He was falling.
Or… maybe he wasn't.
There was no beginning to this descent, no end, and not even the comfort of a middle. Just the suggestion of movement downward, upward, inward, outward, directionless yet inexorable. As though the universe had decided to fold in on itself, and he was caught between two pages that no longer wished to be read.
There was no light. No dark.
Only a weightless pressure, a phantom gravity that squeezed against his thoughts, not his flesh. He tried to scream, or breathe, or blink. But such actions were suddenly... ancient. Forgotten.
And then-
A face.
Not his.
Sharp eyes like winter glass, lips drawn into a line that neither frowned nor smiled. Framing features that seemed to float outside the bounds of memory.
Who…?
He didn't ask. He remembered. But also he didn't.
A contradiction. A fracture.
"You... again."
That wasn't his voice. And yet it came from somewhere inside. Some locked hallway of thought that had not been opened in a long, long time. Or perhaps… not yet opened at all?
The name arrived broken. Half-formed.
Ar…viel.
Like an echo of an echo. A whisper drowned by centuries. A word that once carried importance, now molted of meaning. It should have struck recognition. It should have ignited emotion.
And yet-
Why can't I remember? He was… always there. Always on screen. I saw him… every time I played.
Altherion's thoughts tumbled, confused and wide-eyed, like marbles scattered on a cracked floor. The memories should be there. They were part of him. The game was part of him. Virevia, a name he could barely wrap his mouth around now had once meant escape, immersion, identity.
And Arviel, he had been the center.
He was the main character. The hero. The story's anchor. The one I picked every time.
How, then? How could something so central, so recurring, be forgotten?
He could remember the armor. The swords. The strange world of moons and ruins. Even the sound of the title screen music echoed faintly in his ears, like a song heard through water.
But Arviel's presence? That name?
Gone.
Scrubbed clean.
As if some unseen hand had decided he no longer needed it.
He wanted to say it was the Temple's fault. That strange labyrinth of illusions and whispers. But that was only part of the truth.
The real horror it wasn't just forgetting Arviel.
It was the realization that, for a time, he hadn't even realized something was missing.
And now that the memory tried to return, it didn't fit right. It pressed at the edges of his thoughts like a puzzle piece from the wrong box. It wasn't just memory. It was... intrusion.
As though someone else's life had been stapled into the folds of his.
He tried to breathe. Still, no air. Only motion.
Then, finally, a surface.
His feet, if he still had them touched something.
A floor?
It looked like a canvas. A pale, off-white smear of desaturated tones, stretching infinitely in every direction. Stained in places. Torn in others. There were no walls. No ceiling. Just this endless painting with no frame and no artist. The color of it was not quite white, not quite gray, like paper soaked in milk and left to rot.
A whisperless silence pressed against him from all sides.
His steps made no sound.
Was he walking?
The more he moved, the more uncertain the idea of motion became. The space didn't resist him. It didn't welcome him. It simply was a place without presence, without time, where reality felt like a fever dream scribbled on glass.
His hands trembling, fading reached up to touch his face.
Were these his hands?
They bent wrong. Just slightly. Like a drawing that didn't follow anatomy. And still he walked, because there was no better choice.
"Liesette..."
The name came unbidden. And with it, another wound opened.
He had lost her. Again. When? How?
The memory slipped like wet thread. Every time he grasped it, it unraveled. Was she ever here to begin with?
He stood still.
Or tried to.
Somewhere behind his eyes, behind the thrum of stolen time, a question lingered like a stain:
Am I dreaming?
But it was too orderly to be a dream.
And too broken to be real.
He turned his head, though no direction made sense. And there just for a second he saw shadows. Not of people. Of moments.
The feeling of laughter. The shape of grief. The outline of something sacred that had been shattered long ago.
This place whatever it was, was not a prison.
Nor a sanctuary. Not even a memory.
It was a thought that had become so lost, so fragmented, it collapsed into spatial form.
A cage made of concepts.
A room designed by absence.
And he was drifting inside its guilt.
As he walked, the silence grew deeper. Not louder. Just heavier. As though it wanted to press through his skin, pry open his ribs, and find the part of him that still believed in beginnings.
He whispered again:
"Arviel…"
The name no longer sounded like a name.
It was a riddle. A memory wrapped in fog. A scar that only bled when forgotten.
And far in the distance, if such a thing could exist, something began to pulse.
Faint. Rhythmic.
Like a heartbeat.
Or a countdown.
***
Altherion walked, though each step felt more like a surrender than progress. The floor beneath him made no sound, and there was no sky above to mark distance. Time had unraveled itself, and he no longer knew if he had been walking for minutes, hours, or centuries.
In this place, direction was not a concept. It was a memory.
He tried to count his steps, fifteen, fifty, a hundred but each time he looked back, there was nothing. No footprints. No trail. Not even dust. Only that pale, stained-white ground stretching forever like a canvas that had been scrubbed of meaning and painted over again and again by an unseen hand.
Then, in the distance or perhaps inside his own eyes he saw a city.
