A Decade After Simon Bought the Girl
His name was Simon—nothing more, nothing less.
A name like a shattered mirror, reflecting faces no one had ever known, not even himself.
He had once been a boy, like all wood before it burns.
In the lap of his family, he learned obedience, like a dog sculpted from ash, wagging its tail at the shadow of a hand—not the hand itself.
Then something unspeakable happened—he stopped.
It was as if his ribcage turned inward, and he began to hear the commands of the heart instead of the blood.
Simon dislikes the word "rebellion." It offends him, smells like scorched leather.
He simply... ceased.
Ceased wearing the names stitched onto him.
Ceased sitting where he was placed.
Ceased acknowledging blood as kin.
From that day on, he walked in the opposite direction of doors—he entered through walls.
Immortality?
Yes, he wanted it like a child wants the lamp's light—
Not for anything in particular, only because the dark was far too long.
He tried to gather immortality in his pockets, but it melted.
So he carved into his skin to bury it.
He never knew what he'd do with it if he ever held it.
Would he place it on a shelf? Devour it? Bury it in his chest?
No one knew—not even Simon.
The goal was never immortality itself, but the chase.
To be hunted by desire—that alone was proof he existed.
Perhaps it was immortality that chased him, and he simply never figured out how to run.
But make no mistake: Simon is dangerous.
Dangerous like imagination left unsupervised.
Dangerous because he wants nothing specific.
Dangerous because he does not fear becoming a god—or a corpse.
Dogs follow him, not because he feeds them, but because he doesn't see them.
Children flee him, not because he harms them, but because in him, they see their father when he lies.
Simon... is a mirror that walks on two legs.
In him, you watch yourself burn—smiling all the while.
He was still in his room, the riddle of that strange girl unsolved.
Simon recalled his first conversation with the magicians, back when Billy brought the child for the first time.
They told him: the girl's immortality was not born of a curse—
Which meant it was natural. Innate.
She had likely been born with it.
In the rotting corners of his mind,
Where Simon's thoughts rose like vapors from a split atom bottle,
He muttered to himself:
"Immortality... that metaphysical cancer—
it multiplies without cells,
breathes outside of time,
nests in the nerves of being like a germ born in the mouth of a forsaken god.
There are many of them, the so-called immortals.
Like the so-called Eight Eternal Ones in the far East—
Human in body,
But their souls polished by the claws of creatures sleeping beneath the skin of the cosmos.
They do not remain silent by choice,
But because their language was exiled from the dictionary of logic.
They are surrounded by myths more absurd than the dream of a schizophrenic jinn:
Drinking moonlight as if it were black wine,
Splitting awareness from flesh like a spirit torn from a fool's unfinished painting,
Walking roads not drawn in the geometry of God.
And the immortal beasts...
They are not creatures.
They are folds in perception—creases in the flesh of existence.
They were hunted by those we falsely call:
Holy Magicians, Grand Priests.
But there is no sanctity here—only organized depravity.
They serve equations etched into the core of a dying star,
And they know how to blow into the void until it takes form.
They govern everything—
Thought, blood, the symbolism of the Emperor,
Who now is nothing more than a tube through which the spirits funnel their commands.
To obtain a feather from one of these creatures?
Like stealing fire from the womb of a star not yet born.
Only madness could justify such a pursuit.
I have no choice but to experiment on the girl—
To repeat the rituals until the rituals themselves grow ill with me,
Until reality chokes on my persistence.
But nothing works.
Every step slips into a crack carved in the fabric of awareness.
Every attempt chews itself,
Then vomits nothingness.
The path was supposed to make sense...
But I realize now—
I am not walking a path.
I am inside a dream that dreams me.
Time is not a circle,
Nor a line.
It is a creature that swallows my feet.
And I laugh...
Laugh like one who has just realized the laws of the world were written
with the same ink as his nightmares."
Then silence.
