I was swimming. Not in water—in a thick, heavy darkness, viscous enough to hold me from every side, as if the world had turned into dense tar. I couldn't see anything, and this "nothing" wasn't a calm void: it pressed against my skin, my ribs, my throat; it existed as a physical medium where every movement instantly became a struggle. I tried to paddle forward, but my arms sank and stuck, and the effort didn't push me ahead—it just spread outward, like a wave in wet clay. And the harder I jerked, the more the darkness clung to me.
Somewhere above, there was light. I couldn't explain how I knew that: I couldn't feel my eyes, there were no landmarks, yet the thought of "up" sat inside me like a built‑in command, like the only correct instruction. I started moving in spasms: a shove, a pause, a stretch, another shove.
Then, for the first time, I realized I needed to breathe. Panic struck my mind, and the darkness around me tightened, suddenly crushingly firm. My lungs seized—until then I'd barely felt my body at all—and it was as if something twisted me from the inside. I tried to inhale, and the darkness surged into me with cold weight, like I'd drawn crude oil down my throat. My throat clamped shut, my chest convulsed, and I was yanked sharply upward, toward the surface of the dark.
The boundary tore open without warning. Not a gentle "I surfaced," but a violent rupture, as if I'd broken through thin ice and spilled out. Air hit me dry and hard, slicing cold along my throat, and I gulped it so deep I started coughing before I could even get used to it. I coughed and forced out what was left of that darkness—not water, not phlegm, but a strange oily fog that broke apart and vanished before it could reach the ground. I lay sprawled out as if I'd been thrown, and my ears rang like a blast had gone off nearby—except there was no blast, only silence, too clean to be natural.
I remembered that nature had given me eyes, and if I wanted to use them, I had to open them. I tried—and nothing happened: my eyelids felt fused shut, heavy as if filled with lead. I tensed, failed, tried again, forcing the muscles to obey; pain pricked somewhere deep, and then it gave way. First a slit—a narrow stripe of light that blinded me instantly—then wider. The world was white, almost incandescent, like someone had aimed a floodlight straight into my face, and only after a few blinks did the whiteness begin to yield.
The whiteness didn't "clear" into an ordinary landscape. It simply stopped hurting, as if someone had removed extra strain from my eyes, and I suddenly understood: there was no sky, no ground, no horizon. There was an endless white expanse—but white not as a color, white as a state, a pure medium where shadow didn't exist. I lifted my head, then slowly sat up, expecting cold stone or wet grass under my palms, but the surface beneath me had no texture. It was there, and it wasn't. It gave support without resisting. I didn't sink, yet I couldn't say what I was actually sitting on, as if the very "idea of a floor" was ridiculous here.
Then geometry began to braid itself into that white. Not objects, not walls, not buildings—geometry itself, pure forms that existed without cause or context. Somewhere off to the side, a ribbed polyhedron drifted past, so enormous I could only see one of its faces stretching away, and yet that face didn't thin with distance. It stayed the same thickness forever, as if perspective were an optional setting. In another direction, rings hung in the air, crossing through themselves in a way that broke the logic of knots: I could see they intersected, and at the same time I could see they couldn't, and my brain tried to pick one version but couldn't keep up—the image changed faster than I could understand what exactly was "wrong."
The colors… they weren't laid on top of the shapes—they were inside them. Impossible shades you couldn't call "red" or "blue," because they didn't have a familiar temperature or wavelength. They felt like taste and sound at once. I stared at one color and it left a metallic bitterness on my tongue, a nearly audible high ringing in my ears. Some colors flashed and died not gradually but like a switch: there—gone—there again, but in a different state, as if the "same" color had multiple versions and jumped between them without warning. I tried to blink to regain control, but blinking didn't help: the visions weren't on my retinas. They appeared directly in my head.
And that was when I felt something stranger still: something was colliding here. Not creatures, not winds, not waves—laws. They were trying to impose their rules of existence on each other. Somewhere nearby, space wanted to be Euclidean so that straight lines would remain straight, but right beside it, space wanted to bend and fold into loops, and I felt it as tension, as an inner creak in the world. As if two modes of reality had been turned on at the same time, and now they were fighting for the right to be "real." In ordinary life, that should have shredded matter and mind into pieces—yet here it looked calm, almost beautiful, like watching two rivers of different temperature flow side by side without mixing, their boundary perfectly visible.
