Solitude

Dost thou believe in Death, pale wanderer?
In a Heaven that opes but to unblemished hands?
Or is this mortal life a restless wheel,
Reborn anew ere olden bruises fade,
With ne'er a quiet bower left to close thine eyes?

- "The Cupbearer", by The Sweetest Bane

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

As spring fades into the summer solstice.

...

The avocado struck his chest before his hands could react.

His father had shoved it into his palm with clumsy, disproportionate force. The skin was dark green, pebbled, and unnaturally warm, carrying a faint stench of rancid grease and stale tobacco ash.

"Dinner."

A single word, discarded into the room. His father's eyes never left the fourteen-inch television on the kitchen shelf. The broadcast looped footage of a cracked, sunbaked canal somewhere in the southern hemisphere. His voice was as dry as the canal bed.

The boy squeezed the fruit, stood in silence for two seconds, and walked away.

In the dim hallway outside his room, the door hinge shrieked, metal scraping against metal.

The narrow, dusty mirror caught his tired face beneath thick black hair, dulled in places to sun-bleached brown by long afternoons adrift in the summer glare.

Inside, the computer monitor hummed in the dark. A video game idled on standby; across the plane of pixels, his avatar stood frozen in a dead field.

In the bottom right corner of the screen, only one green name remained on his friends list:

Soren.

Status: Offline (4 minutes ago).

He pulled his chair out, sat down, and set the avocado beside his mouse, dark and inert. He tapped out a quick message:

"Yo. Still breathing? ;)"

...

The cursor pulsed against the empty text box. Four minutes passed. Five. Six...

He rested his head against the chair. A hairline crack ran from the upper corner of the wall to the base of the hanging bulb. His gaze followed it.

He had passed the university entrance exams. What had that changed?

His father's response had come in the same flat cadence as "Remember to pick up the greens."

Tomorrow would repeat today. The day after would follow. Weeks, months, years, with nothing to mark where one ended and another began.

A bruised avocado on a desk. A television droning in the next room. His whole life packed into a wooden crate, marked down, and left on a dusty shelf to outlast its expiration date.

The monitor flickered.

No game notification, no error message. A black window spread across the screen without a border, title bar, or close button. It did not load. It heaved up through the blue subpixels, as though it had been waiting beneath the glass for him to qualify, or run out of luck.

White glyphs cut across the dark, their rigid geometry untouched by the irregularities of a human hand.

Stark white glyphs, geometric and ice-cold, slashed through the absolute dark, a foreign script carved from freezing lines that utterly refused any touch of human design:

CONTRACT SEED // Σ INTERFACE 
* VECTOR : SUBSTRATUM TO STRATUM III [CROSS BOUNDARY]
 DESTINATION : STRATUM III // TRANSIT CATHEDRAL
 LOCAL REFERENCE : 21:47:09 // E STANDARD
 ΔT : STABLE // REALITY ANCHOR : BODY + ACTIVE CONSENT
* COORDINATE : 07 CROWNLESS GATE
* TELEMETRY : [σ: 14.006 | τ: 0.00031 | ϕ: LOCKED]
 ... [SEE MORE]

 [ ACCEPT ] [ DECLINE ]
 EXPIRY: 00:15:00 // E STANDARD

He read each line, each word, deliberate and slow.

The Cathedral opens the Seventh Gate for those beneath the seal.
Step through, or remain to rot.

He knew nothing of seals, heavenly gates, or cathedrals hung in the void. Yet the choice pressed against his temple like a loaded barrel. Leave now, or decay in this room forever.

And then, a storm rose in the boy's chest.

His soul plunged into chaos. If he set foot into that fathomless unknown, when would he ever return? A year? Ten years? Or would there never be a road back? But look at this house...

Ever since his mother closed her eyes for the last time, this place had become a freezing tomb. A father who was once on fire for life, who once loved every blade of grass and greeted every morning sun with noise and joy, was now reduced to a ruin of flesh and bone, sitting motionless and hollow before a television set.

This home had died alongside his mother.

In the teeth of that inner agony, he told himself If there was something out there, a miracle, or anything that could make his father laugh again...

I have to go.

With that tragic resolve, he reached out and clicked [ ACCEPT ].

The screen transformed instantly. Every metric vanished, leaving only a solitary command:

[ DESIGNATE A COMPANION? ]

Soren's face surfaced in his mind like a mourning ghost. A scruffy boy with a shock of coarse, sun-bleached hair, not the auburn of highborn blood, but that filthy, brassy red of a gutter rat, baked brittle by years of scrounging under a scorching sun. 