He looked around the room—
Then at the stack of papers before him.
"Shit. I need a break from this glue."
Simon left his desk—
The room had grown too small for him.
He crossed the threshold—
And corridors opened up before him,
Not obeying architectural law,
But breathing like living beings.
The ceiling was a frozen sky,
And the stars within it moved aside,
One by one,
Like soldiers retreating from a war against the unknown.
To his left—
He passed a wall of fractured mirrors.
They did not reflect him,
But versions of him not yet born:
Simon smiling.
Simon as a child with the head of a serpent.
Simon screaming without a mouth.
He smiled at them,
As if reading ancient books in a library that loathes forgetting.
In some forgotten corner,
He found a staircase that ascended downward.
Without hesitation, he descended.
Each step released a musical note from the dream of a mad priest.
The floor became the skin of books—
Books copied in a language that died before it could be spoken.
There, in the middle of the corridor,
He passed a room they say changes you—
No one leaves it the same.
But this time, the door was opening and closing on its own,
Like it was breathing... or coughing.
In one hallway,
He crossed paths with the ghost of a dog long dead,
Holding a message in its mouth:
"Do not seek meaning. It seeks you... and it hates you."
He took the message
And placed it in a pocket that did not exist in his coat until now.
Eventually—
He arrived at an indoor garden
Where flowers screamed if you got too close,
And a fountain wept actual tears.
He sat beneath a tree
Bearing fruit shaped like melting clocks,
And spoke to himself—
Not with sound,
But with the gestures of his soul.
This was his palace.
Or rather—
A piece of it.
For every time he forgot something...
a new wing was born.
Amid his cryptic silence, Simon sat relaxed on a chair that couldn't decide whether it was made of wood or bone. The sun there did not rise—it watched. And the shadow did not follow the light, but rather contradicted it deliberately.
Within this orchestrated chaos, the rhythm of the garden suddenly broke.
Footsteps. Precise. Measured. Belonging to a world misaligned with this vital disarray, yet they didn't disturb it… they pierced through it, like a master blade sliding through living cloth without tearing it.
It was Butler.
He appeared like an old ghost. No one really remembered if that was his actual name, or if Simon had simplified the matter out of mental convenience. The name didn't matter. Butler was Butler—a function walking on two legs.
He bowed at his master's head—the same bow once taught in ancient imperial academies built upon extinct ideologies.
Without opening his eyes, Simon said,
"What malfunction dares interrupt me, Butler?"
The man replied in a polite, metallic tone, as if the voice had emerged from a music box emptied of sentiment:
"A disruption in the rain mechanism, sir. The farmers are complaining about the cruelty of the sky."
Simon moved his finger as if playing a tune inside his mind:
"Walter is in charge of the weather."
"Indeed, sir. However, Walter has become… part of the problem. His sorcerers suffer from cognitive fatigue. Their rituals are incomplete. The sky, it seems, no longer responds to their gestures."
Simon opened one eye. The garden around him shuddered like a brief nightmare, and he whispered:
"Morgan, then."
Butler nodded without moving his body—only with his eyes—and said:
"I've spoken with him already. He promised to act, as he always does. Still, I thought it prudent to inform you, since things tend to... veer off course when left outside your supervision."
Then silence.
As if his final breath were a period at the end of a book only Simon ever reads.
Butler had noticed his master's scowl and didn't want to leave him in gloom, so he thought of something to cheer him up.
"Tell me, do you still enjoy accompanying this old man on a stroll around the palace?"
Simon was surprised and replied,
"A stroll around the palace… like the ones we used to take as children?"
"Exactly," Butler answered.
Simon remained silent for a moment before rising.
"Boredom is eating me alive."
The corridor felt longer than it should have been—or so it seemed to Simon. The floor was smooth glass, reflecting an internal sky above it, as if the palace itself harbored its own galaxy, pulsing with stars that moved as they pleased. On either side of the corridor, walls were covered in pale blue plants, breathing slowly, exhaling faint whispers. The ceiling was inverted—rootless trees grew from it, their leaves dangling toward the ground, disintegrating before touching it, only to regrow anew.
