"I don't understand."
"You will."
And the figure touched his forehead.
The world shattered.
Silas fell through it—not like falling through space, but like plunging through forgotten thoughts. Through dreams he hadn't had yet. Through questions unborn. And as he fell, he saw truths written across the dark:
That time was a fiction.
That space was a suggestion.
That reality was a note in a symphony no one remembered composing.
He landed—gently.
Back in his cabin.
Only it was wrong.
The ceiling was taller. The cracks were in different places. His notebook sat on the table, untouched—but older. Dustier. As though it had waited for him.
Outside the window, the sky had no stars.
Only letters, glowing and shifting.
As if the night had become a page.
He stepped outside.
The world had changed.
He stood in a vast meadow that stretched forever. The trees were shaped like hourglasses. The rivers flowed upward. The wind carried whispers—not in his ears, but in his bones.
He had climbed. He didn't know how. But he had.
And the cost of that ascent was written in how the world no longer made sense.
And yet—it felt truer than anything else had.
The voice returned—now inside him.
"This is the first space between your world and the truth. The Layer of Ink. Here, stories take root."
He looked at his hand.
His fingers were stained.
With ink.
His own words had begun to rewrite the world around him.
"I didn't ask for this," he whispered.
"You did. When you asked why."
He fell to his knees.
Alone again. But this time, aware.
He didn't weep.
Instead, he whispered the only truth he knew:
"I'm not ready."
"No one ever is."