Max left Brilln not because he hated it, but because he could not endure its silence. The village stretched along the Deralith River, where reeds glimmered like trapped starlight. Festivals came and went. Stories were told and forgotten. Adults smiled tiredly at questions he could not stop asking. Answers never came.
At seventeen, when his mother's map bled new lines across its parchment, Max packed his satchel, lit the Lantern of Veylin, and stepped through the gates. Behind him, wells bubbled, taverns roared, and people lived their quiet lives. Max walked toward the unknown.
The world beyond Brilln, Thalen, was immense. He crossed forests whose trees spiraled into the clouds, lakes reflecting skies that did not exist, and towns where shadows moved backward. Traders spoke of towers walking across plains, of winds whispering secrets. Days became weeks, weeks blurred into months. Max learned to survive by reading the patterns of impossibility: trusting the lantern, following the map's living lines, rationing food, sleeping under stars that shifted their positions at will.
Eventually, he reached the ruins. They were not ruins of stone, but of the world itself. Columns of fractured sky bled light. Stairs twisted into knots. Doors opened into mirrors that reflected nothing. Step by step, he walked deeper, until the ground simply ended. Before him stretched a rift, threads of reality snapping, revealing silence: neither dark nor light, neither void nor form.
He could have turned back. He could have returned to Brilln, pretended the world had limits. He did not. He stepped forward, feeling himself peel away layer by layer, until only his stubborn refusal to stop remained.
He opened his eyes on the First Layer. The ground shimmered silver, impossible geometry rising and folding underfoot. Gravity, time, logic—none obeyed normal rules. Yet Max walked. He tested the waves of dust, shifted when the floor recoiled, and learned to read the ever-changing map. Hunger and exhaustion whispered faintly; the world seemed more interested in testing him than in destroying him. Each movement, each careful step, became survival.
Beyond the First Layer, he climbed further. Time bent, sequences folded, and universes stacked like infinite towers. He walked through metaphysical storms, mathematical theorems suspended as paths, narratives that twisted endlessly, concepts that bruised and twisted the mind, logic that demanded impossible resolutions. Infinity stacked on infinity: universes, multiverses, omniverses, hyperverses, infinite dimensions. Max did not comprehend it. He did not need to. He walked. Step by step, absurdly, stubbornly, humanly.
At the apex, beyond all layers, beyond law, thought, and reality itself, there was a hand. A singular, immense hand that did not move, speak, create, or destroy. Itaram. Its fingers stretched through everything and nothing, beyond infinity and absoluteness. Max understood the truth in a blink: the hand could do anything or nothing, and he could not change it.
He felt everything. And nothing. The weight of every choice, every step, every absurd risk he had taken. He could shout, bow, collapse, or flee—and Itaram would remain unchanged.
Max smiled. The climb had never been about conquering the hand. It had been about walking, persisting, refusing to stop when the impossible stretched before him.
The hand remained unbound, infinite, indifferent. Max remained human, stubborn, alive.
And that, he realized, was the summit: not conquest, not understanding, not mastery, but standing.
And in standing, he had already transcended.