The Traveler eventually stopped beneath an ancient tree.
His body was healed, but his mind refused to rest.
Three parts.
Light.
Darkness.
A human body.
He closed his eyes.
I want to know what they did to him.
Dark Arafial's words kept returning to him.
The Traveler leaned his head against the tree and stared at the fading evening sky.
He wasn't sure how long he remained there.
Eventually, exhaustion caught him.
His eyes closed.
And the world disappeared.
### The Dream Before Creation
There was no ground.
No sky.
No stars.
Only an endless white emptiness.
The Traveler stood in the middle of it, barefoot, wearing the same clothes he had worn in the forest.
He looked around.
"Where am I?"
His voice travelled nowhere.
There was no echo.
No wind.
No movement.
Then he saw something above him.
A man.
Floating in the emptiness.
Long white hair drifted around his face as if submerged in an invisible ocean. His black clothing moved slowly, though there was no wind to move it.
His eyes were closed.
His arms hung loosely at his sides.
He was unconscious.
Yet the space around him trembled.
The Traveler stared at the floating figure.
He knew that face.
He had seen it on the obsidian throne.
He had seen it in the two figures that appeared inside his mind.
He had seen it in the cold reflection of the river.
But this man was different.
He had no black aura.
No golden light.
No visible wings.
He looked almost ordinary.
Almost human.
Except the emptiness itself seemed afraid to touch him.
The Traveler took one step forward.
"Who are you?"
The unconscious man didn't respond.
Then the Traveler noticed something.
The man's body was surrounded by thin cracks.
Not wounds.
Cracks in existence itself.
They began at his fingertips, ran along his arms, crossed his chest, and climbed toward his throat.
The Traveler stopped breathing.
The cracks widened.
Something beyond the emptiness had noticed him.
A voice emerged from nowhere.
"The division is complete."
Another voice answered.
"No. The vessel remains."
The Traveler turned.
Nothing stood behind him.
The voices continued, speaking as if he were not there.
"The destructive half has been removed."
A pause.
"The illuminating half has been removed."
The Traveler looked back at the unconscious man.
The cracks were spreading faster now.
"Then destroy the remainder."
The floating man's fingers twitched.
For one brief moment, his face changed.
Pain crossed it.
Not the pain of a wound.
Something deeper.
The pain of being unable to wake while the world decided what would happen to him.
The Traveler rushed forward.
"Wake up!"
His voice broke through the emptiness.
"HEY! WAKE UP!"
The unconscious man remained motionless.
The cracks reached his chest.
And then—
his body began to change.
It didn't explode.
It didn't burn.
It unfolded.
As if reality had decided that the shape of a man was no longer appropriate for what remained.
His body stretched into three separate forms.
The first emerged from his left side.
A figure made of pale, almost colourless radiance.
Long white hair.
A face identical to the unconscious man's.
Its outline shimmered like light passing through ice.
The second emerged from his right side.
A figure of blackness, dense and absolute.
Dark clothing.
White hair.
Eyes like a bottomless abyss.
Its shape was unmistakable.
Dark Arafial.
But neither figure spoke.
Neither looked at the Traveler.
They were being pulled away from each other by invisible forces.
The third shape remained between them.
A human body.
Smaller.
Fragile.
Its white hair fell across its face. Its hands were clenched, and its eyes remained shut.
It looked almost exactly like the Traveler.
The Traveler stared at it.
"No..."
The three shapes drifted farther apart.
The Light half was pulled upward into a vast opening that had appeared in the emptiness.
The Dark half was dragged sideways into a darkness that had no boundary.
The human body remained suspended in the centre.
Alone.
The Traveler reached toward it.
"Stop!"
He ran.
But the distance never shortened.
The human body began falling.
Not toward a ground.
Toward a world.
A world filled with mountains, oceans, forests, and countless living beings.
A world that had never known the name Arafial.
The Traveler watched the body fall into it.
He saw the body pass through clouds.
He saw a distant mountain.
He saw a human settlement beneath a grey sky.
Then the body vanished beyond the horizon.
The Light half was gone.
The Dark half was gone.
And the original figure—
the one who had floated unconscious in the emptiness—
was no longer there.
Only three separate shapes remained in three different directions.
Three pieces of one existence.
Three fragments that no longer knew how to become one.
The Traveler turned toward the darkness where Dark Arafial had disappeared.
Something was written there.
Not in letters.
Not in a language.
The meaning simply appeared inside his mind.
