For a few seconds, or was it minutes or even hours, I didn't know as I was so hypnotized by the door we remained contemplating it. And before we knew it, we were approaching the door, Systalia's left hand almost touching the handle.
This realization snapped us out of our trance and forced us to look around. Now that rationality had regained control of our minds, we could only converse amongst ourselves to try and understand what was happening and where we were. But nothing could be done; knowledge of our surroundings still eluded us despite the cross-checking of our thoughts and theories.
We knew we were in the city, but at the same time, the surroundings remained strangely calm; the floors were clean, and the air was odorless. We ignored all these strange details in our haste to find a hiding place and the general mental exhaustion that distorted our reasoning.
In fact, the scenery was more like the ruins we'd seen outside the city, although the buildings were at a less advanced stage of deterioration. The area looked as if it had been abandoned for a long time, creating a strange, if not necessarily unpleasant, dissonant atmosphere. The area was totally empty as if everyone was unconsciously avoiding it.
Even more alarming and frankly disconcerting was that the Status was having trouble loading. At least Systalia's was, since mine was still working perfectly. Perhaps the difference lay in the failure-free mode of my Status, although I hardly knew the full extent of the differences.
So, there was no choice; this place had intrigued me enough to explore it. Perhaps that would have been objectively a bad idea, but my only alternative was to try my luck again in this infinite city before we went mad with the search. We just wanted a quiet house, after all! Was that too much to ask of us?
Was it really a luxury not to be disturbed or threatened with death for a whole day here? I was afraid of what the answer might be. As such, I only had a few options available to me. Especially since visiting this place promised a rather refreshing experience. I was fed up with the cityscape, with all the rooms looking identical.
Chasing away these unpleasant memories to not go mad, I refocused on the door. On it, mysterious symbols appeared as I looked. Strangely enough, even though I was looking through my apostle's eyes, these symbols didn't reveal themselves to me simultaneously as Systalia. She had only been able to observe them after I had advised her to stay focused on the door.
My most credible theory was that the door, or even the structure behind it, could understand and analyze our Will. How did it work? Although I had no idea, I was eager to learn, with multiple uses and practical applications running through my mind.
With nothing else to analyze about this door, we decided to enter, Systalia opening the door more expansively until... nothing. No entities were ready to devour us or anything unexpected, which was good. The tension in our minds eased slightly.
We then went deeper into the place, down spiral staircases that seemed to go on into the abyss. And yet, the sight comforted me for some unknown reason. These endless staircases and the walls that stood proudly were all made of the same material as the door: pink sandstone. And they all had a rough, crude appearance, that of roughly cut stone.
Usually, I didn't like these rough aesthetics, but I was making an exception for this place. It was then that a sudden thought innocently crossed my mind. How could I know it was pink sandstone when I couldn't see the colors of my surroundings? It was certainly possible for a trained eye to scrutinize this stone from every angle and touch or even smell it to detect the type of stone.
Nevertheless, I knew very little about this stone; more importantly, I'd spotted it instantly just by looking at it. No, worse than that, the ambiance of this place resonating within me whispered the answer even before my mind really understood the object of its gaze. In short, I had perceived it as pink sandstone because my intuition whispered it to me.
Surprisingly, this revelation hardly troubled me, as part of my mind, no, part of my very Void, took this information for granted and quite logically. But it wasn't! The other part of my mind seemed overwhelmed by madness as it tried to make sense of this contradiction.
To the latter's dismay, nothing could be done. The meaning remained hidden in the darkness of my mind. No, it was more profound than that, like a part that had belonged to both my Void and my essence, a reminiscence of a part of my Soul. The same Soul I've been trying to find in vain. At least, that's what this singular experience meant to me.
If I'd had a body at that moment, I think I'd have broken down in tears without being able to stop myself, a sadness of unknown origin invading me following this revelation. I decided with all my heart that I didn't like this feeling and didn't like feeling such sorrow and melancholy inside me. Strangely enough, this sadness was directed at myself and the state I'm in now.
However, I was violently extracted from this state of self-pity when I felt my being being torn apart. On closer inspection, it wasn't me exactly, but my apostle, whose suffering reached me through our link. In fact, she was in so much pain that she knelt down in the middle of the stairs despite the apparent risk of falling to her death.
