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Chapter 11 - The Moon with a Smile

Ryneth lay sprawled across the floor of his shabby apartment, his body twisted awkwardly beside the candle's last dying flicker. The wax had long cooled into pale rivers across the table's edge, the flame snuffed by exhaustion—or perhaps something else.

His chest rose and fell weakly, but his mind… was elsewhere.

He opened his eyes to a world that wasn't his own.

Darkness stretched endlessly around him, but it wasn't an empty dark. It moved. It breathed. Like ink dissolving in water, streams of faint color rippled across the void—threads of blue and purple drifting through the air like living veins of light. They glimmered and coiled softly, as if conscious of his gaze.

He wasn't sure if he was standing, floating, or simply suspended between moments. There was no ground beneath his feet, yet he didn't fall. The space carried an ethereal stillness, fragile and unnatural, and the silence rang in his ears like a hum that never ended.

It was a place both beautiful and wrong.

A dream too vivid to belong to sleep, and too quiet to belong to life.

Then he saw it—the moon.

It hung low and impossibly large, a pale giant that filled half the sky. Its surface shimmered like liquid silver, its light soft but heavy, pressing down on him with an almost physical weight. For a moment, he swore it was watching him. The craters curved in a way that almost resembled a smile—subtle, cold, mocking.

Ryneth blinked, and the smile was gone.

Just the moon again, silent and perfect.

But something else wasn't.

From the drifting auroras around him, from the ribbons of purple and blue that painted the dark, he felt it—

countless eyes, unseen yet undeniable, staring right into him. Hidden in the glow, they pulsed faintly in rhythm with his heartbeat. He felt their gaze slide across his skin, pressing into his mind. They were scarily beautiful, mesmerizing, almost divine in their stillness.

He turned, and the world bent with him—light trailing like a reflection in disturbed water. Each motion felt wrong, delayed, echoed by a second version of himself that wasn't entirely synchronized.

Ryneth's breath grew shallow.

His voice trembled when he whispered into the silence,

"Where… am I?"

The air around him shimmered. Somewhere in the far distance, the auroras stirred. The whisper that answered wasn't a sound—it was a feeling, crawling along his nerves.

> "You are where your eyes turned inward…"

The words weren't his own, yet they came from within him.

He tried to step back, but again—there was no ground. His thoughts were the only anchor here, and even they began to slip.

The moon pulsed once, faintly, like a heartbeat.

And then, faintly, he began to see shapes forming within the drifting clouds.

Familiar silhouettes—faces, movements, things that looked like echoes of memories—bending, flickering, dissolving before he could recognize them.

Ryneth reached out a trembling hand. The air felt thicker there, heavier, like it could see him.

The moon's light dimmed, and the whispers began again.

Soft. Endless. Overlapping.

He couldn't tell if they were speaking to him, or through him.

Ryneth began to walk.

He didn't know why—only that standing still felt wrong, like the void itself would swallow him whole if he did. So he moved, his feet pressing against something that wasn't quite solid, as if the air had thickened beneath him just enough to allow the illusion of ground.

Each step made no sound, yet he could feel the motion travel up his legs. It was an uncanny sensation—like walking through a dream, where the body obeys commands but the world around refuses to acknowledge them.

Seconds felt like minutes. Minutes like hours. He wasn't tired, nor was he aware of any change in his breath or heartbeat. Everything around him was the same—black endlessness, broken only by the slow, rippling glow of those violet and blue veils floating around him like dying embers.

The moon loomed high and vast above, too large to be real, too still to be natural. It didn't hang—it watched. And every so often, when Ryneth looked away and then back again, he could swear it had shifted slightly, angling as though to follow him.

He tried not to think about it. He just kept walking.

The distance, if distance even existed here, refused to change. There were no landmarks, no shadows that stretched, no sign of progress. Even the patterns in the auroras seemed fixed—caught in an eternal moment between movement and stillness.

He stopped and turned, expecting perhaps that his own footprints might mark the path he'd taken, that some proof of his movement might remain. But there was nothing. Not even the faint shimmer of disturbed air.

"Am I even moving?" he murmured, his voice sounding dull, swallowed instantly by the emptiness.

He stared down at his hands—they seemed real, but faintly translucent around the edges, like light bleeding through mist. When he flexed them, they lagged behind for the briefest instant before catching up, a delay too slight to notice yet too wrong to ignore.

A cold unease gripped his chest. The thought came quietly, whispering through his mind: Maybe I'm not walking through this place… maybe it's walking through me.

He stood still for a long while, though here time meant little. Then, in a sudden act of defiance or desperation, he resumed walking again—faster this time, trying to feel the rhythm of movement, to confirm something of his own existence.

But the more he moved, the more his surroundings seemed to distort. The auroras began to ripple faintly, bending inward, as though reacting to his steps. The moon's light pulsed with each pace, beating softly like a distant heart.

Ryneth's breathing grew shallow. A dull hum filled the air—or maybe just his head. It rose and fell in a rhythm that wasn't his own, as if the void itself had found a voice.

He slowed again, his thoughts growing heavier, duller.

His body didn't feel tired, but his mind did—like walking through honey, each thought dragging through resistance.

It was only then that he noticed something faint. A ripple far ahead, small but unmistakable—a distortion in the air, where the colors swirled differently, forming brief patterns before fading.

He stared at it, eyes narrowing, unsure if it was real or another trick of perception. But it was the first thing that wasn't still.

And so he walked toward it. Slowly, uncertainly.

Every step felt harder now, the resistance thickening as though the void disapproved of his movement.

When he finally stopped, the ripple was still there—closer, yet no clearer than before.

He exhaled, though he wasn't sure if he was breathing at all. "Where… am I?" he whispered.

No answer came—only that faint hum, echoing softly around him, rising and falling like a heartbeat that didn't belong to him.

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