A few months ago, Soren's grandmother had passed away, the last living kin he had left in this world.

Now Soren's rented room was only four moldering walls, barren and heavy with the smell of loneliness. Lately, Soren had moved like a mute shadow; he had not shared a single word since that day.

"..."

He typed the name: "SOREN"

The command was accepted without a millisecond of delay. A heartbeat passed, then another, before crimson text slashed across the glass like fresh blood:

[[ COMPANION REGISTERED: SOREN // MASS SHARED ]]

[[ TRANSFER INITIATING IN: 30... 29... ]]

"I am heading out with a friend for a bit."

His father never turned around. The television hummed on, casting its pale glow over the baked, lifeless canal under a southern sky.

"Make sure to come back early to study," the father muttered, pausing just long enough to draw a breath of stale air. "Or bring a girlfriend back. Either way is fine."

He did not answer.

Father and son both understood that those words were merely noise to paper over the room's emptiness, requiring no answer, offering no trace of one. The father knew he would not buy anything, and the son knew his father knew.

For years, this house had survived only on silences plastered over with machine noise. But right now, that was enough for a farewell.

The corner of the young man's mouth twitched into a sorrowful smile. He returned to his room, took the avocado off the desk, shoved it deep into the pocket of his sweatpants, and sat back down.

Space folded inward. It felt as though an invisible fist had plunged through his ribs, seizing his heart, radiating a freezing light from within rather than illuminating the room.

The floor collapsed beneath his feet...

A violent plunge warped all sense of up and down. The air tasted of scorched oil, stale tobacco, and the ash of ruin.

Then, absolute stillness swallowed everything.

When the clock on the wall froze at 9:47...

Four kilometers away, in the cramped kitchen of a squalid second-floor apartment, Soren was slicing scallions.

He was preparing a late, solitary meal in a building that had long sunk into dead sleep. No footsteps in the hallway, no voice calling out from the table; only the dull, mournful strike of steel against wood.

Thud, thud, thud.

The blade fell slowly, mechanically. The pungent sting of raw allium had bitten deep beneath his fingernails, clinging to his skin so obstinately that hot water and soap were useless.

He wore a faded, moss-green apron marked with old oil stains, the strap behind his back secured in a neat square knot. A small speaker hummed with low, dreary music. Soren chopped like a hollow shell; his mind sank beneath burdens crushing his spirit: the rent due soon, the dusty boxes of his late grandmother...

And on the table behind him, buried among eviction notices, lay a death sentence in black and white, a medical diagnosis sheet for leukemia.

"You have three months left to live at most."

Worse still, as the sickness chewed through his bone marrow, it dragged a hideous complication in its wake, his eyes were robbed entirely of color. Total achromatopsia had reduced Soren's world to a smeared sketch of black, white, and dreary, ash-gray shades, like the leavings of a crematorium. His moss-green apron was only a strip of filthy gray cloth; the fresh scallion was merely a withered, lifeless stalk.

His grandmother was dead. Though he had inherited no debts, he had nothing left to fight back against this world. His body, carrying the seeds of its own end, was counting down its days. The landlord had promised to throw him onto the curb if the rent was not paid before the weekend.

He stood there, knife in hand, falling headlong into an abyss of ruin.

Without warning, a violent pressure seized Soren's throat and the base of his skull, as though the thread anchoring his coordinates to this reality had been severed clean through!

Not a fraction of a second was granted to drop the knife, untie the apron, or cry out. He could not even turn his head; not that there had ever been anyone standing behind him.

One moment, the scent of raw scallions filled his lungs under the warm kitchen bulb; the next, the entire room caved into nothingness.

Reality contracted into a fissure as thin as a razor edge, dragging the physical mass of his body through an unseen needle's eye linking the heavens. Gravity crushed down upon him with abnormal weight. The air turned thin and freezing, carrying the dust of ancient stones gnawed away by time.

Soren opened his eyes. The kitchen ceiling was gone without a trace.

The first thing his vision registered was his own hands.

He was still gripping the kitchen knife, his fingers slick with onion juice.

The apron remained tied across his chest, the square knot behind his back intact. He stared at his hands in a daze, hands that seconds ago were preparing a miserable dinner, now torn entirely from the world he knew.

...He looked up.

No sun, no drifting clouds; only a pale, stagnant ring of amber light that gave off no warmth. It looked like the lingering ghost of a star dead ten million years ago, pinned to an alien sky.

