The desert ended without warning.
One moment Ayor's feet pressed the mute patience of sand; the next, he stood on black stone polished by centuries of forgotten rain.
Before him rose a city neither alive nor dead towers draped in vines, streets paved with moonlight, air humming like the inside of a memory.
The sign above its gate had been erased by time, leaving only a single word scratched beneath: "Return."
He entered.
Everywhere he looked he saw remnants of people's dreams fossilized in architecture a staircase leading to air, a door that opened into itself, statues with faces unfinished.
He realized this was a city built by those who had once sought the Word Beneath Words but stopped halfway, trapped between meaning and surrender.
At the heart of the city stood a hall with a thousand doors, each carved with symbols that shimmered when he approached.
In the center was a single door made of glass so clear it was almost invisible.
Across its surface drifted faint letters that rearranged themselves as he watched:
"THE ONE WHO ENTERS MUST HAVE NO KEY."
Ayor touched his chest, remembering the philosopher's fragment of mirror.
He lifted it and saw his reflection staring back with eyes tired yet awake.
"You again," said the reflection.
"You never left," Ayor replied.
"You've been chasing me across every metaphor. What will you do when you catch me?"
"Listen."
"To what?"
"The silence you hide behind meaning."
The reflection smiled sadly. "Then break the glass."
Ayor hesitated. "I have nothing to open it with."
"Exactly," the reflection said. "That's why you can."
He pressed his palm to the invisible door.
It shattered soundlessly, turning into light that poured through him instead of around him.
The hall dissolved; the city folded into itself like a page closing.
He found himself standing in an open field beneath a sky stitched with pale dawn.
A man's voice spoke behind him — gentle, unmistakable.
It was the blind painter.
"You found it, didn't you?" he said.
"Found what?"
"The Word."
"No," Ayor answered. "It found me when I stopped naming."
He smiled. "That's how all revelations arrive not as discovery, but as recognition."
He pointed toward the horizon. There, the sun rose without light a pale sphere that illuminated nothing yet made everything visible.
"That's the blind sun," he said. "It sees for those who finally stopped asking to see."
Ayor felt tears rise not from sorrow, but from the soft exhaustion of completion.
The air itself seemed to breathe through him.
He remembered the beggar called Time, the boy who sold shadows, the philosopher of ruins each now appearing around him as faint silhouettes, forming a circle.
They were not separate souls but aspects of himself: the past that endured, the hunger that learned restraint, the wisdom that grew quiet.
Time spoke first:
"You've turned your pain into language.
The boy added:
"You've turned your desire into light."
The philosopher's voice completed the chord:
"Now turn your silence into life."
The figures faded into the rising wind.
Ayor unfolded the blank canvas he still carried.
It was no longer blank.
Across its surface bloomed a single symbol, a spiral wrapped around an eye, painted in strokes of living flame.
He understood without thinking: this was the Jargon of the universe, the grammar of becoming.
Not words, but rhythm a pulse that said existence speaks best when untranslatable.
He placed the canvas on the ground and watched it dissolve into dust.
From the dust, flowers began to grow black at first, then slowly turning to gold.
As the sun climbed higher, Ayor whispered:
"Success is not arrival but release.
The door without key is the heart without condition.
When nothing belongs to you, everything visits."
He closed his eyes.
The wind carried his words upward until they vanished or perhaps were heard by the silence that waits above all striving.
And somewhere, between breath and eternity, the Word Beneath Words spoke back not in speech, but in feeling:
a quiet certainty that every wound had been worth its syllable.