And the most impossible thing was that it didn't frighten me. I expected horror; I expected nausea, panic, the urge to vomit. Instead, an even, deep calm came over me—the kind that arrives when you realize that, right now, nothing is required of you. No running. No fighting. No decisions. As if I'd been placed at the center of some vast mechanism that ran on its own, and my only role was to make sure it kept running. I inhaled, and the air here had no smell, no cold, no warmth, yet the breath still felt pleasant, correct. I could have sat there forever, and the thought of eternity didn't scare me—it felt soft, acceptable, almost desirable.
I tried to study the flickering visions deliberately, the way an engineer studies a diagram, trying to find a pattern. I picked one "fragment"—a flash like a city made of black glass—and tried to hold it with my attention. It immediately shattered into a hundred other images: faces I didn't know; a sky split by lightning; an ocean filled with drifting luminous structures; a battlefield where shadows shaped like people crawled across the ground. I tried to catch even a single frame, but each one lived too briefly and carried too many details for my mind to process. It was like trying to read a thousand pages at once while the pages flipped themselves and changed languages. I realized my attempts to "understand" this place were pointless—not because I was stupid, but because this place wasn't meant to be understood by a human. Or by anyone, really.
And yet knowledge rose inside my head, as if I'd always known it and only now remembered. From here, you could see everything. Not "everything around," but everything: any world, any chain of events, any place where observable reality existed—anything you could imagine. I couldn't prove it, couldn't put it into words, but I felt that if I turned my attention the right way, I could see Earth—my kitchen, my yard, a familiar street—and I would see it as easily as I saw these impossible geometries. And at the same time I knew the second part, just as solid: nothing could see me from here. No magic, no gods, no systems, no entities older than time and space. You couldn't reach this place by force. You couldn't punch a portal through. You couldn't "lock on" to it. It didn't hide—it simply existed on the other side of where reality's search queries could even function. This place didn't exist.
But I'd gotten here somehow, which meant I could get out.
I stared into the whiteness and felt something I'd never felt on Earth—not fear and not awe, but reverence that didn't need explanation. As if a part of me had opened, a part that usually stays silent and only wakes up before something wholly new and incomprehensible: the moment you realize the mind has nothing to cling to, and therefore must admit that what's before it isn't "unclear," but greater than understanding. Everything here was too clean, too correct, too alien to have arisen on its own as some side effect of nature. This place didn't feel like space. It felt like a temple‑emptiness—an immaculately stripped room containing nothing but the presence of the one who built it.
And somehow I knew: it was woven. Not created from stone, not grown from matter—woven, from the threads of every possible reality, like a carpet where each thread was a separate world with its own laws, its own history, its own pain and light. The threads didn't merely lie beside each other—they were interlaced with such precision that, in ordinary geometry, it would be impossible. I could see the same pattern belonging to different "fabrics" at once: in one direction it looked like strict symmetry, in another like chaos, and there was no transition between them—as if the act of looking itself decided which law of reality was allowed to be true. No human could do this. Humans are too linear, too bound to "either/or." Here it was "and/and"—layers of meaning stacked without interference, as if someone could hold all versions of truth in mind at once and never get confused.
But within that alien grandeur there was a strange familiar note. I couldn't call it a "signature," yet I felt it—something human embedded in the structure: a habit of thresholds, of borders, of access rules. As if whoever wove this place understood humans too well. Not as equals—as a species. The way an engineer understands a material: not hating it, not loving it, just knowing where it breaks and where it carries load. My chest tightened at the thought, as if I were being watched… even though I knew no one could watch from here.
I stood and walked—not because I wanted to leave, but because I needed to know whether eternity had an edge. With every step the space around me changed not the way a landscape changes, but the way a thought changes: as if I wasn't moving through white, but moving inside whatever the white wanted to show me. Geometry pulled back and surged closer; colors rippled like they were testing my reaction. I saw flashes of worlds—not like a film, but like windows without frames opening for a heartbeat: a world where the ocean glowed from within; a world where cities hung on chains in the sky; a world where someone knelt in prayer before a black star. They were too real to be imagination, and too foreign to be memory.
And then I found the edge. Not with my eyes—with my hand. I reached into the empty white, expecting my fingers to vanish into it, but my fingertips struck something invisible. Like glass: solid, cold, flawless. No roughness, no warmth, no vibration—only an absolute boundary. I slid my palm along it, searching for a seam or a defect, and found none. It wasn't a wall built out of matter at the end of the world.
