echoes of the timeless world -2

 The silence didn’t last. The tower’s light dissolved into shapes—figures—that moved in the distance. At first, they were just shadows, like the ones I had seen before, but as they drew closer, I saw they were not shadows at all. They were beings, if you could call them that, composed of the same shimmering, fluid substance as the air around me. Their forms were constantly shifting, limbs appearing and disappearing, faces warping and stretching in ways that defied logic. They didn’t walk; they glided, their movements smooth and unnervingly silent.

They surrounded me, their eyes—or at least the glowing points where their eyes should have been—fixing on me. I wanted to say something, anything, but my voice felt small and useless here. One of them reached out, its hand elongating unnaturally as it moved toward me. I flinched, but there was nowhere to go. The hand brushed my shoulder, and a wave of sensations flooded through me—memories, images, emotions, all jumbled together. It was as though it was trying to communicate, but the message was too alien for me to understand.

The beings didn’t behave like humans. They didn’t talk, and didn’t seem to have emotions the way we do. They interacted with each other through gestures and flashes of light that pulsed across their forms. I tried to follow, to make sense of their patterns, but it was like watching a language I’d never seen before. And worse, I felt like I was being watched, and judged, as if they were deciding what to do with me.

Days—or maybe hours, or minutes—passed. I couldn’t tell. Time here was slippery, refusing to hold its shape. I tried to keep track of it, marking the moments when the light around me changed, but even that was inconsistent. Sometimes the rivers of light above sped by like shooting stars; other times, they froze completely, leaving me in a still, suffocating quiet.

The beings didn’t seem to care about my struggle. They moved around me, occasionally reaching out to touch me and flood my mind with those incomprehensible sensations. They didn’t need food or water, and soon, I realized I didn’t either. My body no longer felt hunger or thirst, but it didn’t feel like mine anymore, either. It was changing, adapting to this place in ways I couldn’t control. My skin had taken on a faint glow, my reflection in the rippling ground showing eyes that shimmered like the beings’.

I tried to speak to them, to make them understand me, but every attempt was met with silence. Desperation clawed at me. I screamed, yelled, and begged for someone to help me, but the only response was the unending rhythm of their lights and movements. They were indifferent to my suffering, their actions dictated by rules I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

I started to wander, hoping to find some clue about this place, some way out. The environment shifted constantly. One moment, I was walking on solid ground that felt like glass; the next, I was wading through a field of knee-high light that flowed like liquid but didn’t get me wet. I stumbled upon structures—towers, arches, spirals—that seemed to serve no purpose, built from materials that changed color and texture as I approached.

The loneliness was worse than anything. These beings weren’t companions; they were like forces of nature, impossible to connect with. I tried to mimic their gestures, to imitate the pulses of light they shared, but they only watched me with their unreadable, shifting faces. I felt like an animal in a cage, studied but never understood.

Eventually, the weight of it all began to crush me. This wasn’t a trial—it was a slow, agonizing erosion of who I was. I couldn’t tell how long I had been here; the memories of my life before were starting to fade, slipping away like sand in the wind. The name I used to call myself felt distant and meaningless. I was becoming part of this place, losing the edges of my humanity.

I sat on the ground—if you could call it ground—and let my head fall into my hands. The light around me dimmed, as though the dimension itself was mirroring my despair. For the first time, I considered giving up. What was the point of struggling? This place didn’t care about me. The beings didn’t care. Time didn’t care.

I was alone, adrift in a world that didn’t need me, and I didn’t know if I could survive it. At that moment I simply gave up hope and the possibility of me returning to where I belong.

stay tuned for the next part 

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