The Ordinary Existence
Earth -
At 3:17 in the morning, every light went out.
Not just the houses. The streetlamps, the distant towers, even the faint glow that usually hung above the horizon vanished at once.
For exactly seven seconds, the sky became impossibly dark.
Then the stars returned.
By dawn, no one remembered the interruption clearly. Some blamed the storm. Others blamed a power failure. Vaelorian would have dismissed it as an ordinary inconvenience—if he had not woken with the distinct feeling that someone had been standing outside his window.
There was no one there.
Only the wet glass, the quiet trees and a single unfamiliar mark traced through the condensation.
He stared at it for several seconds before wiping it away.
The universe was unimaginably vast.
Billions of galaxies stretched across the observable cosmos. Trillions of stars burned in the darkness, while countless planets travelled through the endless ocean of space.
Somewhere in that enormous universe existed a small blue planet.
Earth.
And on that planet lived a young man named Vaelorian.
He was nobody extraordinary.
No ancient bloodline flowed through his veins. He possessed no mysterious inheritance, no supernatural abilities and no extraordinary destiny that he knew of.
He was simply human.
He had a family, a few close friends, ordinary responsibilities and dreams that sometimes seemed larger than his circumstances.
His life was not perfect, but it was his.
It was a quiet morning in Assam.
The previous night's rain had left the surroundings covered in tiny droplets. The sound of birds echoed through the trees, and a gentle breeze moved through the open windows.
Vaelorian sat near his window with one knee drawn to his chest, a mug of tea cooling untouched beside him. He had been watching the same cloud for several minutes, trying to decide whether its shape resembled a mountain or a ship.
Then his gaze shifted to the glass.
The mark was gone.
He leaned closer until his breath fogged the pane. Nothing appeared beneath the mist except his own blurred reflection: untidy hair, tired eyes and the faint crease between his brows that his mother often told him to stop making.
He wiped the glass with his sleeve anyway.
"Strange..."
His fingers remained pressed against the cold window.
If the mark had been drawn from the inside, he should have seen it before going to sleep. If it had been drawn from outside, the rain should have washed it away. He tried to reconstruct the shape from memory, but each attempt made it less certain. A circle? A broken line? Something he had seen before in a book?
The author's official publication has this text, but this page used it without permission; reading the source supports the creator.
He reached for his phone and opened a search engine, then stopped. What would he even type? Unfamiliar symbol on window? Seven-second blackout? He imagined the results and felt embarrassed before writing anything.
Instead, he opened a notes app and typed:
3:17 a.m. — lights out for seven seconds. Mark on window. Gone by morning.
He stared at the sentence, then added:
Ask whether anyone else saw it.
"How big is this universe, actually?"
The question escaped him quietly.
It was not the first time he had asked himself that question, though usually it came while he was supposed to be studying or falling asleep.
He had always been curious about things that most people rarely thought about. He wanted to know why the moon seemed to follow a moving car, why time felt faster during good conversations, and whether an object could be said to exist if no one could ever observe it.
Space. Time. Gravity. Dimensions. The origin of existence.
Sometimes he spent hours reading about physics, watching scientific documentaries or pausing videos to look up words he did not understand. He kept a notebook filled with half-finished questions and diagrams that made sense only until he looked at them the next morning.
He wasn't a scientist.
He wasn't even particularly knowledgeable about everything he wanted to understand. He had once spent an entire evening confusing dark matter with dark energy and had only realized his mistake after arguing about it with a friend.
But he wanted to learn.
That desire was more persistent than confidence. Whenever he found an explanation, he immediately noticed the next question hiding behind it.
There was something about the universe that fascinated him.
People often discussed what existed beyond Earth, but Vaelorian found himself wondering about something deeper.
What exactly was existence?
Why did anything exist at all?
Was the universe everything, or was it merely a small part of something greater?
He had no answers.
Only questions, stacked one behind another like doors he had not yet learned how to open.
"VAELORIAN!"
A familiar voice interrupted his thoughts.
He flinched, nearly knocking over the tea.
"Coming!"
He saved the note, slipped his phone into his pocket and stood up. Before leaving, he glanced at the window one last time. The glass reflected the room behind him, ordinary and familiar, but he still felt as though he had forgotten something important.
He stretched his arms and walked away from the window.