I tried to push through. First cautiously, like testing whether a door is locked. Then harder. And with every effort I felt something drain out of me—not muscle strength (I wasn't even sure I had muscles here) but the very right to exist. As if I was becoming less permissible in this place. The white began to reject me. Like a body rejecting a foreign object. The more I tried to pass, the weaker I became: my head grew heavy, my arms turned to cotton, the clarity of the visions fell away. And with that came a disgusting thought, crawling into consciousness: if I kept going, I wouldn't be killed—I'd be erased. Not violently, not with blood or pain. Like a mistake in a text.
I stopped. Let go of the barrier. And the weakness vanished instantly, so sharply I almost sat down in relief. The white became soft and endless again; the visions returned; calm spread through me—rest so complete I could accept it and never want anything ever again. An eternal "everything is fine," with no goal, no pain, no hunger, no fear, no need to choose.
And then I understood something else: this place wasn't holding me by force. It held me by meaning. It offered perfect silence in exchange for eternal oblivion. It didn't lock the door outward—it made me stop wanting the door.
I looked around again, differently. From here, you could see everything—I felt it as clearly as I felt the idea of my own name. And no one could see me from here—knowledge woven straight into the fabric. And from here you couldn't leave—the barrier had proven it. But… you could enter this place. I had entered. Which meant there was a path. There was a rule of entry. And if there was a rule, then there was someone who wrote it. A human wouldn't write like this—too vast, too clean. But someone who understood humans could write it so that a human could get here.
I realized I was doing it wrong. Wrong effort, wrong approach—as if I were trying to open a door by slamming my shoulder into it when it simply opened outward. I stood by the invisible edge, and the space was already beginning to reject me again with that familiar, indifferent weakness: not like that. I stepped back, allowed myself to breathe, stopped fighting—and calm returned at once, draping over me like a blanket that had always been waiting. But now the calm didn't soothe; it felt suspicious. For the first time I saw that this silence wasn't the absence of events. It was control—polite, flawless control.
So I looked back.
And only then did I notice what should have been obvious from the start: a table stood in the endless whiteness where there was no horizon and no shadow. Ordinary in shape—four legs, a flat top, a slightly worn edge… if "worn" could even exist where time didn't. But the table wasn't wood or stone. It looked as if it had been woven from light and gold—not metal as substance, but gold as an idea: weight, value, permanence. Light didn't reflect off it; it lived inside it, softly pulsing like breath.
A book lay on the table. And I didn't even recognize it as a book at first, because its "cover" looked like a piece of night sky folded into a rectangle. Stars moved inside it, and I couldn't tell whether it was an image or an actual depth opening inward. The pages turned without wind, without fingers—simply because they needed to. Beside it lay a pen. Too simple to be an artifact, too impossible to be an object. It looked like a hardened shard of reality, torn from a world where "things" still had to obey causality. It had the density of fact. As if whatever you wrote with it would become true simply because it had been written.
And behind the table sat a figure.
I can't say whether he was tall or short, lean or broad‑shouldered. Measurements didn't cling to meaning here. But his presence was absolute. Everything was in him: the divine, the incomprehensible—and at the same time something almost painfully simple, nearly human. He sat calmly, like someone who had stopped hurrying because there was nowhere left to hurry to. He wore white clothing and a white cloak—so simple in silhouette you might mistake it for a monk's robe, except for one thing: over that simplicity I could see complexity that made the mind retreat. Layers upon layers of armor and fabric, braided into an impossible construction—not for protection, but for form, for meaning, for being what he was. No machine could assemble it. No master working from experience and imagination could even hold the blueprint in his head. It hadn't been "made." It had been declared, like law.
I tried to see his face.
And couldn't. Where a face should have been was a supernova. Not a metaphor and not a glow—an actual, unbearable birth of a star, beautiful enough to make you sick and terrifying enough to make you want to worship. I didn't see eyes, but I felt that he was looking. Not judging me, not threatening—simply registering the fact of my presence, the way a scientist registers the appearance of a particle in a detector. Part of me wanted to fall to my knees, pray, or run. But there was no reason—fear itself felt like a joke in this place.
And for some reason I thought he had been sitting there for an eternity.
