It began as a vibration, a hum somewhere beneath my skin, deep and electric, a frequency just beyond hearing. The room, still and dim, folded in on itself, the walls bending, melting, exhaling. Then—detonation.

A great force yanked me upward, or inward, or outward—there was no direction anymore, no up or down, only speed, only light. I was inside the light, swallowed whole by a tunnel of neon geometry, fractals spinning, dividing, expanding. The colors were impossibly bright, saturated to the point of pain, yet I could not look away, could not blink. I had no eyes.

And then they came.

Beings, entities, architects of this place. They did not walk or float but simply were, shifting and shimmering, their faces flickering between beauty and nightmare. They had no mouths, yet they spoke. No hands, yet they reached for me. They peeled me open like a fruit, revealing something infinite inside.

“We have been waiting,” they said.

For how long? A minute? A thousand years? Time stretched and collapsed, a joke I no longer understood.

One of them—a being of iridescent blue, its body a lattice of moving patterns—stepped forward, pressing something into me, through me. A thought? A gift? It burned and it healed in the same instant.

“This is what you forgot.”

I saw it then—the scaffolding beneath reality, the grand machinery of existence, a cosmic loom weaving everything at once. I understood it perfectly, for a moment. And then—

A snap.

I was back. The room was silent, the air thick and still. The walls were walls again. My hands, shaking, were my hands. But the feeling remained, a residue of the impossible.

I tried to speak, but what was there to say?

Nothing.

And everything.