In a confined, windowless room, he sat on a chair next to the intricately carved table. He was nameless, an orphan adopted by the current king himself, and until the passing of the current day, he had been nothing more than an ambitious vessel, eager for purpose. Now, the purpose was being defined.
A single, low-wattage lamp cast a sickly yellow light, doing little to ward off the shadows. The air was stale, the silence thick and pressing. Before him lay the book—heavy, its pages dark, its binding unmarked leather that felt unnervingly warm to the touch, so much so that it felt as if a soul rested within it.
He was to be chosen as the successor, the next in line for the eternal defiance. He was keen on philosophy; his mind had been trained to fight ideas with logic. He understood the syllogisms of the old world, the comfort of A implies B. But the King did not deal in ideas; he dealt in reality. And reality, as Kaelen was learning, did not care for the elegance of a proof.
Kaelen—the name to be forgotten by the beholder—was about to start shedding. It was a messy process. Humans aren't like snakes; we don't lose our skin in one clean piece. We tear. We leave bits of ourselves behind in the jagged edges of our memories.
He opened the book, his fingers tracing the heat of the binding, and the first page read:
"Is there a box under the table? Look into it, what do you see? Is it clear? Or are you deceived?"
The text left him stunned; it was a literal command, violating the very rules of philosophy. Philosophy was meant to be an ascent—a ladder of thought leading to the sun. This was a descent. It was a nudge toward the floorboards. He felt a flicker of annoyance, a spark of his old academic pride. Is this it? he thought. A test of observation?
He had to progress further; he had to look. He leaned, his eyes scanning the dark space below the table. It was clear; only dust lay refuge on the floor.
'A trick of perspective. I saw through it. It was just a metaphor in action. I am not deceived; I knew it.'
He looked back at the page, ready to continue, ready to claim his temporary victory against the text. He wanted to prove he was the constant in this irregular room. But as soon as his eyes rested on the page, he stopped breathing. The relief turned instantly into terror, and comfort shattered into sheer dread.
'If it was clear… why was I compelled to check?'
The question was a perfect, invisible trap; it hadn't stated, "There is a box." He was given a conditional, yet absolute, command, and by obeying the reflex to check, he had already admitted the book possessed the power to dictate his reality. His conviction was a lie. He had played the game by the King's rules the moment he tilted his head.
The room remained clear, but his perception was fundamentally corrupted. The structure of his own mind, his trust in his senses and his philosophical training, instantly began to crumble. This was not metaphor. The pillars of his self were dissolving into sand—the grit of raw, meaningless data—and salt—the barren, preservative terror. The sensation was a gritty, metallic spreading across his tongue.
He stared at the grain of the wood on the table. Was it wood? Or was it just the idea of wood he had been trained to accept? If the book could make him look for a box that wasn't there, what else had it already made him do? His hands began to shake, an irregular tremor that mocked his desire for stoicism.
"The table, the box, the inside—I defined nothing as material. You were merely commanded to look beneath the grasp of your reality, to witness the Unstructure of the Unknown."
The words on the second page felt heavier now, as if the ink itself had gained mass. Kaelen felt a wave of nausea. He realized that his entire life—his adoption, his studies, his very name—was built on the assumption that the world was "material." He believed in things he could touch. But the King was suggesting that "touch" was just another command he had stepped into.
He thought of the King's face—or the lack of it. The King didn't have a name because a name is a definition, and the King refused to be defined. To be named is to be captured. To be nameless is to be infinite.
'Am I being captured?' Kaelen wondered. 'Or am I being set free?'
He looked at his own hands. They felt distant, like tools he was borrowing rather than parts of his being. He tried to summon a logical defense. Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." But the book seemed to whisper back: Who is the 'I' that is thinking? Is it you? Or is it the one who commanded you to think?
He felt the "human" in him crying out for a boundary. Humans love boundaries; we love walls, names, and schedules because they protect us from the sheer, howling scale of the "Unknown." We are irregular creatures trying to force ourselves into constant shapes. Kaelen realized he was a circle trying to fit into a square hole, and the book was the hammer.
The silence of the room began to hum. It wasn't a sound, but a pressure. He felt the shadows in the corner of the room stretching, not because the light was moving, but because his mind was no longer holding them in place. When you stop believing in the consistency of the world, the world stops being consistent.
He felt a sudden, irrational urge to laugh. It was the laughter of a man who sees the floor drop away and realizes he never needed to stand in the first place. But the laugh died in his throat, replaced by the metallic taste of salt.
He was dangling. He was the space between the breath and the word. He wasn't Kaelen anymore, but he wasn't the Successor yet. He was the gap.
With a finger that felt like it belonged to a ghost, he turned the third page.
There were no words on this page. Instead, there was a small, circular hole cut through the center of the paper, through all the remaining pages of the book, down to the back cover.
He peered into the hole. At first, there was only darkness. But as his eyes adjusted, he didn't see the desk or the floor. He saw a flickering reflection of an eye.
But it wasn't his eye.
The iris was a shifting, iridescent violet, and it was blinking in a rhythm that matched his own heartbeat.
Then, a voice—not from the room, and not from the book, but from the very center of his own skull—whispered a single, devastating question:
"If you are the one looking... then who is the one being seen?"
Kaelen's grip on the book tightened until his knuckles turned white, but he couldn't pull his gaze away. The lamp flickered and died, plunging the room into absolute darkness, yet the violet eye remained, glowing with a light that didn't illuminate the room, but seemed to erase it.
He reached out to touch the table, to find something solid, something material, something real.
His hand passed right through the wood as if it were smoke.