At first, I could only watch helplessly, having never seen her in such pain and agony. Until I came to my senses, wanting to understand the root of the problem. Concentrating on all the noise of my apostle's death screams and gesticulations was such a daunting task that I decided to reduce the sensory information reaching me.
However, I didn't make the mistake of cutting off sensory information entirely in case some unforeseen danger arose during my analysis of the situation. And so I plunged into the Body, the Spirit, and finally the Soul of Systalia. There, I saw the cause of her malaise: the core of her Soul seemed to be becoming unstable.
The foreign entity in Systalia, which had caused me so much trouble in bringing her back to life, seemed misty, more precisely there, but a little inside her simultaneously. The only plausible deduction was that this entity's connection was growing weaker and weaker. Unfortunately, I saw no solution but to cut the link between my apostle and this entity once and for all.
But then I witnessed one of the most absurd experiences of my life. To this day, even as I write these lines, I feel as if I was hallucinating that day, even after I'd understood all the ins and outs of the phenomenon. I could feel the whole structure we were in at that moment, responding to my calls and my Will to save Systalia.
I can still hear its Will communicating like a gentle spring breeze, carrying with it a sincere desire to fight all my torments. This entity incarnating itself in this Will, so protective and terribly familiar to me, fills me with intense nostalgia, making my entire Void weep with joy without him or me knowing why.
As, with disconcerting ease, this entity infiltrated Systalia and reconfigured the links between the other, unknown entity and my apostle's soul, I had the impression that part of the source of my feeling was about to reveal itself to me. I was convinced that a fundamental part of my past was resurfacing and would soon reveal itself.
Only, this expectation disappeared as soon as it appeared, the entity with the familiar Will having left my sister, having accomplished its work. However, I was not disgusted; I was only a little sad that the discovery of part of my Identity would not be completed today.
After all, I'd learned a lot of information from this one interaction alone, and I'd also added a lot of new questions that I was eager to investigate. But then, I thought these questions would have to wait for a more thorough examination of this place as I gazed at the dark mist at the bottom of the stairs.
My apostle stood up slowly, trying not to destabilize his body and fall into the infinite abyss. I sincerely wondered how deep these stairs were, as their seemingly endless descent offered a breathtaking experience. As for my sister, she seemed rather anxious to see this bottomless pit.
But even more mysterious was the thick fog we could see further down the stairs. In fact, its presence was already being felt where we were, in the form of an almost imperceptible, but nonetheless present, light mist. This peaceful mist was getting progressively more substantial, and strangely enough, I couldn't say this was bad.
We continued down the stairs, gradually losing track of time in the serene, relaxed atmosphere. In fact, the deeper we went, the more we seemed to float away, and our fatigue magically vanished. Or it was literally magic. In reality, my memories of those moments were still hazy.
Yet my mind wasn't deficient at storing memories, except for my amnesia. And even then, its cause was external and therefore unrelated to any internal degeneration of my memory. But this was different; it was as if my memory was becoming faulty, perhaps barely able to understand what it was feeling.
After all, the few sensations I could remember, if exclusively pleasant, were, more than anything, incomprehensible, as if I were entering a new World. A World utterly different from the previous one and simultaneously similar, and the fact that Systalia could never connect to the System in this place reinforced this idea in the most delirious way possible.
You probably can't fully grasp it yet at this stage of your reading, but the very idea of a place the System couldn't reach seemed straight out of a madman's ramblings. Then again, even those sounded more believable than this idea. And apart from my apostle, I hadn't spoken to anyone about this idea, so baffling was its very conception.
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And for good reason: nobody would have believed me because, apart from this place, the System has always been everywhere. And a spot without a System simply seemed so inconceivable that the very thought of it would drive anyone trying to understand the idea mad. I'd experienced this first-hand with my sister, who, for a long time, was profoundly bewildered and helpless in the face of this simple observation that put her entire worldview into perspective.
With this reality revealed, the unshakeable belief that the System constituted all of Nature, that nothing could exist without it, was called into question. All the more so as it meant that, in some places, one could not see its Status. This was synonymous with not existing for most of these inhabitants since the prevailing paradigm was that no Soul could live outside the Status.
Thus, all Souls owed their existence to the System, both to be seen by it and to be integrated into Nature. And this naturally led many to consider that the System was omniscient, at least as far as Souls were concerned because no being could escape the Status. No one... until now, anyway. And maybe that's what the System wanted in the end.
