Silas wandered for what felt like weeks—through cities folded in time, valleys made of light, archives that breathed when he touched their walls. The second layer was vast, an endless patchwork of variations and reflections, histories never written and futures never read. Yet none of them belonged to him. None of them felt like home.
He began to dream again. Not of libraries or towers, but of a quiet, broken cabin in the middle of the woods. Of a world where the sky was grey and low, where pain was real and sharp and personal. Where he had bled and starved and cried until his throat went silent. A world that was cruel, indifferent, but his.
Then one day, while standing beneath the fractured mirror of a floating city, Silas stopped and looked inward.
The memory returned—clear and piercing. The well. The one he had seen long ago in the first layer. A moment where, in the reflection, he had seen not the fantasy world, but something real. Familiar. His world. His old one. The one that hurt.
He raised his hand, and the ink curled up his wrist like smoke sensing flame. He asked—not aloud, but through thought and memory:
"Is there a gate to my home?"
The ink pulsed faintly. Then it wrote:
"No."
Silas stared at the black answer, disheartened.
But then, slowly, the ink shifted.
"But you may imagine one."
That was enough.
He sat down at the edge of a silent plaza and let the world fade from view. He closed his eyes and summoned every memory of that world: the ash-colored clouds, the cold soil, the rain on tin rooftops, the narrow alleys that smelled of copper and oil, the cabin. His cabin. Rotten wood, broken windows, the trace of childhood scraped into floorboards.
He imagined it, not as he remembered it, but as it was. Not a place of comfort, but a place of truth.
And then, as though responding to a whisper from within him, the space before him tore gently, like old fabric giving way.
A gate appeared.
Not glowing, not grand. Just a crack in the world. A seam, barely visible, pulsing with a memory too deep to name.
He stood before it for a long time.
And then he stepped through.
⸻
The air was colder.
The sky, overcast and bruised.
Silas stood in the middle of a street he knew too well. The city hadn't changed. The buildings were the same cracked brick and rusted steel. People moved like ghosts—faces familiar, expressions indifferent.
But this time, he wasn't a boy hiding from them. He was someone new.
Someone changed.
He wandered. Hours passed. Then days.
He returned to the old woods, to the place he had once called home. The trees had not forgotten him. They stood like sentinels, neither welcoming nor judging.
The cabin was still there.
Rotting, as always. The door half-hinged. The smell of mold and earth filled the air.
And inside, waiting in the dark corner by the crooked stove, was the figure.
The cloaked man.
No face. Or too many faces. The kind of presence that bent reason.
Silas didn't flinch this time.
"I came back," he said.
"Yes," the figure replied. Its voice was layered—echoes of hundreds, none distinct. "You brought yourself here, using memory and desire. That is not nothing."
Silas sat on the floor, his back against the warped wall. "Why doesn't the ink work here the way it did in the other world?"
The cloaked man did not answer immediately. Instead, he extended a hand, and in it appeared a glass of water—too clear to be real.
"This place," the figure said, "is too close to your truth. You do not see it as fiction. You believe in it too deeply. Power bends to perception. And here, your perception is a prison."
Silas frowned. "So I can't change it?"
"You can reshape the edges. Decorate the cage. But not break its bars."
Silas looked around. "Then what am I supposed to do here?"
"Understand," the figure said. "Not escape. Not destroy. Understand."
Silas nodded, slowly. He stood, looked around, and focused on the cabin.
The ink shimmered faintly. It responded—not with wild, divine power, but with subtle changes. The walls grew sturdier. The mold receded. A new bed formed in the corner. A lamp lit without wires. The space became livable. Warm. Not luxurious—but comforting.
And so Silas stayed.
Not for a day.
Not for a week.
But with a heart both weary and quietly burning, he chose to remain—for as long as it would take to see if the broken thing could still beat. If the dirt beneath his feet, the sky above, the laughter and decay, the aching past and its tender ghosts—if any of it could mean something again.
He did not believe this world owed him kindness. He knew better. But for the first time in too long, he found himself willing to ask if he could still make something worth living for inside it.
In the mornings, he watched the sun crawl across the trees outside the cabin, painting the old world gold. In the evenings, he sat alone at the table where no one had ever sat with him before, and imagined voices filling the silence.
He began writing—not with the same power as in the Gates or that strange realm of fiction—but writing just to write. Pages filled with quiet hopes, half-broken stories, alternate endings to his own life. None of them real. Not yet. But he wrote them anyway.
Sometimes he walked the winding roads of the woods, where he used to run barefoot and scared. Sometimes he wandered into nearby towns, unfamiliar and unchanged. He kept to himself. Observing. Listening. Watching how people lived without pain carved into their bones.
He asked the Ink if he could change things here. The answer was—almost. He could paint shadows, rearrange the walls of his cabin, breathe warmth into dying embers. But he could not bend reality the way he did in the other world. Not fully. Not yet.
Because this place—this Earth—he still believed in it. He still saw it as real.
And what one sees as real, he cannot wholly command.
But he accepted that. Or at least, tried to. Because if this world was still real, then maybe he had one last shot at being real within it too.
He started planting small things. Fixing the fence. Cleaning old memories. Resisting the temptation to escape.
Because for the first time… he wasn't running.
He was giving Earth one final chance. Not out of hope, not even out of forgiveness. But because he needed to know—before he ever left it behind—whether the world that made him could still hold space for what he had become.
He would try.
And if it failed him again… he would not return.
Ah… now this is a curious turn of events, isn't it?
You'd expect him to run again. To leap into the next impossible world and leave the wreckage of this one behind. I thought he would. Truly, I did.
But instead, Silas lingers. In the ashes. In the cracks. In the old Earth, where every tree reminds him of a wound.
He is not here to forgive. He is not here to forget. He is here to test. To measure the weight of a past he could not change, against the breath of a future he might still write—slowly, with tired hands.
I watch him and I wonder: Can a life shattered beyond repair be restarted, not from a new beginning, but from the same jagged place it ended?
He will try. And I will watch.
But if this world betrays him again… if it proves too hollow, too cruel, too far gone—
He will leave. And you, dear reader, will follow him into silence.
Or perhaps… something far more terrible