"After that war, I lost everything. My world. My family. My friends. Everything I had ever loved."
Silence wrapped around me. And yet strangely, I was still thinking.
But… wasn't I already dead?
If I truly died, why does this awareness still remain?
Why can I still remember my entire life
from birth, laughter, and tears,
to that final war
all of it collapsing into a single moment
that can no longer be called time?
Is this a dream?
As I tried to grasp what was happening, something changed.
Not light.
Not sound.
Not even a presence.
Yet the meaning was there.
"This is not a dream."
The sentence was never heard it was simply understood.
"What you experienced was not death."
I jolted or at least, I tried to react.
"What do you mean?"
"If I'm dead… is this heaven?"
There was no immediate answer.
Then the meaning collapsed once more
directly into my consciousness.
"Heaven, hell, life, death all of them are concepts that only apply to the place you have left behind."
"Here, concepts have never applied."
I tried to look around.
But there was no around.
No up or down.
No near or far.
"What is this?"
"Where am I?"
"There is no 'where',"
the answer emerged without sound.
"Space has never existed here."
"Neither has time."
"Cause and effect have never known one another."
I perceived something or perhaps it wasn't perception at all.
Everything appeared at once: the birth of worlds, their destruction,
possibilities that never occurred, and possibilities
that do not even deserve to be called possible.
"But… wasn't my world destroyed?"
"The world never truly existed,"
the meaning replied.
"What you called a world was merely a collapsing narrative."
"The world is not one."
"Not two."
"Not many."
"Quantity itself is a failed concept."
I tried to understand.
"Dimensions?"
"Dimensions are merely the simplest attempt to separate stories so they do not collide."
"Yet even that is not the truth."
"Then… the gods?"
"Just names for patterns that emerge when meaning tries to imitate order."
I fell silent.
"Then… who are you?"
There was no answer.
Not because of silence, but because the question itself never fully formed.
Then the meaning collapsed again deeper.
"I am not existence."
"I am not nonexistence."
"I am not a creator."
"I am not the first."
"All words are limits."
"And limits have never touched what you are facing."
"You were not brought here."
"There is no 'here'."
"Your consciousness is merely one possibility that collapsed without reason."
"And even that was not an event."
I wanted to see it.
I wanted to understand.
But the desire itself vanished before it could form.
"There is nothing to see,"
the meaning concluded.
"Because 'seeing' was never born."
And at that point, even the word now no longer carried any meaning at all.