The city breathed in neon and exhaust.
Glass towers flickered like votive candles for gods that had long gone bankrupt.
Inside a single apartment, high above the arterial streets, a man sat in front of a desk stacked with scripture.
The room smelled of wax, dust, and the slow decay of thought left too long to ferment.
He had stopped keeping track of time.
Days bled into one another; clocks and meals dissolved into the rhythm of pages turning.
The world outside thinned to a pulse of traffic and distant sirens.
He slept rarely, ate almost nothing, breathed shallowly and often forgot to start again.
Without meaning to, he had turned his study into a monastery and himself into a novice.
An accidental monk.
The desk bore a small constellation of books:
The Bible, The Torah, The Qur'an, The Tao Te Ching, Beyond Good and Evil, Meditations, The Book of Five Rings, The Corpus Hermeticum, The Art of War, The Red Book, Dante's Inferno, The Book of Enoch, Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Bhagavata Purana, Morphology of the Folk Tale, The Kybalion, Mysterium Coniunctionis, The Upanishads, The Dhammapada, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, The Zohar, The Enneads of Plotinus, The Divine Pymander, The Sefer Yetzirah, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Gospel of Thomas
Each spine was a tower; together they formed a city of words.
He moved between them in trance, mapping their borders, translating them into one another until sentences began to echo.
After weeks of cross-reading, he could no longer tell which voice belonged to whom.
Moses and Laozi argued in the same tone; Marcus Aurelius whispered with Muhammad's cadence; Nietzsche and Musashi shared a grim smile.
When the words finally blurred, meaning itself began to hum.
The scholar leaned back in his chair and realised that the books were not disagreeing at all—they were harmonics of one song.
Eighty percent overlap, he thought. Maybe more.
The same ideas wearing different flesh.
He lit a candle and stared at the flame until the wax trembled.
Then, slowly, the air in front of him bent, like heat over asphalt.
A presence formed—first light, then outline, then density.
An old man's body, muscular, impossible, eyes the colour of sun-struck brass.
"You've been calling for me," said the figure.
"You've been reading in my name."
The scholar didn't speak.
The air around the apparition buzzed with static.
He felt the first jolt, a spark that began at his spine and rose through his skull like molten wire.
Thoughts came in bursts—histories, equations, verses—all at once.
Every time he opened his mouth to answer, the thing before him seemed to already know, and another surge of information followed.
The dialogue became lightning.
When his body could no longer contain it, he stood, laughing.
The laughter broke into dance, and for twenty minutes he spun through the candlelight, praising whatever this was, unable to stop.
When he fell, panting, the figure smiled.
"Good," it said. "Now we can begin."