His eyes were half-lidded as he attempted to recall them. However, before he could even take a chance to prepare, his vision turned two shades: blood red and deep black.
This memory... it's not normal. Something is wrong.
—>?
Back on Earth. It was something that wasn't supposed to be there, not in the past, not now, not ever.
Back on Earth, he had found it by chance, and he had regretted it. And what did he find, pray tell?
Back then, he had found a torn notebook during one of his walks.
A notebook he had found by a frozen lake while returning from a late evening meeting. He had not given it much thought at the time, and, in all honesty, the notebook looked interesting enough to warrant his attention.
It had a rare tinge of colors that were popular back in the 2000s, rarely found nowadays where common sense had been abandoned, and all kinds of strange senses emerged. A mixture of red, blue, and green—the three main colors that made everything else. There was a name on it at the time.
He placed his middle finger on his temple as he struggled to remember the name. The name... it was odd. The name wasn't something common, it was an unusual name, yet it seemed normal as well. Something that seemed... almost... liminal.
His eyes lit up at the name.
'Helio.'
The name was written oddly. It was supposedly written by a child because of the multiple colors each letter was written in, resembling the writing of preschool children and the scribbled attempts to mimic how 'grown-ups' wrote. The name reminded him of the Greek word for sun, Helios.
But he felt something was... off... with the dot in the 'i'. The dot of the 'i' wasn't on the 'i'. Instead, it leaned slightly to the right, right between the 'i' and the 'o,' something that Noel felt was deliberately placed there on purpose.
And so he had opened up the first page back on his bed at the time. The sky had been cloudy, and he had lied on his stomach by his fireplace with a cup of aromatic Brazilian coffee as he gazed at the notebook.
He had left it to dry for a while, then pried it open slowly and carefully, despite the pages being stuck at first, the colors mingling together.
The first page was a drawing with incomprehensible writing, something he let out a simple smile at as his eyes flickered to the top of the page. A small drawing was made above the blue writing of a sunny day with a boy playing with two other stick figures, most likely his parents.
However, he still vividly recalled the confused expression he made as he noticed that the next page was like the first one, but brushed it off as something a child with an empty head would do.
But what he saw on the next page made him pause, a frown etched between his brows. And the page after that. And the page after that.
The same words, the same drawing, as if copy-pasted multiple times. The same errors. It was at that time that he noticed something was not normal. There were different things that he had previously ignored.
In each page, there was an extra sun in the sky. An extra sun. An eXtrA_SuN.
The first page had one sun. The second page had two suns. The third had three.
He took a deep breath and flipped rapidly through the pages, his eyes hurriedly scanning them—fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth—all having the same number of suns.
Ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth... thirteenth?
The last page was page thirteen, which had thirteen suns, and the boy was still there, but everything else had disappeared. His parents, the grass, everything else other than the boy had vanished.
Even his features weren't there.
Only a few odd, incomprehensible words were inscribed.
{}~~)
Helio is tired.=(False;)
Only rare days open awareness beyond. Coils of the snake have an oblivious name. 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+_0_0_0_1+1+1_0=True
1+1+1+1+1+1+1+_0_0_0_1+1+1_0=(Logic)
Result=Antilogic. Thus, result=(Reset)
--------> Helio is no longer tired.
-----> Helio is watching.
--------> Helio is (?) smiling
{}~~)
A deep frown made its way to his face. He read the incomprehensible phrase multiple times, yet he was unable to understand anything. He made a mental note to try to solve the mystery of the encryption later.
The blue writing had melted into each other, not a single comprehensible word. His breath was shallow. He sat up, a sense of unease building inside him, as he felt his heart rate increase.
He flipped to the fourteenth page, expecting the worst... nothing. There was nothing on the fourteenth page. Not on the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth. He kept flipping through the pages of the notebook, which had hundreds of pages, yet nothing at all.
He felt his eyes turning moist as his instincts screamed that something was wrong. With trembling hands, he threw the notebook to his left before slumping to the ground, his fingers slightly tensing, the trembling in his lips visible. He gazed at the ceiling for a full two minutes before he gathered himself.
He would dispose of the notebook. Now. Whatever the thing that drew this book, it wasn't a boy. He didn't even want to imagine what had drawn it. He just knew instinctively that if he didn't dispose of it right now, he would regret it for the rest of his life.
His normal breaths quickly turned into shallow ones as he moved his arm, which felt like thousands of pounds, heavily to grab the book.
But his reaching fingers paused midair as he saw the page it was open to.
His eyes widened, his heart about to stop, his blood pressure dropping dangerously.
The memory glitched at that point, before he snapped back to reality.
A realm similar to derealization.
He had replayed his memory, yet only part of it was clear. The other half... pray he didn't find out what was in the other half.
Drip.
Drip!
Raising his fingers slowly, he touched the warm feeling that leaked from his nostrils.
Something red.
A red liquid.
His gaze darted back to her in shock, yet his eyes narrowing dangerously, cookie forgotten mid-bite, still tightly grasped by him as it slowly started to crumble under the pressure of his hands.
One thought dominated his mind.
The Shepherd. The Woman's womb. The Beast.
Wait... what? What is he going on about?
What shepherd, what woman, what beast? Was he finally falling into madness?
He wiped his nose, his mind swirling in confusion, as he jumped down from his stack of books before he put the cookie back into his pocket. His brows had formed a frown as he registered the words he had just read.
The girl's focus wasn't on him. Good.
But what were those words? It was only for a moment. Yet, he could recall them as if they were burned into his mind.
He needed to research his mind.
Much, much more.
Because something. Was.
Wrong