On the night the sky changed forever, a young man from southern Illinois lay in a dark room in central Illinois and decided to tear his own consciousness open once again.
No TV. No music. Just the sound of his pulse and the cheap plastic click of the DMT pen in his hand.
He drew in a long hit. The taste was sharp, chemical, unmistakable. He held it until his lungs burned, then exhaled in a thin, shaking stream.
His heart sped up.
He hit it again. And then a few more times...
He had hit it so much and was holding them in for so long that he lost count.
The room didn't spin. It just… shifted. Like someone had nudged reality a few degrees off-center. Thoughts that had been scattered all day suddenly slammed into alignment.
The Void remembered him.
Everything came back at once.
The first DMT trip—falling through endless darkness while patterns of light unfolded and collapsed into impossible shapes. Triangles folding into circles, circles into grids, grids into spirals.
That metallic, otherworldly hum in the black around him, matching his heartbeat exactly until his chest didn't feel like his anymore.
The silhouettes waiting at the edge of that space—no faces, no mouths, only outlines cut from shadow and distant starlight. Their "voices" moved directly through his skull in a language he'd never heard.
He couldn't understand most of it.
But two words had come through clearly:
Dark Messiah.
Then the mushroom nights:
The time he felt something inside him click—masculine and feminine energy locking into balance. His breath syncing with something bigger than him, like his lungs were moving in time with the planet.
The time his vision flipped inward—eyes closed, but his mind opening into a full 360° field. All around him in that inner space, there were figures made of light and shadow. Not real faces, not clear bodies. Just energy shaped like people, their forms flickering and shifting.
He couldn't name them. But he understood what they were.
Most felt strongly tied to African and European blood—heavy, close, familiar in a way his entire life suddenly made sense. A few others carried faint traces of Native and Southeast Asian lines, thinner threads woven through the rest. They didn't speak. They didn't have to. Their presence alone said: this is your ancestry; this is how many stand behind you.
The night in the shower when his body went freezing cold under hot water, vision fading at the edges, muscles shaking. He'd almost blacked out stepping onto the mat, teeth chattering, wrapping the towel around himself just to keep from going into shock.
And the golden mushroom. Its cap a burnished gold, the bottom of its stem fit his own thumbprint. The one he'd saved for months without knowing why. The night he finally ate it and felt his body go completely cold and his blood turn heavy, like something thick was moving through his veins. The night he silently swore his life to the Almighty Source, no conditions.
All of that collided in his head as the pen left his lips this time.
There was no slow drift.
Reality snapped.
The room disappeared.
Darkness took everything—ceiling, walls, bed, body—like someone had cut the entire scene out of existence.
He was back in the Void.
He wasn't standing or lying. There was no "up" or "down." He simply existed, suspended in nothing. Then lines of light appeared, drawing themselves into view: triangles, circles, cubes, runes, symbols he didn't recognize. They folded into each other, broke apart, and reformed into new shapes.
From somewhere in that black, a low hum started.
His heart locked onto it instantly.
Thump… THRUM.Thump… THRUM.
The same alien engine as before, syncing his pulse to something that wasn't human.
Last time, he had been helpless.
This time, he tried to control his breathing. Tried to center himself. Focus his will.
The Void ignored him.
His memories rewound around him like someone was projecting his life onto the darkness:
The night months ago in his Springfield backyard when he'd looked up and seen three white stars too perfect, too sharp, connected by faint lines of light. A triangle with a pitch-black pupil staring down through its center.
The night the aurora had spilled across the Illinois sky over his front yard—red and green curtains rippling where they had no business being. The air buzzing against his skin while space weather reports screamed about a record-breaking solar storm.
The eclipses that had crossed his state in recent years, when day had dimmed like somebody had thrown a sheet over the sun and the whole world held its breath.
Now those scenes didn't just replay. They merged with the geometry around him.
The triangle of stars slotted into the patterns as a living sigil. The eclipses cut through them like rotating blades. The aurora washed color over the darkness, staining it red, green, and violet.
Then they arrived.
Shapes formed a ring around him—tall, thin silhouettes made of shadow and very distant starlight. Their faces weren't faces, just shifting layers of symbols. No eyes. No mouths.
Pressure built behind his forehead. Telepathy.
Last time it had been noise—meaning he couldn't hold onto.
This time, it was sharp.
Welcome back, Dark Messiah.
Their tone wasn't worship. It wasn't hate. It was certainty. Like they'd been waiting for him to show up again, because that's what he was supposed to do.
He didn't have a mouth here, but his intent pushed outward anyway:
What am I? Why me?
The Void answered with images instead of words.
He saw ice.
A whole polar continent, but not like the one he'd learned about in school. This one glowed faintly from within, as if something alive was buried deep under every frozen layer.
He saw footprints pressed into fresh snow—dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. Different weights, heights, gaits. Different faces. Different skin tones. Different bone structures. All mixed. None fitting neatly into any old box.
He saw what slept under the permafrost.
Bones of creatures that had never walked the old Earth. Frozen plants with veins like glass. Structures half-organic, half-metal, still humming quietly in the dark like organs belonging to something enormous.
At the same time, he felt the real world: Earth's upper atmosphere being shredded by the solar storm currently raging over the old Illinois sky. Magnetic fields twisting. Reality flexing.
The hum under his heartbeat grew louder, stacking into a layered chant.
A new layer of Earth is forming, the voices said without sound.The white lands are waking.Your people were scattered too long. Your broken lines are a key. Your blood is a map.
The geometry bent toward that frozen mass. Lines of light dragged themselves across the dark and converged into a single point above the continent. Over it, an aurora stretched open again—red, green, violet, like a slit cut into the sky.
Something grabbed him.
It wasn't a hand. It wasn't claws. It felt like a root had been driven into the center of his being and yanked.
Fall, the entities commanded.Walk where no one is native. Become what the old world refused to name.
Sound, color, and pressure stacked until they broke.
He hit.
Cold smashed into him from every direction at once. Snow exploded around his body, fine ice shards scraping his skin. Air carved its way into his lungs like knives when he gasped.
He choked, coughed, forced himself onto his hands and knees.
The Void was gone.
The humming was gone.
Only wind howled around him now—huge, open, empty. No city smell. No cars. No human heat.
He pushed himself up.
He was still on Earth.
But it wasn't the same Earth.
The solar storm hadn't just colored the sky. It had split the planet's fate, birthing a parallel version—a new reality layered over the old one. And down here at the bottom of it, the south pole wasn't just a dead ice cap anymore.
It was a continent.
The horizon was a circle of white in every direction, broken only by jagged black rock and distant bulges under the ice, like enormous shapes moving beneath thick glass.
Overhead, the aurora from Illinois was here too—but frozen, steady, like a permanent storm pinned in place. Red, green, and violet light rippled slowly across the sky.
He looked down at his hands. Same skin. Same mixed features. Same body.
But the air, the gravity, the silence—everything else whispered: this is not the old world anymore.
Far beneath him, something deep in the ice shifted. A long, slow crack rolled out under the snow, like a sleeping giant stretching after too long.
Later, when others finally arrived, they would say this was the moment the White Lands took their first breath—
—and the Dark Messiah of the White Lands opened his eyes.