THEY DID NOT SEPARATE HIM TO SAVE THE WORLDS.
The Traveler's blood ran cold.
A second line appeared.
THEY SEPARATED HIM BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT CONTROL HIM.
Then a third.
AND THEY LEFT THE HUMAN PART TO SUFFER.
The emptiness shattered.
The Traveler heard a sound.
A single, terrible sound.
It was the unconscious man's voice.
Not speaking.
Not screaming.
Just a faint breath as he fell away from everything he had ever been.
A breath that no one heard.
A breath that no one answered.
And then—
the dream showed the Traveler something else.
For the briefest moment, before the three shapes disappeared completely, the unconscious figure opened his eyes.
They were blue.
Exactly like the Traveler's.
The figure looked directly at him.
And the Traveler heard a whisper.
"You were never meant to be alone."
### The Awakening
The Traveler jolted awake.
He struck the tree behind him with his shoulder and immediately scrambled to his feet.
His breathing was ragged.
His hands shook.
For several seconds, he couldn't tell whether he was still dreaming.
The forest surrounded him.
The sky had darkened.
The river continued to flow nearby.
Nothing had changed.
Yet the Traveler felt as if he had watched an entire universe die.
He pressed a hand against his chest.
His heart was beating too quickly.
"Three..."
He swallowed.
"Three parts."
Light.
Darkness.
The human body.
He remembered the unconscious figure floating in the emptiness.
He remembered the cracks.
He remembered the invisible beings discussing the destruction of the remainder.
And most of all, he remembered those final words.
You were never meant to be alone.
The Traveler stared into the trees.
"Was that really you?"
No answer came.
He waited.
Nothing.
Then he looked toward the river.
The black stone.
He remembered the first option.
The strange stone beneath the water.
The voice that might belong to Light Arafial.
The Traveler wiped his face and forced himself to breathe normally.
He didn't know whether the dream had been a memory, a warning, or something placed inside his mind by an unknown presence.
But he knew one thing.
Dark Arafial had told him that he remembered the separation.
He had told him the Light half was sealed somewhere beyond his reach.
Yet the dream had shown something Dark Arafial had never mentioned.
The original Arafial had been unconscious.
The separation had happened to him while he could not defend himself.
And someone had decided that the human part should be left to suffer.
The Traveler's fingers curled.
"Who did that to you?"
A voice answered from behind him.
"You're asking questions you can't survive the answers to."
The Traveler spun around.
Dark Arafial stood several paces away.
His expression was cold.
His eyes moved over the Traveler's face.
Then he noticed the fear.
Not ordinary fear.
The kind that remained after a person had seen something they could never explain.
Arafial tilted his head.
"What did you see?"
The Traveler stared at him.
"You tell me."
Arafial's expression didn't change.
"I asked you a question."
"And I answered."
A pause.
Then the Traveler stepped closer.
"I saw the original Arafial."
For the first time, Dark Arafial became completely still.
The Traveler continued.
"He was floating in the air. Unconscious. His body broke into three shapes."
Dark Arafial said nothing.
"Light. Darkness. And the human body."
Arafial's eyes narrowed.
The Traveler watched him carefully.
"You told me you remembered being separated."
"I remember fragments."
"Did you see him unconscious?"
"No."
The answer came too quickly to be a lie.
Dark Arafial looked toward the river.
"What else?"
The Traveler hesitated.
"They said they couldn't control him."
The forest seemed to grow colder.
Arafial's face became unreadable.
The Traveler added, "And they said they left the human part to suffer."
For a long time, Dark Arafial didn't speak.
Then he laughed once.
It wasn't amusement.
It was a short, bitter sound.
"Of course they did."
The Traveler's expression hardened.
"You knew?"
"I suspected."
"That's not the same as knowing."
"No," Arafial replied. "It isn't."
The Traveler stared at him.
"Who were they?"
Dark Arafial's smile vanished.
"If I knew exactly who had taken us apart, do you think I'd be standing here talking to you?"
The Traveler had no answer.
Arafial looked directly at him.
"Tell me everything you saw."
So the Traveler told him.
The voices.
The three shapes.
The falling human body.
The message written in the emptiness.
And finally, the blue eyes.
When he finished, Dark Arafial didn't move.
But the darkness around his feet had begun to spread.
"Blue eyes," Arafial murmured.
The Traveler nodded.
"Like mine."
Arafial looked at him for a long time.
Then he said something that made the Traveler's stomach tighten.
"The complete Arafial did not have your eyes."
The Traveler went still.