Simon walked slowly, like a man afraid that a thought might overtake him and crush him with its weight. His hands were behind his back, shoulders burdened by nothing tangible.
Beside him, Butler walked with steady, measured steps, like a man trained by centuries in composure.
He tilted his head slightly toward his master and said in a calm voice,
"Why do you look troubled, sir? Your face is pale, like someone who let go of a dream he was clinging to in his sleep."
Simon didn't respond immediately. His eyes were fixed on a crack in the glass floor, beneath which a small meteor seemed to be drifting slowly. Then, finally, he sighed and said:
"The girl gave me nothing. No secret, no meaning, no path. She's like the others—just a shell without essence. Or maybe I failed to dig deep enough. I haven't come closer to immortality… not even a step."
Butler was silent for a moment, then nodded as if he'd heard this a thousand times before.
"Immortality, sir, is a weary wish. A dream that keeps birthing itself until it becomes impotent. How many great men longed for it? How many kings tasted everything and then died as if they never were? Immortality, sir, is nothing but a dream for a foolish ape."
Simon smiled, though it wasn't a true smile—just a motion that didn't know its way to his face.
"I don't want to be merely a man, Butler. I want to be more… I want to be that stain that slipped from the Creator's brush in a moment of distraction, falling onto the canvas of existence and ruining the order. I want to be the first with no end."
Butler stopped in front of a large oil painting of Simon's grandfather—a man with sharp features and a robe adorned with symbols. The grandfather's eyes in the painting seemed to follow them. Beneath the painting, an epitaph was carved in a dead language, its words bleeding transparent oil.
Butler spoke in a voice closer to a whisper:
"But even stains, sir, can be washed. Even distortions get reshaped in the cycles of time. Immortality is nothing but delayed erasure, wrapped in gift paper."
Simon stood before the painting, staring into his grandfather's eyes without blinking.
"Then what's the point? To die like them? To become just a name an old historian spells out between two yawns? No… I want to be the void, not the letter."
A gentle breeze stirred from an unknown place, shifting the sheer curtains along the walls like imprisoned souls exhaling. Butler said:
"Perhaps, sir, what you seek isn't survival—but escape. Escape from being forgotten. But is immortality anything other than eternal oblivion in a different shape?"
Simon remained silent, staring at something unseen.
And in his heart, the old question echoed once again…
Is fleeing erasure the very erasure itself?
Sure. Here's the full English translation with the elegy in rhyme and the rest in fluid, literary prose:
---
In the main hall of the manor, where the walls whispered ancient secrets,
Butler approached the antique painting hanging with a weight of age above the sealed fireplace.
It depicted Simon's great-grandfather with hazy features and eyes like ash from rain.
His elderly servant silently lifted his glasses and gazed at the unyielding face of the unsmiling ancestor.
"This painting..." Butler said in a voice soft and worn, like the sigh of a whole lifetime,
"Do you remember how we used to play beneath it?
Pretending to be little detectives, trying to decipher the strange elegy?"
Simon stepped forward slowly. His voice this time was heavier than usual,
as if something from the earth was dragging him inward.
"I remember... We used to read it like an incantation from a book we weren't supposed to own."
And then, in a whisper nearly drowned in the heartbeat of the walls, he recited:
"In brassy nights with no moon's face,
The First Grandfather lost his place.
Within his palm—a pearl of smoke,
That drifted through both time and folk.
It spun, it sang in absent tune,
And screamed when light would near too soon.
It floated time, it drowned the dawn,
And made from moments wave and yawn.
He met a friend, a stranger weird,
Who drank warm honey none had stirred.
He stirred his tea with fingertip—
A star—and laughed with no known script.