But this isn't the time to talk about me yet; I'm already complaining far too much, right? So let's return to this charming place and its etheric atmosphere, invoking all the lightness of this world. Among the rare memories of all my passages up and down these stairs, I could nevertheless recall some disconcerting details.
First, the subdued light, comparable to the soft glow of twilight, rested our eyes, which needed to be confronted with less intense light. My condition of colorless vision, which I had passed on to my apostle, automatically made me more sensitive to brightness.
Or, to compensate, my vision of nuances had been refined, making me more sensitive to extremes of luminosity. It was a fascinating question, even if I never knew the answer. And that was okay; some mysteries were much more exciting when you didn't know them.
Moreover, it was accompanied by the omnipresent scent of a closed-in, slightly chilly air, akin to cellars that hadn't been opened in ages. After all these unpleasant olfactory scents, it was a breath of fresh air to feel a pleasant scent. An intoxicating scent returned me to a perfect plenitude and a complete harmony of myself.
And these moments shone even brighter in their deathly silence. Only the muffled sound of our footsteps on the ancient, cracked stone steps broke the immutable tranquillity. It was the finishing touch to this atmosphere of eternal peace, almost like my Void. This resemblance was probably the reason for my instinctive appreciation of this place. Or was it the other way around?
And if, unfortunately, you'd like to know more about those moments spent on those spiral staircases, I regret to inform you that those were all my memories of yesteryear. The rest could never be etched finely enough, although I already feel fortunate to possess memories of one of my most memorable and singular experiences.
After all, it wasn't every day that we had a positive experience of Void and the slow destruction of our being. All of which was enhanced by a fleeting and eternal solitude but irreversibly so. It is as if our entire environment existed indefinitely, no longer subject to Entropy and thus to Time itself.
Only my Void and the true Identity it created could reproduce this feat. All the more so, this atmosphere gave me a glimpse of my true Desire and Identity. Although these flashes of understanding, in their fleetingness, eluded me for a long time, they eluded me just as soon as they appeared, rendering my quest for discovery meaningless. Or so I thought...
For here I am today, counting my modest adventures and trying for a while to appear perfectly sane despite my corrupted mind on all sides. But anyway, let's not talk about that part; you'll feel it soon enough, although I hope to be able to tell you my whole story before then. So, let's pick up where we left off.
As we took the last few steps, our previously bogged-down minds became clear again, while memories of our descent became hazy, almost inaccessible. Despite this sense of amnesia about our immediate past, the last traces of joy in our minds told us not to worry too much about the latest events.
In any case, we could only resign ourselves to looking ahead, as observation of the stairs gave no clue as to the phenomenon that had occurred there. There was an imposing, majestic corridor with architecture that seemed out of time. Indeed, everything in this corridor reflected a mixture of a thousand and one eras, a thousand and one societies, and a thousand and one lives.
The walls were built from pink sandstone and different metals, some shiny, some not, and different shades of grey. And that was for the recognizable materials since many parts of the walls were built from exotic materials taking on viscous, soft, wet, ethereal, changeable, and even indescribable aspects.
And the worst was yet to come, as the most enigmatic parts were undoubtedly the plethora of symbols that adorned almost every available surface of these walls, sometimes even spilling over onto the floor. These symbols, of different sizes, fonts, shades of grey, depth of engraving, and erosions, bore witness to this place's entire history and antiquity.
These symbols, undoubtedly the writings of long-extinct languages, stood there with dignity as if just waiting for someone to decipher them and reveal all their wisdom. Once again, that haunting sense of familiarity returned, and my being could scarcely comprehend the significance of this effect.
Hanging on the walls were lanterns of all sizes, greyish hues, and smells. Each lantern appeared so differently at first glance. Even so, a second glance revealed repetitions, albeit without coherent patterns, as if some had been replaced by other models over the ages.
Yet I could not distinguish the most recent models from the oldest and could only stand in awe of this profusion of different designs. I could scarcely imagine the number of people who had trodden this path before us or the length of time that separated us from the last occupants of this place. Was it a few years, decades, centuries, millennia, millions of years, even to the dawn?
I could only stand in awe of the immensity of this place, both in space, with its endless corridor, and in time, with all the events, torments, sacrifices, and tragedies that this place has at one time or another experienced.
