Then, as suddenly as it began, it ended. The pressure vanish. The roaring silence fell. The riot of color dissolved. He is no longer tumbling, no longer pulled, no longer compressed. He is… somewhere.
POV [ First person]-
I expect another void, perhaps one with different colors, or a new trajectory. But this was utterly, profoundly different. I am not floating in empty space but standing.
Standing on something solid. Something that feel like… earth?
No, not quite. The ground beneath my feet was soft, yielding, and seemed to faintly glow. It is a pale, luminous white, shot through with veins of silver light that pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm.
The air around me is still, silent, and carried a faint scent I couldn't place – like old paper and fresh rain and something else, something deeply familiar and yet alien.
He look around, his eyes wide. He is in an enclosed space, though the walls aren't walls in the conventional sense. They aren't stone or metal or glass. They were… light. Shimmering curtains and columns of radiant energy, coalescing into semi-solid forms that stretched up and away, dissolving into a hazy, soft luminescence far above. The light isn't harsh; it is gentle, pervasive, casting no shadows.
And then he see them.
Shelves.
Not wooden or metal shelves, but structures formed from the same glowing, yielding material as the floor and walls. They rose in vast, impossible arrays, stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see, receding into the luminous haze. And on these shelves, there are… books.
Not books as he knew them – bound volumes of paper and ink. These are pulsating objects of pure energy, each one distinct in size, shape, and the intensity of its glow. Some were small, flickering like candles. Others are large, radiating a steady, internal light. Their surfaces aren't paper but seemed to shift and ripple, showing fleeting images or patterns just on the edge of comprehension. The air hum with a low, resonant frequency, and he realize it is coming from the books, a silent chorus of countless voices.
This place is a library. A library of… what? Memories? Experiences? Consciousness?
His own memories, the ones he has watched 20 times, felt dull, two-dimensional compared to the vibrant, living energy emanating from the books around him. And the ache of the missing memories returned, sharper now, a desperate yearning. Could they be here? Are the gaps in his life story represented by some specific, glowing volume on one of these infinite shelves?
He took a tentative step forward. The soft ground compressed slightly under his weight, and the silver veins beneath his feet flared brighter momentarily. There is no sound from my movement, only the pervasive hum of the books. He reach out a hand towards the nearest shelf. The glowing material felt cool, somehow both solid and permeable. He run his fingers along the spine of a book – a slim, azure-colored one that pulsed with a rapid, excited rhythm. As he touched it, a faint warmth spread through his fingertips, and for a fleeting instant, he feel a surge of emotion that isn't his own – a burst of pure joy, like a child discovering something wonderful for the first time. It vanish as quickly as it appear, leaving me breathless.
So, the books contained feelings, experiences. They are not just records, but living echoes.
He walked deeper into the aisles, the towering shelves stretching above him like canyons of light. There is no clear path, but the arrangement seemed to follow some invisible logic, a non-linear flow. The books changed – some dark and brooding, others bright and effervescent. Some were silent, dormant. Others vibrated with intense energy.
His mind raced, trying to make sense of it. The endless drift, the vortex, this place… it felt like a journey not through physical space, but through something else. Something internal, perhaps. Or perhaps this was a place that existed outside of conventional dimensions, a repository of consciousness itself.
He thought back to his life, replayed 20 times. The moments of confusion, the decisions he couldn't quite trace the origin of, the feelings that felt oddly displaced. Was he missing pieces of his own narrative? Or perhaps pieces of a larger narrative that he was somehow part of? The feeling of being an "idiot" during his memory playback now seem less like self-deprecation and more like a genuine lack of understanding, a gap in my own self-awareness.
He stop before a section where the books are darker, their light a deep, bruised purple, pulsing slowly, heavily. As he reach near, a wave of profound sadness washed over me, so intense it brought tears to my eyes. He instinctively recoiled, the emotion subsiding as he moved away. These were clearly not just my memories, or my feelings. This library held… everything. Every lived moment, every felt emotion, cataloged in this impossible space.
But he hasn't been brought here to browse the collective consciousness of existence. He has been brought here. he has stop, he has been sucked into the vortex. And he has feel the distinct lack of his own memories.
He started walking with more purpose, scanning the shelves, not looking for specific titles (there were none), but for something that felt… his. Something that resonated with that missing piece, that nagging emptiness. It was a strange feeling, looking for something he didn't know he had lost.
He walked for what felt like hours, the sheer scale of the library overwhelming. Aisles stretched into infinity, filled with countless millions, billions, trillions of glowing volumes. It was a testament to the sheer volume of experience that had ever been or would ever be. How could he possibly find anything in this cosmic archive?
Just as despair began to set in, a section of shelves ahead caught my eye. It isn't the books themselves that are different, but the space around them. The usual soft light here was slightly fractured, as if seen through rippling water. The hum of the books was different too, a lower, more discordant frequency. And there, nestle between two towering stacks of vibrant, humming volumes, was a gap. A space on a shelf where a book should have been, but isn't.
The space isn't empty, though. It held a faint outline, a shimmering distortion in the air, like residual heat rising from pavement. It pulse with a weak, irregular rhythm, and as he approach, the ache in his chest, the feeling of missing memory, intensified sharply.
This is it. This feel like the source of the emptiness he had felt during his repetitive memory viewing. This space is where something belonging to him should be.
He reach out his hand, not towards a book, but towards the empty space, the shimmering outline. As his fingers brush against the distortion, it flared with sudden, intense light – pure white, blinding. It felt like touching a live wire, not painful, but shocking, jolting my very essence.
And then, the outline solidified. Not into a book of light, but into something else. It compressed, condensed, becoming smaller, denser. It isn't glow; it absorbed light, a deep, almost black, matte object about the size of his hand. It is shaped like a keystone, or perhaps an irregular crystal, its surfaces smooth and cool to the touch.
As his fingers closed around it, a torrent of sensation, image, and pure understanding flooded his mind. It wasn't a memory he watched; it is one he experience, instantly, fully.
It is the memory of standing on a precipice, looking out at the void, years ago, long before the endless drift began. It is a moment of profound choice, a forks in the path. One path led to the life he has just watched 20 times – the growing, eating, sleeping, inspiring, embarrassing, embracing, motivated, insulted, and all the "idiot" moments. The other path… the other path involved a sacrifice. A letting go. A deliberate act of purging certain knowledge, certain connections, certain memories that would allow him to embark on the journey he eventually took, the one that led to the drift and then, somehow, here.
The forgotten memories weren't missing because I'd lost them. They are missing because he has chosen to lock them away, to remove them from my active consciousness, like sealing a dangerous artifact in a vault. And this keystone-like object in his hand… this is the key. Or perhaps, it is the vault, holding those deliberately hidden fragments of his past.