The city had no name or perhaps it had too many, and they had all dissolved into one another like salt in rain. The locals called it "Here," and that seemed enough. Its skyline was stitched together from broken glass and memory. Every building leaned slightly, as though it had tried to whisper something to the ground but forgot the language midway.
At dawn, the fog moved like though slow, hesitant, unsure of its destination. Ayor walked through it barefoot, feeling the breath of the streets under his soles. The city had taught him that everything alive hums quietly: walls, lampposts, dust. If you listened long enough, even silence confessed.
Ayor was not a seeker of gold, but of grammar the invisible one that orders existence. Somewhere, he believed, there was a Word Beneath Words, the primal code behind all happenings joy, failure, time, and the strange arithmetic of hope. They said whoever found it could translate pain into purpose, and loss into light. Ayor did not know if he believed this or if belief was simply another language that lied politely.
He had once been a merchant of tangible things: coins, crypto,grains, promises. But the market burned one night an inferno that began in the price of wheat and ended in the ashes of men's ambitions. When the smoke cleared, Ayor realized that wealth was a mirage drawn on the desert of hunger. He began walking, and never stopped.
The first person he met in Here was a beggar who called herself Time. She wore no clock, no calendar, only a grin made of wrinkles. She sat beside the river that reflected the sky too perfectly as if heaven itself were drowning.
"What are you looking for, wanderer?" asked Time.
"Meaning," Ayor replied.
"Ah," said Time, "that's the one currency that never holds its value."
The beggar stirred the river with a twig. Ripples formed circles chasing circles.
"Every man thinks his pain unique," Time murmured, "but pain is the most fluent language ever spoken. The problem is, few listen; most only translate it into complaint."
Ayor sat beside her and watched the ripples fade. "Then how should one speak it?" he asked.
Time chuckled, "By living it quietly, until silence translates you back."
That night, Ayor slept by the river and dreamt of letters raining from the sky. They didn't form words only patterns, spirals, symbols too intricate to read. When he woke, he found a small pebble in his palm shaped like an eye. He kept it. It looked as though it saw through him.
Days later, Ayor reached the Market of Mirrors, a place where nothing was sold but reflections. The merchants offered you versions of yourself: one wealthy, one famous, one healed, one utterly broken. Each mirror spoke in riddles.
"Choose your illusion," said the vendor.
"And what do they cost?" Ayor asked.
"Whatever truth you still possess."
He walked through aisles of silvered glass, each surface shimmering with possible lives. In one, he saw himself crowned and adored; in another, starving but serene. He realized that both faces belonged to him, potential births within the same skin. The mirrors began whispering in chorus, calling him Failure, Prophet, Fool, Creator.
The voices tangled until they became one untranslatable sound "Jargon". A wordless hum that only the soul could interpret. Ayor felt dizzy, as if his mind were being rewritten.
He left the market without buying anything. But the whisper followed him like perfume:
Perhaps "All meanings are rented. Only silence owns."
In the District of Dust, Ayor met a man who painted with his eyes closed. His studio smelled of turpentine and thunder. He was blind, yet his paintings shimmered as if light obeyed her touch.
"How do you paint what you cannot see?" he asked.
"Vision is a distraction," he said. "I paint what looks back at me."
He dipped his brush into nothingness and drew lines that moved like prayers.
"You search for the Word Beneath Words, don't you?" he said without turning.
Ayor froze. "How do you know?"
"Because only those wounded by silence seek to name it."
He wanted to ask him what it looked like the secret Word but something in his stillness warned him not to. So instead, he asked, "Have you found it?"
"I stopped searching," he said softly. "That's when it began to speak."
Ayor felt a strange tremor within not sadness, not joy, something more ancient.
The man smiled faintly. "When success delays, it's not denial it's training. Life waits to see if you can love the process without the prize."
He handed him a blank canvas. "Carry this," he whispered, "and paint only when you have nothing left to prove."
That night, Ayor wrote in his journal:
"Pain is not punishment; it is translation. It turns the invisible into voice.
The indifferent man is not heartless he is free from bargaining with fate.
To live indifferent is to live balanced, unmoved by excess joy or despair.
Perhaps that is success a stillness that no outcome can seduce."
The next morning, the fog lifted briefly, revealing the edge of the city where the streets bent upward like an unfinished sentence. Beyond it lay a plain of white sand and silence so loud it could be mistaken for divinity.
Ayor knew his journey had only begun.