For me, this place will always remain the embodiment of Eternity and Entropy, just as the Void embodies the Absolute and the Immutable. And so we went deeper and deeper into this storied place, trying to find a home that would welcome us, as well as the Truths of this World.
And although the latter seemed like an unattainable fantasy, I should have never made assumptions about such an unfamiliar place. I can't thank Fortune enough for having stumbled close enough to this place that day for The Book to lead me to it. Without it, I'd never have been able to write these lines, becoming just another corpse in a cold, indifferent World.
We continued our walk, so overwhelmed by the beauty of our surroundings that we stayed in this corridor for almost a day. And yet, we weren't tired. Worse than that, we were even fitter, and Systalia was getting a boost to her stats as if the Void's debuff were counterbalanced by a buff or even removed. That alone made me want to stay in this place forever.
Indeed, I suspected that this buff would only materialize here and that, once back outside, it would disappear, leaving my sister weak and helpless once again. But it didn't matter for the moment, and I much preferred to let myself be carried away by the atmosphere emanating from this enchanting and strangely nostalgic setting.
It was a good thing I hadn't had a body at the time because I didn't want anyone to witness me crying out of the blue as if my very being remembered deep in its entrails was its connection with this place. Only this was hardly true for my sister, who could only watch helplessly as her own tears came out of nowhere as if her Soul were remembering a distant past now inaccessible.
In retrospect, it was a strange sight since my sister should have understood the reason for her sobs. Yet she seemed totally confused about her body's own reaction. She was an excellent actress, or she had amnesia about at least part of her past, or the events had happened in another life, just like my own sensation of having lived in this place even before I was born.
As we strolled along, we saw multiple entrances leading to other corridors. This place had many corridors, far more than rooms, as I hadn't encountered any. I was confident, however, that these corridors had to originate in rooms. So, I'd inevitably come across some.
And so it proved, as the corridor ended where an immense hall began, offering us a breathtaking view of a surreal setting. A few objects littered the floor, though most were displayed on furniture and certainly stored inside, while a tree oozing power and charisma reigned supreme in the center.
Its roots, sinking into the ground, overflowed in places, giving us a glimpse of the occasional pulsations that ran through them. And even though we were quite a distance from the tree itself, we could see all its branches and foliage shining with vitality from an unfathomably attractive energy.
But the craziest part of the story was the sheer size of the tree. Dozens of meters, hundreds or even thousands, I hardly knew. The only certainty was the impossibility of seeing the boundary of this tree, just as we could imagine the boundary of this room. It was simply too excessive in its grandeur to be imagined by anyone.
Suddenly, I began to understand why there were so few halls. Perhaps they were all as vast as this one? And if that were true, it would explain the inordinate length of the corridor we'd traversed. In any case, I could only stand in awe of the smallness I felt about this room.
As we made our way through the room, we could make out rotting wooden furniture from a long-gone era. On top were tools and implements that were surprisingly well preserved and, therefore, usable when their function was revealed to us.
In addition, books, sheets, computers, and tools with touch screens resided both on the furniture and in its various drawers. However, something immediately puzzled me about the written language on these supports, giving me a surprising idea. And it was soon confirmed when I asked my apostle to place The Book alongside them.
The handwriting on the book and on these various supports was precisely the same, which could only mean that they had been written by the same person, or at least by people belonging to the same civilization or who had passed on this language to each other. There had to be a link somewhere; I just had to work out where.
I remained pensive, scanning the distant edges of the room, admiring its majesty and potential secrets – especially the latter.
I then briefly recalled all the recent events before exclaiming in a voice filled with joy and hope: "At last, My Apostle, we have found our home, the place of our residence, I hope, for a long time to come. At last, we can begin our story."
At my words, Systalia looked into the distance, only able to reply in a frank, moving voice: "Yes, you are right, My Goddess, we have found the place where we belong. We have finally found the point of origin of our, I hope, ascent."
And so we discovered our sanctuary of peace, a sure anchor for the future in this hectic and destructive World, which has served us well on many occasions. A place that has known so many stories and will surely know more long after my death, perhaps for eternity. Or at any rate, until the end of time.
In short, at this very moment, several names could have been given to this place, at once so peculiar and so banal, and at once so foreign and so familiar, all describing different aspects of this place: The Eternal Observer of Epics, The Sanctuary of Forgotten Myths, or again, The Refuge of Another Time.