Step to paradise

Not the colors, not the sounds, but the layers of meaning beneath every phenomenon. The folds in reality that others pass by, but he is held by them, forced to read, forced to remember.

Even before he stepped through the door, even before the ban was awakened, Flauros was a reader of the world in whispering words, belonging to no one, seen by no one but him.

Language, which the world considers a tool, is for him life.

He has cultivated them, honed them, like a sleepwalker sculpting in the night. They are daggers, keys, fragments of the soul. Every line he wrote in the other world now becomes a suggestion, a whisper of how this ban works.

It does not teach him to burn.

It teaches him to understand, then to break from the root.

Every time he opens the book of creation, Flauros enters the context of what is about to happen.

He read before the battle.

He read before the betrayal.

He read before his death.

And the scariest thing was that on some pages, there were lines of writing that did not resemble the language of any world.

They resembled his writing style.

And then, there were nights, in the flickering light of the fire, when his eyes were fixed on the winding lines in the void, Flauros suddenly had a thought:

"As if… I was the book itself, reminding myself in the present."

A loop of knowledge.

A split self, the one who wrote and the one who read himself.

Looking back at them, memories of the old days flooded back.

That night was like being soaked in ink, thick and sticky on every street of the city.

Kaiden, a 12th grader from the city's most prestigious high school, was walking home from his extra classes, headphones dangling from both sides of his neck, walking silently through each dark, windy puddle.

In his hand was a faded canvas backpack, and in his head was an indefinite void.

He got 10 points on the math test, the same in physics. The teacher praised him. His parents said, "I'm so proud of you."

But all of that didn't make his heart beat faster even a beat.

Kaiden was good. But not happy.

To him, this world was no different from a test with a known answer. It kept repeating itself, boring to the core.

He thought maybe he was born in the wrong place. Or the wrong world.

And then, it appeared.

On the old concrete road, where Kaiden often crossed out of habit, under the flickering streetlights like the eyes of a sleeping person, a book lay precariously in the middle of the empty street.

No dust, no tears. As if it had just been dropped by an invisible hand.

He stopped.

It should have been passed over, like all the other trash on the roadside. But Kaiden's eyes were held back, as if there was some string tied to his eyeballs.

Curious. Unattractive was a more accurate word.

He knelt and picked it up. The book cover was covered in smooth leather. No title. No words. Just a line of words, "Little flowers and big grasslands".

There was no author's name or genre.

Kaiden turned to the first page.

Blank.

The second page.

Also blank.

He smiled faintly.

"A joke?"

But then, as he was about to close the book, a single, striking line on the third page caught his eye amid the blank white of the page.

"To find meaning, one must first abandon all definitions."

Kaiden paused.

Something rumbled in his head, like the whisper of a thousand dry mouths reciting the same mantra.

He didn't understand.

But his heart was beating faster for the first time in years.

"This book… is mine."

He thought. For no reason. He just knew.

Kaiden stuffed the book into his bag, and turned to walk back to the cramped room on the third floor of the old apartment building, where that night, instead of doing his homework, he sat at his desk, opening the pages as if he had found a secret door hidden under the concrete floor of reality.

And with each page he read, the world slipped further away from reality.

The world that was not meant for Kaiden… began to crack, and called his name.

That silent book was not readable.

It was visible.

Kaiden didn't know when he stopped calling it a "book", but called it a friend, an invisible teacher, or sometimes, his second face.

No two days were the same.

Some days, when he opened it, there were notes like medieval texts.

"He who knows the name of everything will have power over it. But he who calls himself by his name… will begin to lose his identity."

Some days, there were short stories, like children's stories.

"A small flower in the middle of a green grassland. It didn't know who planted it, didn't know why it bloomed. But every morning, it opened its eyes to a bright yellow, and the wind sang to it things that humans would never understand."

Kaiden read.

And each sentence seemed to drip a new color into his pupils.

From seeing life as black and white, he began to see the blue of the sky, the yellow of wild flowers, and the gray of the nameless loneliness in other people's hearts.

He, the one who used to see everything as numbers, charts, and logic, suddenly felt like laughing when he saw the sunlight shining through the classroom window.

