Darkness swelled at the edges of perception, curling like the ink of an unfinished manuscript. In the vast expanse of slumbering reality, where thought bled into existence and illusion became indistinguishable from truth, Yeaia Nolas drifted.
Time had no meaning here. He was neither awake nor asleep, neither present nor absent. The world—if it could be called that—was an unformed haze, a canvas of forgotten dreams where even he struggled to remember who he was.
His black-and-white hair, streaked with ember-like highlights, fanned out like liquid smoke in the dream-stained void. His body, ever flickering between solid and ephemeral, had lost the ability to fully define itself. His mismatched eyes, red and silver, saw too many things at once.
Something was wrong.
The loops, the distortions, the rewritten fates… Klein's unraveling existence had torn through the fabric of perception itself. But while Klein had been ensnared in the intricate maze of shifting realities, Yeaia had suffered a different fate.
He had been forgotten.
Not by Klein. Not by the world. But by himself.
A paradox. A contradiction.
Yeaia had fallen through the cracks of the Dreamer's own Pathway, submerged in an ever-expanding dream where his existence was a half-formed question rather than a certainty.
Where had he been?
How many loops had passed since he was last real?
His form flickered, distorting as waves of thought—not his own—pushed against him. Fragments of false memories mixed with real ones, forcing him to relive different versions of events that had never happened.
The child calling him "big brother."
Klein's mismatched gaze, flickering between knowing and unknowing.
The Fool's throne, always shifting, always empty, always occupied.
Yeaia exhaled, the sound barely registering in the formless space around him. He lifted his hand, watching as his fingers wavered between tangible and unreal. The Dreamer's Pathway had always blurred the line between reality and fantasy, but now…
Now he was adrift.
And yet, something was stirring at the edges of this endless dream.
A whisper. A presence.
Something—someone—had not forgotten him.
His mismatched eyes widened as a sliver of golden light cut through the void. A hand, reaching for him. Not Klein's. Not the Fool's.
Something older.
Something that had been watching from the beginning.
Yeaia's breath hitched as his body began to pull toward it, the weight of the unknown dragging him from his endless slumber.
Reality was waiting for him.
Or at least, whatever was left of it.
---
Darkness. Silence. The weight of an unfinished dream pressed against the fabric of reality.
Yeaia Nolas drifted through the remnants of thought, slipping between the half-formed illusions of a fading mind. The space around them was neither real nor unreal—it was something in between, an existence that flickered and pulsed as if uncertain whether to remain or vanish altogether.
They had been here before. But this time, something was different.
A whisper curled through the void. It was not a voice, not truly. More like the remnants of forgotten words, an echo of something that had never been spoken.
"Still dreaming, are we?"
Yeaia turned—or at least, they believed they did. The nature of movement was strange here, more like a shift in thought than a physical action. Before them stood a figure that was both familiar and alien, its features blurred, as though seen through a veil of half-remembered sleep.
"Who are you?" Yeaia asked, their voice carrying through the dreamspace like ripples on a still lake.
The figure chuckled, and the sound reverberated through the void like a lullaby that never ended.
"Who am I? No, the better question is—who are you?"
The question lingered, wrapping around Yeaia like invisible chains. They tried to answer, but something caught in their throat—something heavy, something that refused to let them speak.
Memories surfaced in fragmented flashes. Klein. The Archive of the Unwritten. The loops. The ink that refused to dry. The Fool that was never supposed to be.
And then—nothing.
A gap. A space where something should have been.
"Ah, I see. You don't remember, do you?" The figure's voice was almost pitying. "You were supposed to be a story, and yet here you are, drifting outside the pages."
A chill crawled up Yeaia's spine. They clenched their hands, only to realize they had none. Their body—was it even theirs anymore? Were they even real?
"Where am I?" they asked, their voice quiet.
The figure tilted its head, shadows shifting across its featureless face.
"You are nowhere, yet everywhere. You are a dream abandoned mid-sentence, a thought half-formed. You were written, but never finished. And now…"
The figure leaned closer, and for the first time, Yeaia saw its eyes—red and silver, mismatched like their own.
"Now you must decide—will you wake, or will you fade?"
The void around them trembled. Yeaia felt something pulling them, dragging them back—back to where they had come from, back to the unraveling reality they had left behind.
They had no choice.
They had to return.
Even if they no longer remembered why.
Even if they were no longer certain who they were.
As the dream shattered around them, as their form began to coalesce once more, only one thought remained.
"Who… am I?"
---
End of Chapter 78
---