But as the tale was passed along,
The Grandfather fell out the song.
He slipped where silence starts to swell,
Beyond the edge where fables dwell.
And there, beneath the void's dark seam,
A shadow met him, shaped like dream.
It said: "I am the king of dusk,
Give me your laugh—and gain the husk."
He gave the laugh he had to give,
It split the wind and ceased to live.
And in his palm—alone, apart—
A power formed none could outchart.
Since then… no soul has known his den,
Or how much time he's made or been.
But some will say, if storms make cheer,
You'll hear his bleeding laugh appear."
Simon paused, then smiled with a fragment of sarcasm:
"Ah... yes, I remember. Those were fun times."
Butler asked, "So? Have you solved it? After all these years?"
Simon shrugged with a quiet fatigue:
"Of course not... it's not something to solve. Just mythical lore."
Butler stepped back, raising his brows in skeptical surprise.
"Mythical?"
Simon laughed silently.
"Yes. That Grandfather never existed.
The story says he found something that allowed him to travel beyond the known continents.
Even if that were true, there's a massive gap we can't overlook."
He stepped closer to the painting, as if trying to step inside it:
"There are four whole generations missing between my earliest recorded ancestor and Grandfather Louis.
Nothing about them—no names, no graves, no records. Even Louis' own parents are unknown.
He simply appeared, inherited a mythical fortune with no explanation,
and became one of the Empire's Seven Great Houses... from nothing."
Butler's voice trembled:
"You think that was a coincidence? That he just showed up... with all that power?"
Simon's eyes, like windows opening onto an old wind, met his:
"Maybe he made a pact. A Magician? A god? Something ancient? I don't know.
But something happened.
Something that was never written down.
And then my grandfather Louis invented the story of the "great-grandfather." "
They both fell silent.
Outside the window, the wind rose, and the painting trembled—
as if the Grandfather himself stirred within, ready at last to say what he never dared.
A silence fell between them.
Then, as if Butler decided to twist the blade:
"And what about the idea of unknown continents? Do you believe they exist?"
A sharp smile curled on Simon's face—
the kind that always came right before mockery.
"Ah, of course I do. Just as I believe in a civilization that lives under the clouds, eats rain with a fork, and washes its sins with liquid sunlight."
Butler turned toward a glass-paneled wooden cabinet near the painting.
He ran his fingers along the polished surface, quiet in his examination.
Then suddenly, he pivoted to Simon:
"Tell me—where did you get the Prismenan wood used to build your desk?"
Simon answered flatly, like repeating a detail from an old report:
"From the Kingdom of Luthien, as recorded in the supply log."
Butler gave a short, sharp laugh:
"Ah yes, Luthien. That's what they all say.
But let me share something interesting—Luthien sits on the western edge of the continent, doesn't it?"
Simon nodded slowly:
"It does. Its borders are well defined."
Butler stepped forward, a strange gleam in his eyes:
"And yet this type of wood—Prismenan—is seen nowhere else.
It's not imported, not exported, not cultivated.
Only Luthien has it,
as if it grows in a vacuum, untouched by the laws of nature."
Simon crossed his arms, tone dripping with irony:
"The world's a big place, Butler. Vast kingdoms, thousands of kilometers wide.
Uncharted lands. Maybe there's a remote forest, or a rare soil type..."
But Butler cut in:
"That's too convenient, sir.
A kingdom the size of Luthien couldn't hide something like this for centuries.
Take the Saphiranak Forest.
Everyone who's ventured in—treasure hunters, fugitives, explorers—found nothing.
Not a trace of this wood.
Not even in its deepest roots."
"Maybe they didn't look well enough. Or maybe the forest doesn't give up its secrets easily."
Butler laughed again, more sharply:
"Secrets? Or well-crafted lies?
Think. This wood only began to appear four decades ago.
No ancient records. No historical descriptions.
It's as if the earth just… invented it."