"What?"
"The original's eyes were not blue."
Arafial stepped closer.
"They were something else entirely."
"Then why did I see—"
"I don't know."
The answer was colder this time.
Not because Arafial was angry.
Because he genuinely didn't know.
He looked toward the river.
"Your dream may have shown you something real. Or it may have shown you something that wants you to believe it was real."
The Traveler frowned.
"You think someone put it in my mind?"
"I think you should stop trusting things simply because they feel like memories."
Arafial began to fade.
The Traveler caught his attention.
"Wait."
Arafial looked back.
"If you don't know where Light is..."
The Traveler's voice steadied.
"Then we'll find out."
Arafial stared at him.
Then a thin smile appeared.
"Listen to yourself."
He leaned forward slightly.
"You can barely survive a forest, little vessel. And now you want to search for a sealed fragment of a being that frightened the powers above existence?"
The Traveler didn't look away.
"Yes."
Arafial laughed.
This time, the sound was genuinely cruel.
"Wonderful."
He vanished.
His laughter lingered for another second.
Then even that disappeared.
The Traveler stood alone again.
He turned toward the river.
Whatever the dream meant, he wasn't going to learn anything by remaining beneath a tree.
He began walking.
### The Stone Beneath the River
The river curved through the forest, passing between two enormous rock formations.
The Traveler followed it until he reached a stretch of water so clear that he could see the stones at the bottom.
Most were ordinary.
Grey.
Brown.
Pale.
Then he saw the black one.
It lay beneath the surface, half-buried between two larger rocks.
It was perfectly smooth.
No moss covered it.
No algae clung to it.
The water moved around it without touching its surface.
The Traveler crouched beside the river.
He stared at the stone.
Something about it made the mark beneath his collarbone feel warm.
He reached into the water.
The instant his fingers touched the stone—
the entire forest disappeared.
He was standing in the white emptiness again.
But this time, the three shapes were nowhere to be seen.
There was no unconscious figure.
No dark opening.
No distant world.
Only a thin line of light stretching across the emptiness.
The Traveler looked at it.
Then he heard a voice.
A man's voice.
Quiet.
Distant.
Almost unbearably tired.
"If he has found you..."
The Traveler froze.
The voice continued.
"...then the separation has already begun to fail."
The Traveler's throat tightened.
"Who are you?"
Silence.
He stepped forward.
"Are you Light?"
The thin line flickered.
For a moment, the Traveler felt something looking at him from the other side.
Not a god looking down at a human.
Not a monster studying its prey.
Something familiar.
Something that had once belonged to the same existence.
Then the voice spoke again.
"Do not trust the one who sits upon the throne."
The Traveler's blood ran cold.
Dark Arafial.
The voice had warned him against Dark Arafial.
He immediately demanded, "Why?"
The line of light began to fade.
"Wait!"
The Traveler reached toward it.
"Where are you?"
The voice returned one final time.
"I don't know."
A pause.
"I don't know where they took me."
The light trembled.
Then came the last sentence.
"But I remember what he did when they came for us."
The emptiness shattered.
The Traveler was thrown backward into the riverbank.
Water splashed around him.
He coughed, dragged himself onto the stones, and stared at the black stone still lying beneath the water.
His hand was trembling.
He had heard a voice.
He had heard a warning.
And the voice claimed to be the missing Light half.
But it had said something else.
Something that could change everything.
I remember what he did when they came for us.
The Traveler slowly looked toward the forest.
Dark Arafial had told him he didn't know where Light was.
He had said he remembered only fragments.
Perhaps that was true.
But what if the Light half remembered something Dark Arafial did not?
What if the original Arafial's destruction had not happened exactly as Dark remembered it?
The Traveler looked down at his hand.
A thin black mark had appeared across his palm.
It resembled a crack.
The same kind of crack that had spread across the unconscious Arafial's body in the dream.
It pulsed once.
Then vanished.
Far beyond the forest, in a realm without a beginning or an end, Dark Arafial stood before the obsidian throne.
He stared at his own hand.
A thin crack had appeared across his palm.
He slowly closed his fingers.
For the first time in an age he could no longer measure, Dark Arafial looked afraid.
Not of the Traveler.
Not of the beings above him.
Of a memory.
One he had believed was lost.
And somewhere beyond his reach, a voice whispered through the dark:
"You left him behind."
Dark Arafial raised his head.
"Who said that?"
No one answered.
But the crack in his palm remained.
And the throne beneath him had begun to tremble.