Beneath his feet lay cracked, bone-chilling gray stones; the fissures were choked with pitch-black moss that clung to the rock like the claws of demons. Broken arches framed the space. Gazing through the gaps where stained glass once sat, Soren saw only an endless drop, only an ocean of pale mist churning over a bottomless void.

A ruined cathedral drifting in the void.

No roof, no altar, no god. Only giant, abandoned slabs of stone, a biting wind, and a sliver of space torn violently from Earth.

The air was dry as ash. Every breath scraped his windpipe like ground glass.

...

"Soren?"

"An actual adventure, for real...?"

"..."

The voice was terrifyingly ordinary, that same lazy, careless drawl they tossed at each other across sticky desks in the PC cafe.

Soren turned his head.

His best friend stood among the rubble, looking as stunned and clumsy as someone who had just stepped out of a convenience store only to realize he left his keys behind. Behind him, a jagged tear in space rose more than two meters high, burning and bleeding an alien light.

And as Soren looked through that tear, his eyes died in their sockets.

On the other side of that gate lay another world.

And that world was overflowing with color.

Burning reds, terrifying greens, and golden hues as radiant as honey poured into his retinas. It was a fury of light falling upon a blind man. A sensation surged up from the depths of his chest.

Was it hope? Greed? Sheer shock? He guessed it was envy. He did not know anymore. 

"Hey, Soren?"

Stop calling me...


Please, just shut your mouth.

Inside Soren's skull, panic shrieked loud enough to tear him apart, yet on the outside, his body remained frozen like carved stone. Cornered by absolute terror, he shed no tears; strangely, an unnatural chill gripped him instead, tightening every muscle and constricting his veins until his pulse slowed to a crawl.

What the hell... have you done?


Why... why did it have to be right now...?

...

Through all of it, Soren didn't utter a sound or twitch a muscle. He knelt there like a stone idol in the belly of a ruined cathedral, eyes locked in a blank, unblinking stare at a hairline fracture between the stones.

In that suffocating quiet, an eerie fable from his childhood drifted back to the surface of his mind:

...

Once upon a time, deep in an ancient forest on the fringe of the world, four monkeys lived together on a great bough.

The ancient forest was a place of ceaseless savagery. To keep their spirits untainted, the four monkeys swore inviolable vows:

The first monkey covered its eyes with its hands:


"I see no evil."






The second monkey clamped its hands over its ears:


"I hear no evil."





The third monkey sealed its mouth with its fingers:


"I speak no evil."




And the fourth monkey sat with its hands resting idle on its lap:



"I do no evil."




Then, a winter harsher than any other fell upon the woods. The trees froze into bone, food vanished, and ravenous predators began to prowl the dark in a frenzy of starvation...

...

"Hey, Soren?"

Hearing his name, Soren slowly got to his feet.

He could not, could never remain in that old world any longer.

He thought of his friend's family, thought of his own sickness, and the despair that came before. Envy, greed, sorrow, rage, and the desperate will to break free of that gray, dead world now fused into one.

...

He had made up his mind.

He looked at his best friend, looked at the burning rift bathed in the colors of salvation, then lowered his gaze to the kitchen knife in his hand, the steel blade still wet with pungent scallion juice. When he spoke, his voice was flat, cold as the perennial ice upon a dead lake:

"In that world over there, do you want to be a hero, or a king?"

His friend took a step toward the rift, chest open, entirely unguarded:

"I would want to..."

The moss-green apron whipped over his head from behind!

The heavy canvas snapped taut around his throat, locked fast in a neat square knot, the exact knot Soren had tied behind his own back in a quiet kitchen just minutes ago.

Darkness fell over his friend's eyes; the blade drove down into the cervical joint.

The kitchen knife did not cut clean; it bit deep into flesh and wedged savagely against the neck vertebrae, sending a sickening shock back into Soren's wrist. His friend's scream was choked into a wet, gurgling gasp as fresh blood sprayed over their frantically tangled fingers.

Soren did not hesitate; he did not blink. Bracing his boot against his friend's lower back, he wrenched the hilt sideways with both hands, grinding the steel edge against cartilage until something gave way with a savage snap.

His friend thrashed desperately beneath the canvas apron, fingernails clawing frantically against the freezing granite.

Soren dropped his full weight onto the victim's shoulders, pinning him to the stone. Pressing his open palm hard against the spine of the blade, he sawed downward with the rhythmic savagery of a wild beast, hacking, slicing, tearing through muscle, sinew, and windpipe.

