A few hours ago...
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A man's eyes gently flickered open, his blurry vision darkening for a moment, as he dizzily saw a mixture of a plethora of colors, his eyes struggling to open properly.
A profound heaviness enveloped him as if challenging his will, creating a pressure on his eyelids that rivaled the weight of the world that Atlas carried.
His memories were fuzzy, his mind spinning again and again, as he grunted, trying to find a sliver of memory, an anchor he could hold on to. Nausea overwhelmed his senses as memories that weren't his swallowed him.
His eyes snapped open—bloodshot—as he grasped his head in evident head-wracking pain, his head tilting back. He pulled his hair, grinding his teeth to their extreme. His eyes darted on the flooring as vivid images wandered in his mind, images he had never seen, but felt that he could.
Enlightenment had he seen? Nay, it was madness. He had seen a mere glimpse of what contained his enlightenment, and any sane being dared to call this enlightenment?
No, even insane creatures wouldn't dare to call this enlightenment.
This was... something else.
Wait, what madness...? What enlightenment?
What the hell was he going on about?
For the ever-calm Noel, this was something unfamiliar, something he felt for the first time in a long while.
Unease.
The unfamilar feeling he was not used to left him anxious. He hated to lose control of himself, especially when he didn't even know the cause.
The last thing he recalled was his death by falling off a skyscraper, and the last things him remembering was the message he had gotten from the devs. After that, his brain did not allow him to recall anything else. A nagging sense kept poking at him, as if mocking him for not recalling what he had seen.
He closed his eyes, breathing out slowly to control his breathing. With due time, his rigid breathing slowly calmed down, his heart that threatened to make a hole through his ribcage slowly slowing down like a tamed tiger would.
He opened his still-groggy eyes, before he winced in discomfort, his eyes taking in the vibrant colors around him. He brought his hand and attempted to wipe his eyes.
Was he perhaps in heaven? He was incredibly sure that he had died. In a moment of intrigue, Noel entertained the idea before shaking his head, a bitter smile adorning his face.
Heaven?
The joke was too ridiculous for even devils to make. The man was simply beyond redemption for his actions on Earth. At least to the public. Noel simply didn't care about others' perception of him, yet he wasn't a fool to not know what others thought of him.
He did what he pleased on Earth, ignoring what people attempted to force on him. If anything, the only place that would be quite suited for him was hell. But as far as the colors he could identify spoke to his blurry eyes, the place seemed to be too bright and organized to be hell.
Wouldn't that suggest that a third place existed? Between heaven and hell? In the first place, people believed in heaven and hell based on their religions, but had they seen them themselves? How would they know what they looked like?
No, more accurately, how would they know they existed? Noel didn't contradict them, he merely thought logically, something many people would ignore.
In that case, if this was neither hell nor heaven, then... what was this? A dimension between?
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Noel staggered off where he was for a moment in surprise, his eyes darting across the room in confusion, before he quickly rubbed his eyes, accidentally scratching his cheek in the process.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The same taps, as if getting tapped on a table, were heard in front of him. His blurry vision started clearing up a bit, although his cheek stung quite a bit.
The noise came again. Sharper this time. Close. Not thunderous, but unmistakably deliberate — like a polite knock meant to jolt the soul rather than the ears.
The haze before his eyes began to shift. Blinding white turned into shape, structure, texture. Shadows melted into straight lines. Pillars emerged, impossibly tall, flanked by towering shelves of books that disappeared into the sky like ancient trees in a forest untouched by time.
Noel blinked, trying to make sense of the place. It wasn't real. Couldn't be.
And yet it was.
The floor beneath him gleamed, white and unblemished — untouched by dust or decay. Overhead, light poured in from unseen sources, neither cold nor warm, casting no shadows. The walls, or what passed for them, were decorated with grand frescoes that seemed to shimmer ever so slightly, like paintings breathing beneath a thin veil of glass.
Before him, centered like a throne in a cathedral of knowledge, stood a long rectangular table — pure white, pristine, impossible in its perfection.
And at its far end, a man sat.
His tuxedo was black as ink, finely tailored, every crease and fold crisp beyond reason. A white porcelain teacup rested in his left hand, steam curling upward in elegant spirals. His right hand held up a large white-wrinkled newspaper, perfectly unfolded, hiding his face in a way that felt less like an accident and more like a rule of nature.
Noel didn't remember walking toward the table, but somehow he was seated now — stiff, his breath shallow, heart steadying against his ribs like a prisoner adjusting to a new cell.
The silence in the library was absolute — not heavy, but profound, like the quiet found in dreams or sacred spaces. Noel sat at the white table, uncertain whether he was meant to feel honored... or trapped.
Across from him, the man in the black tuxedo sat with serene poise, legs crossed beneath the table, a white porcelain teacup held delicately in his gloved left hand. His face remained hidden behind the neatly folded newspaper he held in his right, as if shielding himself from the world — or perhaps shielding the world from him.
Everything about him seemed calculated, deliberate. He didn't move like a human. He moved like an idea — too still, too perfect.
"..."
The silence went on prolonged, before Noel coughed once, deciding to break the silence. He decided to ask the question anyone would have asked if they were in his place.
"Um... excuse me, but could your grace bestow me the honor of telling me who are you... ?" He asked awkwardly, his eyes blinking as he looked around him at the unfamiliar setting that seemed quite otherwordly.
The man ignored him, or seemed to do so, the silence going on, broken by the occasional sound of the man sipping his tea.
The splendid fragrance of such wafted through the air towards Noel who was starting to get quite unsettled at the lack of response.
However, he raised an eyebrow in caution as he saw the vapor that drafted from the tea having a slight light-blue hue, that seemed odd no matter how he looked at it. The smell was quite odd as well, having the scent of a mixture of burnt dark wood, blueberries, and something else he couldn't quite identify.
His thoughts took a strange turn as he tried to guess the liquid.