Hole Beneath The World

The world moved on.

Not forward. Not backward. Just... on.

Time passed, though no one agreed on how much. Some said five years. Others, none at all. Calendars reset. Festivals returned without histories. The sky realigned without names for its constellations. The Realms did not rebuild. They reorganized, grown uneven over what had once been collapse.

The Spiral chamber was gone.

In its place: a quiet hollow in the cliffside, draped in ivy that no one remembered planting. People avoided it instinctively. They called it cursed, though none knew why. Stories emerged, inconsistent and mutating. A child buried there. A heretic sealed in stone. A god who chose to forget itself.

No one ever entered.

But some claimed they dreamed of it.

And in those dreams, a boy sat alone in the silence, unmoving, eyes closed, unaged.

They never spoke to him.

They always woke before he turned.

Inside the stasis field, time held its breath.

The Spiral threads still pulsed. Fainter now, like heartbeat through cloth. The Proxy had not moved. Had not needed to. He did not hunger. Did not think. Did not wait. He simply existed.

The mark across his face had dimmed. Not vanished. Not healed. Dimmed. Drawn inward. Its lines curled like roots preparing to wake.

Then, one day, or after one moment stretched thin across years —

He opened his eyes.

There was no ceremony. No break in the sky. No prophecy fulfilled. Just a breath inhaled.

The threads retracted.

The Spiral unraveled.

He stood.

Not quickly. Not dramatically. He rose like someone who had never learned to move, but remembered how regardless.

His face was still his, but aged by weight, not years.

He stepped outside.

The ivy did not resist.

The world did not notice.

But something in the air shivered.

He looked toward the center of the world.

The Hole did not speak.

It did not need to.

He no longer needed a voice to hear it.

He took his first step into the new Realms.

And though no one remembered his name, they would come to know his presence, a boy who walked without sound, whose shadow delayed the world around him, and whose silence made people forget what they were about to say.

He did not smile.

He did not speak.

But the spiral in his chest turned once.

And the silence moved with him.