The dream gathered shape after that same stomach-dropping plunge—only this time the fall did not end. I yelled, arms flailing, voice dragged thin as the scene stretched and snapped like an eyelid stung by light. Then—pulp—the world hit wood and the impact stayed. I was seated, strapped or merely planted, on a polished wooden chair whose grain was so smooth it felt like glass under my palms. I inhaled, held, let the breath out to steady myself. The place glowed with the last embers of a setting sun, the light dying like a small, reluctant sun on the horizon.
Books rose up in rows around me—shelves tall as trees. The room smelled of old paper, leather, and a kind of time-soaked musk that made the air feel heavy with memory. Somewhere under that weight there was something sweet—citrus, or jasmine—so subtle I could not name it. The silence was thick; even my echo seemed to be absent.
"Hello? Is anyone here?" I called. The sound scattered and returned thin.
A footstep answered—a crisp sound on polished floor, heels clicking like the closing of a sentence. She emerged as if a page had been turned: a woman in a green frock that layered like leaves, gloves of black lace veiling her hands which cradled a heavy tome. A bonnet shadowed her face. Up close she was too precise, too finished—alive but someone had carved her from ideal and left a seam.
I wanted to reach for a mirror. My hands found glass and I stared. I was me, but not—close enough that the difference made my skin prickle.
"System?" I said, then heard the word slip out wrong. The voice—her voice—answered without moving her lips, dry and intimate as paper.
"Close, but not quite," she said, then, as if conceding to my fumbling, offered, "Axiom. That will do."
She sat—a chair appearing under her as if summoned by etiquette. A small servant chair, and she perched as if on stage. Her manner was casual, almost bored. Her voice slipped into the air and made clean lines across my fog.
"Maybe the fool first," she muttered to herself, flipping an invisible page.
"Axiom?" The word caught like a deer in headlights. I felt a cold thread run down my spine. You — you are that? I asked, the memory of the castle like a jagged scar in my mind: the thing in the dark, the Page of Swords. She smiled without humor.
"What are you?" I asked, the present pressing the past away with its questions.
She sipped from a teacup that had not been there a breath before, and the cup made no sound against the saucer. "I suppose I could tell you," she said. "Though 'tell' is generous. It will be more useful if you understand."
I wanted to be impatient, to press for names of makers, of motives. She seemed to expect that. A book appeared in her hands—blank-spined to my eye, then, at a tilt, full of letters I somehow understood. A dictionary. She tossed it like a child offering candy.
"The Absolute Unborn," she began, voice clean as ink, "are not gods or spirits. They are living axioms—principles made manifest. They are not beings with wills; they are the concepts themselves."
She bit a chocolate bar that had not been moments before in her hand. It was absurd to be handed candy in the middle of metaphysics, and that absurdity anchored me. I took it, absentminded, and the taste was bitter-sweet.
"You can think of the world as a game," she said, drawing on a scrap of paper. "We—everyone and everything—are characters in that game. The Architects are powerful players: they reshape landscapes, they call miracles into being. But even they obey the rules. The Absolute Unborn are the source code. They are gravity, causality, logic. They don't desire or scheme—they simply are the law that runs."
She sketched, slow and deliberate: a lattice of lines and symbols that felt like rules forming under my eyes. The greenhouse appeared around us as she drew—a glass room thick with roses, and graves beneath them in equal measure. The roses smelled like the world before language.
"You can't fight them," she said, setting the puzzle down in my hands without the least patronizing note. "Not as you fight people. You can't swing at gravity and cut it down. You can only exist within the law." She poured tea like a teacher demonstrating a point, small steam curling in patterns that didn't obey my need for sense.
"If the code needs to change, it changes. Mortals interpret a change as a miracle or a breakdown. That's our translation." She paused, looking for the exact place where I might mishear. "They are not cruel, necessarily. They are amoral. They do not care. They 'are'—and that is all."
I thought of the Page of Swords, of things unmade and remade in a single instant during the frost lock. The memory bruised my chest. "Then what of the Architects? The ones who seem to do things—Alpha, Omega, Méisos?"
Her eyes brightened, the slightest amusement. "They are players—very powerful ones. Imagine a developer with console commands. They can spawn items, alter the terrain, reassign a character's parentage. They bend the game, but never the engine. The engine—the Absolute Unborn—remains. Even gods are bound by the grammar of the world."
She looked at me as if this abstract had teeth. I tasted cold in my mouth.
"What if two forces clashed?" I asked, because the thought of power hitting power made a small, feverish drum in my ribs.
The smile that crossed her lips was slow. "Then the façade of an Architect's omnipotence cracks. Their 'will' is a function of the code; exposed, it's still impressive, but limited. They would be beautiful, finite simulations trying to play at authorship."
She made it sound inevitable. I felt smaller and more like a puppet, then oddly safer—if everything was machinery, error could be debugged. But the comfort was shallow, like warm plate.
"How many of them are there?" I asked next, a question settling in my throat like a stone.
"As many as the Major Arcana," she said, and the answer felt both too neat and terrifying. She named nothing. She did not need to. The titles—The Magician, The High Priestess, The Page—hung between us like cards fanned and waiting.
She set the teacup down. Her voice softened, and for a moment she seemed less like an axiomatic lecture and more like someone sharing private lore. "You can't go to their 'world.' You can only be shown a piece of the code, forced to read a line. When that happens, the mortal mind shudders. Some break. Some are gifted. Most go mad."
I pictured a developer at a console, keys tapping, making choices that felt like prophecy to those below. The image was obscene and relieving at once.
"And the one who can rewrite—who is like a developer and a player?" The question was stupidly small, but I had to know.
She cup-clinked her spoon against porcelain and let the silence do the heavy work. "Even such a being is bound by the engine. They have a powerful console command—yes—but the engine is the engine. The Absolute Unborn remains."
Her explanation shifted into metaphor, then story. "If two such forces ever collided openly, the reveal would be… catastrophic. One would be forced to see the limits of the other. Imagine: a supposed author discovering the book that contains their name and learning they are a sentence in somebody else's sentence."
My head spun in slow circles. The greenhouse before us blurred: roses and headstones, something tender and something final.
She rose, palms folded in habit, and pointed toward a cliff that had not been there a moment before. We stood at the edge. Below us yawned a dark nothing—a vast absence like a throat. The sun sank; color leeched away.
"How many are they?" I repeated.
"As many as the Major Arcana," she said again, and this time I heard the weight of it. Each card a law. Each law an axiom embodied. The world had an alphabet of absolutes; they wrote reality with indifferent hands.
Something in the library loosened—a seam, a pull. The scene rattled. I felt the same nausea that comes before falling, a memory of plummeting stitched into my bones. The cliff fractured like fragile clay. The greenhouse collapsed, roses scattering into black.
I woke with my dress soaked in sweat, heart hammering like a trapped bird. Outside the window the evening had settled—ordinary, ordinary as rain. But the library's sounds still hummed in my ears, its truths unspooling in my skull.
I could no longer decide if I had dreamt a lesson or been shown the underside of reality. Either way, something essential had shifted: a knowledge that names were masks, that power wore rules as much as it wore pride. And somewhere in that booklined hall—whether a waking place or otherwise—someone had smiled and handed me a chocolate bar.