A dry crack tore through the air as the final joint separated.

The severed head broke free, bounced twice on the granite, and rolled a yard away. The headless trunk crumpled like a great tree felled in the deep woods.

...

Absolute stillness rushed back into the hollow cathedral, save for the bitter wind howling through the broken walls.

Soren's chest heaved. He fell to his knees, violently vomiting a pool of yellow bile onto the stone. Shivering all over, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then dragged the bloody blade across the dead boy's pants to clean it.

He rolled the corpse aside, reached his bloodied hand into the pocket of the sweatpants, and fished out the avocado.

He did not know if avocados existed in the radiant world beyond the gate. But a whole seed brought from Earth could be a vital stepping stone, an asset to start a new life in an alien realm. With the tip of his knife, he slit the pebbled skin, pried out the stubborn pit, and shoved it deep into his pocket. He stripped the soft, bruised pulp away and left it on the cold stone. He had to discard it; this wet, fatty flesh would rot on the long march ahead.

Crouched beside the pool of blood, staring at his reddened hands, the ending of the old fable quietly took shape in his mind:

...

The tragedy unfolded in an instant.


The first monkey, hands glued over its eyes, never saw the predator's claws sweeping from the shadows, dying with its sight locked away in blindness.


The second monkey, hands clamped to its ears, never heard the branch snap behind its back, falling into the false quiet it worshipped.


The third monkey, hands pressed tight to its mouth, couldn't even scream for help as fangs tore through its throat.

All three were butchered by the beasts of the woods.

In the freezing dark, thick with the stench of iron, the fourth monkey heard the faint, dying call of its companion beneath a hollow log, a desperate whisper that inevitably drew the hunter back to finish what was left...

When dawn filtered through the gray mist, silence claimed the grove.



Yet, astonishingly, at the feet of the fourth monkey lay the mangled, broken carcass of the predator.

Its two hands gripped a heavy, jagged rock dripping with crimson.

And in its dead, unblinking stare, there was no longer any thought of resting its hands upon its lap to honor the vow it had sworn long ago...

...

...

Soren stood up, taking steady steps toward the rift of blazing light.

His face was as flat as winter water, stripped of remorse, cleansed of guilt. He stepped straight through the boundary of space.

The tear snapped shut behind him with a sharp hum, mending reality as though it had never been torn, granting him not a single chance to look back at the past.

A line of crimson glyphs flared across the empty air, then dissolved into nothingness:

[[ PRIMARY INVITEE DECEASED ]]
[[ MASS INHERITED BY COMPANION: SOREN ]]
[[ PASSTHROUGH AUTHORIZED ]]

WELCOME TO STRATUM III

...

Science has shown that after the head is severed from the neck, the human brain retains consciousness for a few brief seconds.

As blood pressure collapses and the last neurons burn through their remaining oxygen, consciousness does not vanish at once; it drifts, sinking into the thick nightmare of the void.

On the freezing granite floor, the eyes of the severed head still stared wide open.

He saw Soren step through the gate of glory.

He saw the spatial tear close, swallowing the traitor into that radiant distance.

His eyelids grew as heavy as lead. A bone-chilling cold raced from the cut in his throat to the crown of his head. In the dimming space fading to eternal night, the fractured thoughts of a wretched son cried out in his dying mind:

...Mother, I cannot visit your grave this year...



...And I have never once held my father's hand since that day.



There are wrongs I never had time to make right.



I know nothing in this life lasts forever--



...But my god, I do not want my father to weep tomorrow!



...


There is someone out there who needs me...



I have not reached the place I need to return to,



I have not seen the soul within this body clearly, and...

His pupils dilated completely.

His eyelids closed.

Eternal night came down.

...

The ancient cathedral sank back into the thousand-year silence of stone.

On the cold floor, the body lay curled. A yard away, the severed head stared unblinkingly at a crumbling wall, while the headless chest pointed straight up into a dead, ruined sky.

Two halves of a single human life, forever turning their backs to look in opposite directions.

...

Dost thou believe in Fate's remembered grace,
That a shared crust might warm the bitter cold?
Wherefore remain so gentle with each other,
If the great fish must swallow down the small,
Acrid as lime upon the tongue of grief,

And when the breath expires, the indifferent spade
Heaps only darkness on the quiet clay?

- "The Cupbearer", by The Sweetest Bane

..........