Squally was at home, but it wasn't his home. Ill remembered placements of old furniture he couldn't quite recall the shape of were oddly cramped into corners, littered bizarrely about the rooms in a way he was certain they wouldn't have been. As his eyes passed over them and then returned, he swore some had repositioned.

  Squally rubbed at his eyes, hoping it could somehow clear the image, but when he pulled his arms down, he found himself in front of his parents' bedroom. The bronze doorhandle gleamed just out of reach of his short, stumpy, child-like arms. He stretched onto his toes, fingers grazing the metal, but the moment he tried to grasp it, the knob slid away like oil on glass, his touch unable to claim it.

  Frustration swelled in his chest, and he ran an aggravated hand through his full head of hair.

  Then he heard a voice—warm and melodic that cut through the fog of this estranged home. "Supper is ready!" His mother's voice.

  A grin spread across his young chubby cheeks, and without hesitation, he turned to run toward her call. "Coming, Mama!"

  He ran from hall to hall, up and down floors, his home so much larger than he remembered. As he continued to run, the wooden floors gave way to cobbled streets, walls dissolving into narrow alleyways. The farther he ran, the less of his house remained—his childhood home swallowed piece by piece, replaced by the twisting, shadowed corridors of Abut's ghettos.

  "Squally supper is getting cold!" His mother's voice rang out again, teasing, warm, distant.

  "I'm coming, Mama!" Squally tried to answer, but his voice barely carried, swallowed by the labyrinth around him. He ran faster and faster with ever more urgency, searching for his homely kitchen; corner after corner, his house lost its roof, and walls grew into entire buildings. His small legs lengthened, muscles surging with each step.

  "Mama, where are you!?" His voice cracked and deepened, maturing as his body did the same. He ran even faster, he had to find her, he had to tell her.

  Each step Squally took further into the maze seemed to age him, each step a leap in his life. The twenty-four-year-old Squally turned another corner and came upon a fork in the road.

  To his left: the city crumbled, buildings disintegrating into swirling dust, all drawn toward a single puddle where a tiny green herb sprouted—fragile, new.

  To the right: the city grew monstrous, its structures rising impossibly high, converging at infinity, forming an oppressive tunnel of stone and flickering candlelight. At its end, a large, rounded chest sat in the gloom.

  And then—"If you don't come soon, there won't be any supper left for you!" His mother's voice, bright and beckoning, drifted from the chest.

  That beautiful, impossible voice was all he needed to make his decision.

  Squally took a step to the right. He entered into the overbearing confines of Abut. The sky disappeared behind the infinite rise of buildings pressing in from all sides. Air thickened, stale with candle smoke and dust, the silence broken only by the muffled, shifting echoes of distant footsteps—though none walked here but him. Each step further aged him more until he finally reached his familiar age of fifty-six.

  At the tunnel's end, the chest loomed. It was smaller than he'd expected, yet the padlock affixed to it was monstrous—a behemoth mass of blackened iron larger than the chest itself, warped as if sculpted by some impossible weight. The keyhole, absurdly small, was no larger than a pinprick. It was an impossible barrier to surpass.

  Then, from the chest's seam, the gale wind howled out. It struck Squally with a crushing weight, peeling away his body. His adult form shredded, dissolved, flaking away into nothing. He barely had time to scream before he was small again—pudgy hands, short legs, breathless wonder. A child.

  Something heavy dropped into his pocket. He didn't remember it being there before.

  The young boy pushed his pudgy hands in and pulled out the offending object.

  A key.

  A tiny ink-stained origami key, damp paper fringes curling at the edges. Yet oddly enough, the thing was unbelievably heavy—denser than lead. His tiny arms ached just holding it, his fingers trembling under the burden. It was too heavy and the na?ve child wanted nothing more than to be rid of it.

  He cast the key away into the padlock mechanism, and with a resonant click, the chest was unlocked.

  The raucous wind died in an instant. A vacuum of silence swallowed the world.

  Then the lid of the chest groaned, its hinges croaking like something ancient stirring from sleep. It opened all the way, the movement powered by nothing, its gaping maw beckoning. The darkness inside was soft, somehow relieving.

  The boy entered.

  With a deafening slam, the lid was sealed shut.

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  "Supper is cold now."

  Then, as suddenly as the silence arrived, it left with an explosion of sounds.

  A sickening wrench, the percussion of fists against flesh, the shuddering collapse of bodies against husk and stone. It clawed through the wood, through the dark, through him. The boy shrank, curling into the corner of the chest, pressing his hands against his ears—but the noise did not fade. It was in the marrow of his bones, in the space between his thoughts, a brutal symphony that struck with each breath.