Simon responded coolly:
"Plenty of things appear suddenly.
Diseases, metals, new stars in the sky.
Maybe Prismenan was simply a late discovery."
Butler leaned in, voice low:
"Or maybe... it's something else.
Something that isn't a 'thing' at all.
Something that doesn't belong here—
yet exists.
And is sold… exclusively to the Seven Great Houses."
Simon smiled, but a flicker of unease passed through his eyes:
"You're painting reality in your own colors, Butler.
Sometimes the strange isn't supernatural.
It's just incredibly rare."
Butler's voice softened, back to that eerie calm:
"And we live in a world so saturated with rarity...
it almost feels like the norm."
Simon narrowed his gaze:
"Are you suggesting this wood came from outside the continent?"
Butler, barely above a whisper, like dropping a stone into still water:
"Maybe it didn't come from outside the continent...
but from beneath it."
Simon shot him a puzzled look.
Butler pressed on—bolder now:
"Don't be surprised.
The trick was never in the number of continents...
but in their dimensions."
Simon raised an eyebrow:
"Dimensions? You mean… size?"
Butler nodded, lips tight:
"Yes.
Our continent isn't what the maps pretend it to be.
What we know is just the fringe—the stage's front curtain.
But behind that veil?
Even kings are kept blind."
A pause. Then he added:
"This empire we live in—with its hundred kingdoms—is only one time zone.
A narrow slice of something far greater...
Something with no end to its horizon,
where nations melt like drops into the ocean."
Simon folded his arms again, staring hard at Butler:
"If all that were true… why don't we see any trace of it?"
Butler took a step closer. His voice steady, cold:
"Because you're not just looking in the wrong place...
You're looking with eyes that were deceived from the day you were born."
Simon fell silent for a moment. Butler, shifting away from the earlier topic, cast his gaze toward him and asked, almost gently:
"How is the girl?"
But Simon's expression tightened, a shadow of anger cutting across his face—like the question had scraped an old wound raw.
"Irrational, Butler... she behaves like she lacks a complete mind, like awareness itself is missing."
He exhaled, the sound thick, like it came from someone standing on the edge of a thought too vast to voice.
"You see, if she were truly unconscious, she wouldn't fear. Wouldn't tremble. Wouldn't run from the ones who hurt her. But she does. That's not nothing—that's a fractured awareness. Confused, exhausted… but there. When the servant comes to feed her, she smiles, she touches, she plays—like a child chasing the ghost of safety in a stranger's warmth. But that mind of hers… it's scattered. Not absent, just broken. Unanchored."
Butler stepped in closer, silent. Simon went on.
"When she's left alone, she spins in circles, crashes into walls, falls, gets back up—again and again. No rhythm. No sense. Like she's blind to herself. No instinct to protect her. Just... a thing trapped in a loop, slowly shredding from within."
A pause. Then Simon whispered to the air itself:
"They called her insane. But even madness has tendrils of consciousness that pulse underneath. This? This is worse. It's like her awareness has been split, shattered, caught between being and non-being. A paradox. Something unclassifiable. Like a smoke cloud that dances aimlessly in the air—brushing against truth, only to flinch away in fear."
Silence followed, not the kind that brings peace, but the kind that drapes everything in surrender.
Butler didn't reply. He just stared into the void, as if Simon's words had pressed against something nameless in his soul.
Then—without warning—the light trembled.
The walls felt it first. A deep groan leaked through the floors, and then everything joined in—a violent, unnatural quake. As if the world had suddenly remembered it had forgotten something vital... and now it was afraid.
"What is this…" Simon muttered, standing up as the ceiling above him swayed like a restless ocean.
Tiles cracked. Books tumbled from high shelves like prisoners flung from towers.
And the ground... the ground wasn't still. It was breathing. No—roaring.
Butler didn't move.
He watched a fallen iron candelabrum hit the marble with a clang. Then said quietly:
"I don't know."