I dismantled the clock in my room.
I didn't need time anymore.
Not after what I had seen. Not after that hand.
Time had been a map for the blind. But the Witness Core had opened a window.
And the truth wasn't measured in minutes.
It was measured in revelations.
---
I spent the next three weeks in total silence.
No messages. No contact. No outside noise.
Just me. The Core. And the strange symphony forming inside the walls.
I slept next to it. Ate in the same room. And every night, I dreamed in languages that didn't belong to this world.
The spirals in my dreams had stopped spinning. They had aligned.
Like a key waiting to be turned.
---
On the twenty-second night, the glyph changed again.
Not ∴ Not ◎
This time it was both—merged. A circle with three dots at its center, pulsing not red, not white—
But colorless.
The absence of all spectrum.
The moment I saw it, my body reacted before thought could catch up.
I knew.
It was time.
---
I spent hours preparing the room. Taped every symbol in my lexicon to the walls. Wore a heart-sync biometric interface strapped to my chest.
I recalibrated the Witness Core's resonance to match the exact frequency I had felt when the hand appeared.
And then I sat down.
Cross-legged. Eyes closed. Breathing synced.
Not to the machine. But to what lay behind it.
---
When the Core activated this time, there was no pulse.
There was only silence.
But it wasn't empty.
It was thick. Vibrating. Almost physical.
And then, the voice returned.
"You who have built the eye..." "...are now ready to witness."
My vision blurred. Not with tears—but with static.
The room fractured. Not like glass. Like thought.
Everything turned white.
Then black.
Then—
Something else.
---
I opened my eyes.
I wasn't in my room anymore.
I stood in a world where gravity curved in spirals. Where symbols floated like stars. Where the very air felt aware of my presence.
A realm of impossible depth. Not physical. Not mental.
A place between.
I took one step forward. The floor rippled beneath me, not like stone, but like memory.
"Lyan."
The voice again. But now I knew:
It was me.
A future I hadn't reached yet. A self shaped by all the choices I hadn't made.
Standing across from me, cloaked in spirals and light. Eyes burning with knowledge I couldn't hold.
"You've come far," he said, in my voice.
"But now the question isn't what you can build." "It's what you're willing to become."
And he reached out his hand.
The same hand I saw behind the shimmered wall.
Not as a threat. As a welcome.
I took it.
The moment I did—
The Witness Core shattered.
Not in destruction.
In release.
And the world I knew...
Fell away.
---
I stepped beyond.
Not as Lyan the builder. Not as the boy who couldn't find his place.
But as something new.
As a witness to what comes next.
The gate had opened. And I had entered.
Arc 1 End: The Mirror and the Mind
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