Not imprisoned—that word didn't fit. A prison is where you're stripped of choice. But here, if there was a cage at all, its keys were in his own hand, between his fingers, in the form of that pen. Are you a prisoner if you can leave any second—yet don't, because you're waiting? He didn't look like he suffered. Didn't look bored. He looked… patient. As if he knew the event would happen not "someday," but exactly when it had to, and therefore there was no point in forcing it sooner.
I took a step. The whiteness didn't resist. Its calm even deepened, as if I'd finally chosen the correct direction and stopped ramming myself against the border. The star‑book rustled a page—not a sound, but the sensation of rustling, like a fate being turned. The pen shifted a fraction, as if reality itself signaled readiness to be written.
I understood one thing: this place wasn't just a "viewpoint." It was an office. A room where something was recorded. Where something was chosen. Where the fates of worlds weren't watched—they were given final form.
And the figure was waiting.
He spoke as if the sound didn't travel through air but appeared directly inside me—in my bones, my chest, the meaning itself. His voice wasn't loud, but it filled everything effortlessly, the way light fills a room when shutters are thrown open. There were no emotions in it the way humans have emotions, but there was inevitability—not a threat, not an order, but the certainty of something that had existed longer than any word. And yet, inside that divine purity, there was a faint human note—like he had once learned to speak so that I could understand, and now he chose each phrase carefully, almost afraid of being misunderstood.
"I… expected this outcome," he said, and there was a strange pause in the words, as if he were trying them against the text, checking whether they fit. "But I couldn't know exactly how it would look."
I opened my mouth because I had so many questions they pressed outward, physically, like pressure on the eardrums when altitude changes. Who are you? What is this place? Why am I here? Where is Earth? Is this a dream? Death? A game? Punishment? Did you create all of this? Are you watching billions of us? Can I go back? Can I see my family? Why can I see everything while no one can see me? Why can't I leave? Why is there a boundary if this place can be entered? And the worst, stickiest question—the one that didn't even want to become words: if you're here, does that mean you can decide what happens to me next?
But I didn't ask. Not because I lacked courage. Courage had nothing to do with it. I simply understood that questions didn't work here the way they did back where I lived.
The figure tilted his head slightly—or maybe it only seemed that way. The movement was minimal, but the supernova where his face should be shimmered, like heat over glowing metal. And I understood without words: answers wouldn't come. Not because he didn't know. Not because he was hiding them. But because he wasn't the one meant to explain.
"I don't tell stories," he said. And it wasn't refusal. It was a definition of role, like a law: gravity doesn't explain why stones fall. It simply makes them fall. "That's not why I'm here."
Those words cut off my most human hope: find the one in charge, and he'll explain everything, give instructions, calm you down.
I swallowed and felt how dry my throat was, though it seemed as if air itself didn't exist here. My heart beat evenly, but inside, a strange almost childish despair grew: I'd found the source of my questions—and he was silent. And yet his silence wasn't empty. It was full of meaning, like the hush before a bell strikes.
"But you're here," I managed at last. My voice sounded small and inappropriate against his, like paper rustling in a cathedral. "So… something has to happen, right?"
He didn't answer immediately. The pen in his fingers rotated a fraction, as if a shard of reality were choosing the facet that would touch the page. The book of cosmos turned its own page—no wind, no fingers, simply because it needed to. And the whiteness around us, all those impossible geometries, quieted for a moment, as if the world were holding its breath along with me.
And then something happened I didn't expect even here, in a place where expectations had no weight: his attention slid off me—off the one standing at the table—and went somewhere past, higher, deeper, straight through the layer of "me" that was body and fear, into the point where there is usually no one at all. And his voice, still heavenly, still calm, suddenly found a different direction—not to me as a man, but to the one who holds the threads.
"Why did you send him here?" he asked.
The words didn't strike me—they pushed me aside, made me transparent, stripped me for a moment of even the right to be a conversation. I felt it almost physically: as if I'd been placed between two beings speaking a language where my role was only to carry sound. And at the same time the meaning hit instantly, like a cold needle: he was speaking to the author. To me—not to me in this body, not to me choking in the dark, but to me who chooses where the story goes. Yes. To me.
The figure leaned slightly over the book. The supernova didn't dim, but it grew "quieter"—not in light, in intent. The question continued, and for the first time something like reproach appeared in it, though even his reproach sounded like a law of nature being stated aloud.