  With every impact, his body twisted. Limbs stretched, muscles corded, clothes shifted. He was growing again, aging between the blows. And then the chest wept—thick rivulets of red and green paint bled from the seams, sluggish and viscous. The liquid dripped onto his skin, branding him, carving his story into him with an agonizing slowness.

  A final impact, louder than all the rest.

  Then, silence.

  Squally, the older monk, opened his eyes to nothingness. A void of absolute black, stretching infinitely in all directions. No chest. No city. No wind. No sound. Only his own breath, shallow and cold, whispering into the abyss.

  The world seemed different now, more concrete than just before. And yet, for all his clarity, he did not know if he was still dreaming. Or if he had woken up somewhere else entirely.

  Like that, in the darkness, he waited.

  Time became meaningless. Hours bled into days, days into weeks, and weeks into something beyond reckoning. He had no body to hunger, no lungs to fill, no tether to anything but his own mind. The nothingness left too much time for his own mind to torment itself with. It twisted in violent spirals: regret lashed at anger, fear gnawed at desperation, longing tangled with loathing. He was an impossible storm of conflicting selves, tearing at the walls of his psyche, trapped in an eternal deadlock.

  A sudden glint in the distance.

  There was no land for the man to walk upon, so instead, he moved forward simply by the thought of the very concept. One light became two. Two became ten. A cascade of white pinpricks stitched themselves into the abyss like an unravelling seam, a slow and deliberate weaving of the cosmos into existence.

  It was only as he drew closer that he understood.

  This was not merely like the night sky.

  It was the night.

  He drifted before a titan, a gargantuan blue star, its core a roiling inferno of ionized destruction. It screamed in unfathomable heat, massive tendrils of burning plasma reaching out, lashing at the fabric of the universe itself.

  It was unlike anything he had ever known. He had never seen a blue star, and the heat it exuded was unmatched by even the hottest of summer days in his home world.

  Five rocky planets orbited around this blue star. Like a cracked egg, one of these planets had burst open from one side, discharging its inner magma out into the solar system.

  Squally stared into the planetary ruin, awe-struck by the sheer scale of devastation—when suddenly, he heard the chime of a bell. A small pink rhombus suddenly grew out of thin air. Or it was a rhombus, but its body would reject any stable state. It would shift and transform, shrink and grow, continuously morphing into other shapes.

  Squally's attention was taken away from the strange sight by the chime of a second bell off to his side. At this new location, a small blue cuboid grew, twisting upon itself and fluctuating through dramatic states of being.

  A third chime.

  A fourth.

  More and more.

  Soon, the void swarmed with colour—a great congregation of impossible geometry, all distorting, all shifting and transforming, shrinking and growing. The final form that each coloured entity took was different. Some figures bent just enough toward familiarity: warped semblances of animals, crude parodies of human forms. But others… others drowned the mind in their sheer foreignness, their very existence an affront to the notion of perception.

  The collection of beings did not seem to notice Squally's presence. They turned to each other and communed, humming out mystifying melodies, some occasionally interrupting others.

  He'd guess they were speaking, but his mind refused to let go of the idea of singing. Their voices were too alienatingingly musical in such a way that it tore at Squally's mortal ears. Sounds he knew not possible played upon progressions even more so.

  It was a maelstrom of resonance that neither obeyed rhythm nor melody yet still held some indecipherable structure. Notes twisted into shapes. Vibrations curled into colours. He clung to the term music—but it was music flayed and reformed.

  The entities, oblivious of the mental decimation they caused on this unnoticed onlooker, all hovered around that shattering planet, occasionally shifting and morphing in the direction of the planet as they sang like an incomprehensible facsimile of gesturing.

  The collective song finally concluded, and one entity stepped—or rather, shifted—forward.

  An enormous orange form, composed of two hovering crosses, flanked on either side of a continent-sized pyramid. The pyramid peeled open like the pages of an ancient tome, revealing within its center a monolithic eye.

  A ray of orange divinity erupted from its gaze, a light that swallowed existence itself, a brilliance that dwarfed even the blue giant in the distance.

  Squally shut his eyes from the blinding flare.

  And when he opened them again—

  The destroyed planet was gone.

  The beings were gone.

  He was alone.

  Squally was suddenly awoken by the chime of a bell. A small pink rhombus grew out of thin air, or it was a rhombus, but its body would reject any stable state. It would shift and transform, shrink and grow, continuously morphing into other shapes. The pink shape finally locked into a form resembling that of a featureless human with only one limb. The arm was outstretched towards Squally holding a glowing parchment: It read.