Another ordinary day had begun.
Later that afternoon, Vaelorian was sitting with his friends at a small tea stall near the road. He kept turning the paper cup between his palms, watching the thin skin of tea tremble whenever a bus passed.
Their conversation moved between random jokes, arguments and discussions about the future.
One of his friends suddenly asked:
"Bro, what do you actually want to become?"
Vaelorian opened his mouth, then closed it. The easy answer—engineer, teacher, something stable—would have satisfied everyone, but none of it felt honest.
"I don't know yet."
"Seriously? You don't have any plans?"
"I have plans. I just haven't figured everything out."
His friend laughed.
"Typical Vaelorian."
Vaelorian smiled, though the joke landed closer to the truth than he wanted. He had a folder on his phone titled Future Plans, but it contained university links, astronomy articles, a half-written application and a video explaining how black holes might evaporate. He had never managed to choose one direction and stay there.
"At least I know what I don't want," he said.
"Which is?"
"To spend my whole life pretending I understand things."
His friends stared at him for a moment.
Then one of them snorted. "You don't understand things now."
"Exactly. I'm being consistent."
They laughed, and Vaelorian did too. The sound loosened something in his chest.
For a moment, everything felt completely normal. The tea was too sweet, the road was too loud and his friend was still trying to prove that an obviously fictional movie had been scientifically accurate.
Vaelorian listened, occasionally interrupting to point out another mistake. He liked these arguments even when he pretended not to. They gave his thoughts somewhere to go, and his friends never made him feel foolish for asking questions that had no practical use.
And perhaps that was what made those moments valuable.
He had no idea how much the universe would eventually take from him.
He had no idea how much he would have to sacrifice.
And he certainly had no idea how far his curiosity would eventually lead him.
That night, Vaelorian returned to his room.
The surroundings were quiet. Rain tapped against the roof in uneven bursts, and somewhere outside, a dog barked once before falling silent.
He changed into an old shirt, pushed his books aside and opened one about the fundamental nature of the universe. A folded receipt marked the page he had been reading the night before.
One particular concept caught his attention.
Dimensions.
He traced a finger beneath the paragraph as he read.
He had previously understood the basic idea of three spatial dimensions and time as the fourth dimension in the spacetime framework.
But what about higher-dimensional structures?
Could reality be more complicated than human perception allowed?
He reached for a pencil and drew a cube in the margin. Then he tried to draw a fourth spatial direction and ended up with a tangled shape that looked more like a badly folded box.
He frowned at it.
"If a two-dimensional creature saw a sphere passing through its world," he murmured, "it would see a point appear, grow, shrink and disappear."
He paused, imagining the scene.
What if something higher-dimensional had passed through his world? Would he recognize it? Or would he mistake a fragment of it for a symbol on a window?
The thought made him laugh under his breath. It was an absurd conclusion, and yet he did not cross it out.
He put the book down.
For several minutes, he stared at the ceiling, listening to the rain and the faint hum of the ceiling fan.
Then he closed his eyes.
He began to breathe slowly, attempting to clear his thoughts. Inhale for four seconds. Hold. Exhale. He had learned the method from a video and had never managed to follow it without counting.
It wasn't anything supernatural.
Just a simple attempt at meditation.
He had recently become interested in the relationship between consciousness, the human body and the nature of reality. The more he read, the less certain he became about where thought ended and the physical brain began.
He wanted to understand himself before attempting to understand the universe.
A mosquito whined near his ear. He swatted at it without opening his eyes, lost count of his breathing and started again.
Minutes passed.
Nothing happened.
No mysterious energy appeared.
No ancient voice called his name.
No supernatural phenomenon occurred.
His left foot went numb. His thoughts wandered to the mark on the window, then to the blackout, then to whether the two events were connected. He tried to push the questions away, but they returned each time with a different shape.
Eventually, he opened his eyes.
"Maybe tomorrow."
He smiled faintly, more at his own impatience than at the thought, and went to sleep.
Outside, the night sky remained silent.
Far beyond the atmosphere, countless stars continued their ancient journeys.
And somewhere beyond the reach of human observation, something existed that humanity had never imagined.
It wasn't watching Vaelorian.
It wasn't waiting for him.
It didn't even know he existed.
For now, he was simply one human among billions.
And his story had barely begun.