"You know the time for the great story hasn't come yet. Too much isn't ready. Too many threads are still loose, too few knots have been secured. Why are you opening this door now?"
Inside me a wave of outrage and confusion exploded—then drowned in something else, in a strange doubleness. Because a part of me—the part that a second ago had simply been a hero—suddenly felt like… a voice. Not "my" voice, but the one through which someone speaks. I understood that I wouldn't be allowed to raise a hand, ask a question, become equal. My role was to pass an answer so that two would hear it at once: the one at the table, and the one reading.
And then the answer came as an inner voice—neither alien nor entirely mine, but one I recognized the way you recognize your own thoughts in moments of brutal clarity.
You're asking why I sent him here as if you have the right to judge me, the voice said inside. Well, fine—maybe it was a whim. I'm the author. And you and I both know it doesn't matter. There are rules. Neither you nor I can ignore them.
The figure froze. The pen stopped half a motion.
I inhaled—and the breath felt alien, like I wasn't drawing air but drawing a decision. Visions of worlds flickered again in the whiteness, and for an instant I thought I saw worlds still empty, worlds where not a single name had yet been written. Too much "not yet."
You know too much isn't ready. You know we'll be waiting forever if we wait for perfection, the inner voice continued. So why not dilute this endless expectation with something interesting? One simple, fun—maybe long—story won't hurt anyone.
At last he lowered the pen to the page—not to write a word, only to touch it, like placing a seal without pressing down. The supernova trembled, and his voice came even and final, without agreement and without refusal, as if he accepted that arguing with rules was pointless.
"So you want me to send him on this voyage," he said. "While the great story waits."
Yes, the inner voice answered—and that single word carried more certainty than all my earlier attempts to "understand." Because if he doesn't swim now, he'll never make it. Let at least let one of them achieve something.
The white around us grew quiet again, like a grove before a pagan rite begins. I felt the space itself preparing—not for explanations or words, but for an act that couldn't be undone.
The figure raised his hand—and I didn't see the gesture, I felt its meaning: a page is being turned, and with the page, a fate is turned as well. The book of cosmos opened wider, and its inner sky became bottomless for a heartbeat, like a mine shaft with light thrown into it.
I didn't hear him sigh, and I couldn't see his expression—there was no expression for me to see—but I felt him thinking. Not about where to send me: that was already decided. He was thinking about what to name me. And there was something almost human in that—no weakness, no doubt, but the precision of choosing one word out of a thousand, knowing it would become not just a label but an axis future plots would spin around.
A name wasn't sound. Here, a name was form. If he wrote it, it would become a kind of gravity: an invisible pull bending events in a certain direction, even if I resisted. Cold rose in my chest, as if something inside me already understood—now I would be defined. And then it hit me: I didn't know my own name. I looked at my hands and couldn't see them. I tried to remember anything—and found only images, not facts. Had I forgotten everything? Or… had I never existed? Was I being written into the plot right now?
The pen was in his fingers again—not a tool, a key to the right to fix reality. He didn't hurry. The supernova shimmered differently, and in that shimmer I caught not emotion but choice—final, irreversible. As if he had checked something only he could see: threads not yet stretched, knots not yet tied, fire not yet stolen.
"Let it be so," he said,. "The name must be powerful. Symbolic. And why invent one when all names already exist."
He touched the page.
I didn't see letters, but I felt the word appear inside me, as if someone had branded me with something that would remain forever.
"Prometheus."
Beside me—so close I felt a movement of air that didn't exist here—a door flared into being. It didn't "appear" from nothing; it was as if it had always been here and simply hadn't had the right to be visible until now. A rectangle of light in the whiteness, clean as a cut, yet soft as a morning window. Beyond it there was no world, no landscape—only dense, living brightness, warm with real time, real space, real story.
The figure turned his head slightly—or again, maybe it only seemed so—and his voice came closer, almost personal in its shape. It still carried no emotion, but it carried something human: a wish spoken at a threshold.
"Good luck, Prometheus," he said. "Your road won't be easy. But if it were easy, it wouldn't be interesting."
I wanted to answer. To say anything—gratitude, a curse, a question, a vow. But words stuck, because the door was already pulling at me like a current. And I understood: this wasn't a moment for words. This was the moment for a step.
I walked up to the light.
And I stepped through.
Into my first chapter.