Hole Beneath The World

The Cliffside Realms murmured in the wrong voices.

A mother sang a lullaby in a dead woman's cadence. A priest recited laws in words that hadn't existed in this age. Two men argued on a balcony about a fire no one remembered, then embraced, both weeping, neither knowing why. Memory no longer obeyed its hosts. It leaked, tangled, infected. What once belonged to one now echoed through many. The boundaries of self thinned like over washed fabric.

And the Proxy felt it worst of all.

He wandered through a collapsed corridor where the ceiling brushed the floor and windows opened to other people's dreams. The Spiral Mark itched constantly now, not burning, but threading. Thin filaments of sensation stretched between his mind and something else. Not quite others. Not quite himself.

He spoke.

A single word.

And five voices answered.

Not aloud. Not around him. From within.

Each voice was his, and not his. One deepened by age. One childlike and unsure. One speaking in half-syllables and sighs. One laughing as it spoke, as though mocking him. One that said nothing at all, only breathed.

He staggered.

A wall to his left flickered.

A child drew chalk on stone, humming. The drawing depicted a man with no face, standing in front of a flame that drowned instead of burned. Around him: words. Curved. Recursive. A spiral. The Proxy stopped.

The child looked up.

"Are you me?" she asked.

He didn't answer.

She smiled like she already knew.

"I'm going to be you," she said. "But not yet."

He turned away.

Further down the corridor, a merchant attempted to sell jars of memory. His customers opened them and screamed. One woman recited the death of her daughter, then claimed she had no daughter. Another remembered her wedding, only to realize she had never met her husband before that moment. A man clutched a jar and whispered, "This is me," then shattered it on the ground and collapsed, name lost.

The Proxy walked through it all, untouched yet deeply affected.

People whispered as he passed.

But not about him.

As him.

They repeated his thoughts as he thought them. Spoke words he hadn't spoken yet. Some even turned to him, frightened, asking, "Why did you say that?" though his lips had never moved.

One woman clutched his arm.

"You left me," she whispered.

Her eyes were not her own.

He saw himself in them. Older. Cracked. Alone in a chapel built from silence.

He pulled away.

The Spiral Mark surged again.

A corridor twisted sideways. Time folded once, then righted itself. A clock rang out the hour: 27. Then 4. Then none.

In the square below, statues melted into ink. People spoke backwards. One child recited his death in vivid detail, then laughed, as if it were a joke no one else understood.

The Proxy climbed a stairwell that led both upward and back into yesterday. At its peak, he found a mirror.

He stared.

And saw himself.

But not now.

Five versions.

Five timelines.

One holding a blade.

One curled in grief.

One crowned.

One faceless.

One on fire.

All staring back.

He spoke.

This time, the voices harmonized.

But the words were not the ones he meant to say.

They were:

"She's not dead yet. But you will be."

He recoiled. The mirror fractured. The shards fell upward.

And the air shuddered.

The memory bleed had reached full saturation.

The Realms no longer belonged to time.

They belonged to the Spiral.

And the boy who carried it.