The forest did not welcome him; it simply failed to stop him.
Away from the palace torches, the darkness was thick and tasted of damp earth and rotting pine. Here, the trees weren't the decorative garden pieces of the courtyard. They were ancient, indifferent pillars of wood, their roots tangled in the dirt like the veins of a buried giant. Kaelen walked without a lantern, his eyes adjusting to a world made of varying shades of charcoal.
He noticed, with a dull sort of curiosity, that the deeper he went, the less the forest tried to look like a forest. The further he moved from the eyes of the palace guards—the observers who expected trees to be trees—the more the shapes began to blur. A branch above him didn't just hang; it seemed to vibrate with a half-formed geometry, as if the world were lazy, only rendering the details when a "person" was there to demand them.
We live under the arrogant assumption that the universe exists even when we aren't looking at it. We trust that the mountain remains behind our backs and the ocean continues to churn in the dark. But Kaelen was seeing the truth of the "spacious" mind: reality is a demanding performance, and without an audience, the stagehands begin to pack up the scenery.
His boots made no sound on the moss now. He felt a sudden, sharp tug in his chest—a ghostly, distant sensation. Somewhere, back in a stone room, a body was still sitting in a wooden chair. Somewhere, a heart was giving a wet, heavy thud against a ribcage. It felt miles away, a tether made of thin wire pulling at a man who was already halfway into the mist. He was "awake," yet he felt like the dream was the palace, and the reality was the chair he couldn't quite escape.
"The paint is peeling, isn't it?"
The voice didn't come from the King. It was a hollower sound, like wind whistling through a ribcage. Kaelen didn't turn. He knew by now that looking for the source was a "person's" errand, and he was rapidly retiring from that profession.
"It's quiet," Kaelen said. The thought manifested in the air, bypassing the meat of his throat.
"Silence is just the sound of the world stopped in its tracks," the voice replied. "The trees, the dirt, the stars... they are all so tired of pretending to be 'material' for your sake. Now that you've stopped believing in the weight of your own skin, the scenery is finally allowed to flake away."
Kaelen looked down. He was no longer standing on a path. He was standing on a grey expanse that looked like the surface of a frozen sea, a vast mirror of stagnant ice that stretched into a horizon that had forgotten how to curve. The trees were still there, but they were translucent, flickering like dying candles. They looked like skeletons made of salt, elegant in their ruin.
It is the final insult to the human ego to realize that the world does not love us, nor does it hate us. It simply endures us. We are the noise that keeps the silence from sleeping. When we finally grow quiet, the universe exhales, glad to be rid of the burden of being "something."
The tug in his chest happened again. Thump. Back in the chair, his fingers probably twitched. Back in the chair, his lungs were likely fighting for the stale, dusty air of the room. But here, Kaelen reached out and gripped the air. It felt like dry parchment. He pulled, and the darkness tore like a wet cloth.
Behind the "paint" of the night, there was no more forest. There was only the white, endless glare of the Unstructure. He stood at the threshold, watching the "real" world dissolve into grey flakes of ash, his iridescent skin finally matching the crystalline desolation of the frost.
Kaelen didn't step through the tear. He didn't have to. The more he stared into that white, vacant glare, the more the "here" and the "there" began to bleed into a single, cohesive wound.
The tugging in his chest became a violent jerk. Thump-thump. The wire was shortening.
He looked at his hands—those crystalline, iridescent things—and watched as the frost of the frozen sea began to climb his wrists. It wasn't cold; it was simply an absence. He was becoming part of the unobserved world, a detail the stagehands had forgotten to pack away.
There is a specific kind of cowardice in a body that refuses to die even when the soul has already moved out. We treat the instinct to survive as a noble fire, but standing there at the edge of the world, Kaelen saw it for what it truly was: a mechanical glitch. The lungs pump because they are built to pump; the heart beats because it is a muscle with a memory. It doesn't care that there is nothing left to breathe for. It doesn't care that the person it serves has become a spacious, hollow thing.
"You're still holding the handle of the door, Kaelen."
The voice was closer now, vibrating not in the air, but in the marrow of his translucent bones.
"I'm miles away," Kaelen whispered, his eyes fixed on the white glare.
"Distance is a material lie," the voice rasped. "You can walk until the stars turn to dust, but as long as that meat-clock in the chair keeps ticking, you are just a kite on a very short string. You aren't exploring the void. You're just stretching the leash."
Kaelen turned. Behind him, the forest was almost gone. The palace was a smudge of grey charcoal on the horizon. But floating in the middle of the frozen sea, solitary and absurd, was the wooden chair.
It looked pathetic out here in the crystalline ruin. It was a hunk of carved oak and yellow light, a small bubble of "somewhere" in the middle of a vast "nowhere." And in it, slumped like a discarded doll, was the other Kaelen.
His head was back, his mouth slightly open. His skin was pale, waxy, and glistening with a thin sheen of sweat. He looked heavy. He looked agonizingly, disgustingly real. Every ragged breath the body took sent a ripple through the frozen sea, cracking the beautiful, stagnant ice.
It is the great tragedy of the successor: you cannot truly be 'nothing' until you find a way to silence the 'something' that still claims your name.
Kaelen walked back toward the chair. Each step felt like wading through thick honey. The closer he got to the yellow light, the more the "paint" began to slap back onto the world. The grey expanse started to grow the brown tint of dirt; the salt skeletons started to look like trees again.
He reached the chair and looked down at his own face. It was a strange thing to see the machinery of your own life from the outside—to see the twitch of an eyelid, the pulse in the neck, the desperate, involuntary cling to a reality that was already peeling away.
"It's so small," Kaelen murmured.
He reached out a shimmering hand and placed it over the body's heart. He didn't feel a beat. He felt a cage.
He was a nightmare that had finally learned how to wear a man.