Ruins, more accurately. Towers that curved toward the sky like the broken fingers of buried titans. Bridges arched over empty streets, leading nowhere. Walls stood half-built, or maybe half-erased, forgotten mid-thought. The city pulsed with a silence so deep it had weight.
Then he blinked.
It was gone.
Just one blink. The kind you don't notice until after it's happened. But the city had vanished like a dream slipping through waking fingers. The white canvas returned, mocking him with its emptiness.
Another blink.
And he was inside the city.
There was no transition. No falling. No tunnel. It was as if the city had collapsed inward, folding him into itself, absorbing his presence like ink into paper. He hadn't walked there. He had been moved, like a pawn in a game he didn't know he was playing.
The streets beneath his feet were uneven, carved with symbols that shifted like eels when he looked too long. Buildings leaned into each other like conspirators. One moment they were spires, the next they melted into staircases, then grew eyes that blinked once, then vanished.
When he reached out to touch a wall, he felt a subtle throb like a heartbeat hidden deep within the stone. He jerked his hand back. Stone should not throb. Walls should not feel alive.
Then came the people.
Or what might once have been people.
They walked in silence. Their limbs moved in strange, elegant patterns. Their heads turned. But they had no faces. Not hidden, just never formed. Smooth, featureless, as if the idea of identity had been stripped away.
Each time one of them passed Altherion, their bodies unraveled, dissolving like steam before they could even make contact. They left no trace, no warmth, no noise.
He tried to speak.
The sound came out warped, as if his voice had to crawl through ten broken versions of himself before arriving at his mouth. His own ears rejected it. It felt... foreign.
Terror pressed against the edges of his mind. What was this place? Was he still inside Virevia? Or was this the underlayer of some ancient dream that the game had only scratched?
He took a breath. Then another. Each one steadier than the last.
Think. Stay logical. If I stop thinking, I start unraveling.
He gritted his teeth. The only weapon he had left was the clarity of reason. Madness had already won too many battles in places like this. He would not give it another victory.
But beneath his resolve, something strange slithered upward through his spine.
He was being remembered.
Not remembering but being remembered by the place. It felt like reality itself had begun sifting through his thoughts, his memories, his identity. Like the world was trying to recall who he was, from a time before.
And then he looked up.
The sky was not sky. It was a dome of fractured glass, etched with a million thin cracks that moved on their own, reshaping themselves into patterns he almost recognized. At one point, they seemed to form the hint of a face.
A face that did not belong to him.
But it knew him.
For one breathless second, Altherion felt like he wasn't walking through a city at all.
He was walking through himself, through a hollow version of his mind, reflected in crumbling stone and bleeding walls.
Was he alive in this place?
Or just an echo, programmed to believe in motion?
He didn't know.
But his feet kept moving, because that was the only thing left. In this place, you either walked… or you disappeared.
At last, he came to an arched gate made of bent metal, shaped like the roots of a tree that had forgotten how to grow.
He wandered deeper into the city that should not be, his thoughts fraying like threads through needles that weren't there. But amidst the ever-shifting geometry and fading phantoms, something caught his eye.
A building.
No, the building.
It didn't just look like a library. It declared itself one. Carved into the stone above its great, arched doorway were symbols that flickered between alphabets, one moment ancient runes, the next a twisted mirror of his own tongue. Between the flux, he caught two fleeting words:
ARCHEOTHEQUE INKORRIGIBLE.
"Well. That definitely sounds like a place I'm not supposed to be," Altherion muttered, stepping closer.
There was something about libraries that made even the most absurd places feel grounded. Maybe it was the promise of logic. Or at least, the illusion of it.
He reached for the heavy brass handles of the main door.
The door vanished.
Not with a pop or a magical flash, just wasn't there anymore. One blink, and it had slid four meters to the left, humming quietly as if it had always been there.
Altherion stood still. Squinted. Rubbed his temples.
"Okay, We're doing this, huh?"
He took a step to the left. The door moved to the right.
He lunged. The door zipped around the corner like a shy animal.
He tried the window instead, only to see the panes disassemble themselves into a flock of mirror shards that flew in a circle before reassembling on another wall, higher and even less reachable than before.
"Oh come on! just let me-!" Altherion dashed toward the door again.
This time, the entire building rotated ninety degrees, like a Rubik's cube solving itself in reverse.
He stumbled, hit the ground with a grunt, and glared upward as the structure pulsed with quiet, smug satisfaction.
"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" he muttered at the bricks.
The building made no reply, but a small stone near his foot vibrated slightly. Whether in amusement or warning, he didn't know.
After several more embarrassing attempts involving fake doors, sideways stairs, and one ill-fated moment where he almost climbed through a bookshelf that pretended to be a doorway, Altherion finally outsmarted it.
He stopped chasing the door.
Instead, he closed his eyes. Let his breathing slow. He pictured the library in his mind not as it was, but as it should be: still, open, welcoming.
He took a single step forward.
The door opened.
He blinked.
He was inside.
Just like that.
He turned around, expecting to see the entrance again. There was only wall. Smooth, seamless, as if the door had never existed at all.
"...I hate this place," he whispered.