The boat was wrong in a way he couldn’t stop looking at.
Every inch of it, the hull, the low curved bow, was carved with designs that didn’t belong to any single culture he could name, shapes that looked almost like letters until he tried to read them, and every one of them, without exception, made him think of the same thing.
Dying.
Not in the abstract, not the way a man thinks about death when he’s healthy and bored, but personal and certain death, the kind carved by someone who had seen it up close often enough to get the details right.
He looked past the bow and understood, all at once and without needing to be told, exactly what he was floating on.
‘Lovely,’ he thought.
‘Really inviting to say the least.
Ten out of ten, would drown in it.’
The knowledge arrived like his inherited memory did, already finished, already certain, like a fact he’d known his whole life and simply forgotten to think about until now.
The River of Eternal Darkness.
The actual thing, one of the 9 Sefirot of the Oldest One, a broad, straight, dark, and colorless river that flows silently, heralding the stillness of fate and the proclamation of death.
This was a river that did not loop.
It looked more like an ocean for there was no end in sight.
He knew its name the way he knew his own.
He knew, too, that this particular river and he were no longer entirely separate categories.
‘Right,’ he thought slowly, turning that over with considerably more caution than he usually gave anything.
‘That’s new.
That could be a problem.’
It felt close.
Too close.
It felt like the river wasn’t a source he reached into, nor a room he just happened to be standing inside of, but a room that started calling itself “Him”.
‘Oh no, don’t do that.
I would like to formally decline.
Is there a form for this?’
There was, predictably, no form.
But before “He” could panic about becoming a cultivator, or worse, a pile of worms larping as a cultivator.
A somewhat relieving thought “He” couldn’t quite laugh “His” way past surfaced in “His” mind.
Back home, “He” was spoiled about the second book and knew that this Sefirah wasn’t just one thing.
Its will was rebuilt the slow way, out of centuries of “cultivators” climbing toward it, praying to it, dying for it, each one leaving some small mental fingerprint smudged into the whole, so that by the time it was revealed it wasn’t something pure at all.
It was a crowd wearing one face, a mind shaped and made just barely survivable by however many people had touched it and left a little of themselves behind.
This river had never had that.
There was no Celestial Worthy of Heaven and Earth either, no whispers of a fraud that went mad by going further than “He” should have.
Which meant that this Sefirah wasn’t infected by anyone.
No fraud.
No thousand small, human fingerprints forming the rough shape of a Great Old One.
Just the thing itself, exactly as the Original Creator had left it.
‘But that doesn’t make sense, a Sefira will try to infect its surroundings, even instinctually, to eventually form a sense of self.
Something is preventing it from acting, a force that rejects the certain future it offers.’
“He” considered the most likely possibilities “He” could think of based on how “His” new reality worked as “He” understood it.
‘The Storm?
The universe itself rejecting a foreign power?
Or something else?
Could be any of those, could be all of them.’
“He” raised “His” hand and the calm river started moving faster and wilder, like a dog excited to go for a walk with its master, but alas, the door was locked and neither of them could get out.
‘Okay,’ he thought, considerably less amused than a moment ago.
‘At least I can confirm that I’m in some kind of realm outside of reality and I can’t access anything outside.
That’s a much, much worse kind of problem than wearing a new hat.’
There was only the river, patient and enormous and entirely uninterested in anything but their fusion, and the very faint, very unnerving sense that whatever was happening to “Him” had already been happening for a while before “He” noticed it.
‘Alright,’ “He” thought.
‘New plan.
Panic quietly, on the inside, like a professional, I can’t be losing aura because of this.’
“He” lowered “His” hand and once again the river returned to its calm and stable flow.
That was when the boat rocked once, gently, the way a boat does when it finally remembers what a shore is for, even though there was no shore to be seen.
He heard the hull scrape against something solid.
He looked down to check his footing.
There was no boat.
There was no shore either.
‘Ah yes, the Amon special, just kidnap me and leave me in the middle of nowhere.
Very professional.
Very reasonable developments.’
He was standing in a garden now.
Flowers everywhere, pale ones, stretching out in every direction like they’d been planted by someone with a grudge against empty space.
He recognized precisely none of them, he wouldn’t exactly call himself a flower expert.
The light had no source he could find, just a soft, directionless orange that made the whole place look like it was permanently caught in the last five minutes before sunset.
‘Nice ambiance at least, still no exits though.’
That was when he noticed the mirror.
It was enormous, easily three times his height, standing upright in the middle of the flowers like someone had planted that too.
The frame was old, ornate, the kind of craftsmanship that took a lifetime to learn and several more to forget, and something about the shape of it tugged at a memory that wasn’t quite his, a smaller mirror, silver backed, carried in a woman’s handbag, glass slightly too dark to be practical.
‘Huh, is it a mirror for a giant?
I’m not quite there yet though.’