Chapter Three: The First Domain
Absolute darkness.
No color. No sound. No gravity.
As if the entire universe had collapsed into a single point… then burst into a blinding white light, swallowing everything.
A dot expanding… unfolding into a new space.
Eyas found himself standing in a vastness beyond comprehension. A whiteness that belonged to no spectrum, without walls, without ceiling, without shadow.
A boundless field, so still it choked him. Even his own breathing felt like it belonged to a dream.
He whispered, hesitant:
"Where…?"
But his voice didn't return. It dissolved into the light, the way salt vanishes into water.
He took unsteady steps until he spotted a faint blue glow in the distance—pulsing, flickering. The closer he came, the more it felt as though his feet were treading on illusion, not ground.
It was a machine… or rather, a colossal computer, rooted in the void like a tree grown out of pure light.
He halted before it, uncertain, and spoke as if addressing a presence both seen and unseen:
"Before I touch you… I must know your domain."
---
Time passed—though here, time had no measure.
Minutes? Hours? It no longer mattered.
He ran, he shouted, turned right, turned left—nothing changed. The place remained the same, the silence remained the same.
And yet… the domain felt as though it was watching him.
In the end, he returned to the computer. This time, he did not flee.
At the foot of its towering chair—two stories tall—he began to climb the metallic frame like a child scaling a giant tree.
His breath quickened. Sweat slickened his hands. His shoes scraped against the metal in a tense, repetitive rhythm.
Five minutes… ten… until at last he reached the top.
He sat upon the massive seat, facing a luminous screen filled with symbols in a language unknown, without keys, without controls.
Curiosity guided his fingers. Just one touch.
---
White light swallowed the world again.
He squeezed his eyes shut, raised a hand to shield them—then lowered it, only to find everything had changed.
No longer in the blank void.
Now, he stood in a cosmic arena, a circle the size of a city surrounding the great machine.
And around that circle… planets revolved.
Real. Towering. Moving in sacred orbits, as though physics itself bent to the will of another tower.
Eyas stood in awe.
The first planet: a charred, dying mass, a blackened stone fading into silence. Just the sight of it sent a primal fear coursing through him.
The second: a crystal-blue world, beautiful as a dream, yet it stabbed him with a strange longing.
"Had I… lived here before?" The thought whispered unbidden within him.
More planets passed—a third, a fourth, a fifth—each stirring a different emotion.
Until his gaze met the sixth: Alpha.
Small, quiet, solitary. Exactly as he remembered it.
But then… he looked up.
The seventh.
High above the rest, towering even over the domain itself.
It was no planet. It was something else.
A mass of shadow, eternal, featureless. And yet, he felt it watching him.
And then—an eye opened.
One enormous eye, yellow, with a pupil alien to every living thing.
His body shook. His throat went dry. Blood trickled from his nose… and from his ears.
Then came the voice.
Not a single voice—but thousands. Men and women, wails and whispers, chants and howls—a chorus unbound by time or space.
The tower itself was speaking.
"You… have come…"
The words were not heard. They were driven into his skull like poisoned needles.
Eyas trembled, tried to scream—but his tongue turned to stone.
He staggered… and fell.
And the light was gone.