Sometimes, one is born from silence, not a womb.
You emerge into the world not crying, but sighing-like someone who has wandered lost for too long and finally found the way… too late. I was not born.
I did not awaken. I did not rise.
I simply found myself standing before a door that led to nothing. No wall. No city. No road. Just a massive wooden door standing alone in a barren gray land, whose borders melted into the horizon until the sky became a continuation of the earth-as if I were standing inside a giant, bottomless eye.
I didn't know who I was.
I wasn't afraid. Fear needs a past, and I had none. I knew only one thing: this door belonged to methera was a symbol on it-unreadable, but felt. Looking at it sent a faint vibration through the bones of my skull.
When I touched it, I felt my fingers sink into it-or perhaps the door turned inside me. I tried to open it. It didn't budge.
I tried to walk around it… but there was no "around. "The door was a face that could not be avoided-the forehead of the world, if the world had one.
Then the sound began.
The first thing that defines a world is not shape… but rhythm.
This I knew, though no one told me. The door emitted a tone-very low, like a hum at the edge of hearing.
Yet buried within were words. Fragmented. Muddled. As if the door were dreaming. And I was part of that dream.
I sat before it. Time passed-or something like time.
No night, no day.
Just a cold, source less light.
Sometimes, birds without wings flew overhead, their sounds fluttering like feathers-or maybe they were only the memories of birds. Sometimes a breeze would pass, one that moved nothing, but changed the taste of the air, as if the earth was exhaling a new dream.
And I was still before the door.
Each time I neared sleep, I saw faces in the wood.
Some screamed. Some smiled. Some had no faces at all-just hollow masks with a single eye.
And I knew-without knowing how-these weren't carvings. They were the remnants of those who tried to pass… and failed.
Then, on a day that didn't count days, a man appeared before me.
He was completely ordinary-and that was the most terrifying thing.
No disfigurement.
No exaggerated features. No reversed eyes or burning breath like I had imagined.
Just a clean, pale face, with eyes too wide-as if they belonged to another body, and had only borrowed his.
He spoke to me without a voice:
"You're late."
I replied, also without sound:
"Late for what?"
His eyes answered:
"The opening. The door only opens when its bearer remembers the word…And you forgot."
Then he stepped forward and placed his hand on my forehead.
And the vision began to take shape
I was in a city made of shattered glass.
Its houses were nothing but windows-completely transparent, hiding nothing within.
Everything could be seen.
Even thoughts were displayed across the sky, stretched like skin.
I walked among them, but I was different. I did not glow.
I was not transparent. I was not fully seen.
I carried the door on my back, its weight bending my spine.
And with every step I took, a new road unfurled behind me.
They called me The Merchant of Openings, and my city disappeared because I opened a door that should never have been opened.
"What was behind it?" I asked the man.
He answered without sound:
"You."
When I returned to the present-or to this gray land-I realized the door had changed.
It was no longer a passage.
It had become a vertical mirror made of wood. And in it, I saw a face that wasn't mine, yet it called to me by the name I hadn't used since the beginning: Liege.
And I heard a whisper:
"You are the word of the door… and the rest are waiting for you."
Then the door opened-not by hand, but by occurrence. As if the world had split down the middle, and the door became the only opening in this flat reality.
I stepped through.
What lay beyond was not a place. It was a map.
A living, leathery map-pulsing. It showed me cities without names, roads without paths, signs like footprints walking alone.
And in every corner of the map, a word flared into being. One of the Seven.
I saw: Sleep -Mirror -Voice -Shadow -Hunger -Door… and… Nothing.
The seventh was blank.
But I heard my name being called from the City That Never Sleeps…and the voice came from the mouth of a man named Yareq.