Wanted to draw, even though his hands were shaking.

Wanted to tell stories, even though his voice was still dry.

Friends called it "Kaiden 2.0", a strange update after spring break.

Laughed more. Replied to messages. Learned to say "yes" instead of "I know".

Who would have thought it was all thanks to a book with no author, no origin, only a strange name?

And Kaiden, after years of living like a shadow, believed that.

I am that flower.

Small. Lonely. But still raised his head in the wind, naively wanting to know more about the "great steppe" that life had never allowed him to step out of.

Other people's world was a cozy dining table, a tray of food with parents laughing and talking, a bright future called "top university".

Kaiden's world was silent pages of books, the smell of old paper and ink, nights sitting under a desk lamp, quietly listening to a book without a writer whispering into his heart.

And then he knew.

He knew he couldn't be a doctor. He couldn't be an engineer. He couldn't be the "pride" that his family built as a shell around their genius son.

Kaiden wanted to write.

Because only when he wrote could he see the steppe that the book told about.

Only when he wrote could he touch the loneliness of souls that no one bothered to name.

Only when he wrote could he feel his heart, which he thought had turned to stone, still beat a few beats.

But it was Kaiden, not Flauros.

The blood moon's light crept through the stone window, shining on the desk where Flauros sat like a breathing statue. In front of him, on the dirty desk that smelled of ink and dust of knowledge, was a thin notebook with a dirty paper cover.

It couldn't be here.

He knew that. Very well.

Because Kaiden had brought nothing with him when he passed through the gate.

There was only himself and a memory as tattered as a birthmark torn to pieces by time travel.

But it was still there.

Open, silently. The page waited.

Exactly as it had looked in the past.

"The little flower is not afraid of being stepped on. Because each time it blooms, it becomes stronger."

The handwriting was crooked.

The ink was smudged as if it had cried in the rain.

Flauros sat motionless.

He didn't speak. Just looking at that illusion was like looking at the part of himself that had been disemboweled and discarded by his own hands.

"Illusion."

He said softly, as if to reassure himself.

When he had studied forbidden arts, he had been warned that if you studied too deeply, illusions would reflect back into your mind like ghostly fingers.

Calling my name. Pulling me. Luring me back to the dead.

But why... did it appear now?

When he was about to kill another candidate?

A game of the self? Or a call back from the name he had buried deep inside, Kaiden?

Flauros didn't know.

He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

He reached out to touch the notebook.

His fingertips almost touched the page when it dissolved into dust, carried away by a cold wind that came not from the window, but from within his mind.

All that remained was a blank desk. No notebook. No words. No one.

He closed his eyes. He thought.

'So, in the end, are words knowledge... or are they flowers on the prairie?'

'If I let knowledge kill the little flower inside me... who will remember that I was once a person who loved useless things?'

When the notebook turned to dust in front of him, Flauros did not stand up.

He sat there. For a long time.

His hand rested on the table as if it were still there. As if if he just closed his eyes... he would be Kaiden again, the student who wrote with his heart.

But nothing came back.

There was only the sound of the wind howling through the cracks in the wall.

And a call from inside him.

A voice. Not high, not low. Not strange, not familiar.

It was Kaiden's voice, but it seemed distorted through the broken mirror.

"Go home, Kaiden..."

Flauros laughed.

The laughter of someone who could no longer distinguish between true emotions and a mechanism to protect his mind from breaking.

'Go home?'

But did that 'home' still exist?

Or had it turned to ashes the night he stepped through the gate of this world?

All the other candidates were threats to his ability to return. They were stains on the only page that could rewrite destiny.

They had to die.

Not because he hated them.

Not because he liked killing.

But because if he didn't kill them, he wouldn't be able to return.

And if he didn't return… then everything Kaiden had given up—family, friends, humanity, the grasslands, poetry. It would all be meaningless.

He had tried to save everything, tried so hard that his eyes no longer reflected people, but only a bottomless abyss.

All just to return.

'I have to kill them.'

'Can't hesitate. Can't be shaken.'

'Otherwise, everything will be meaningless. I will be meaningless.'

The scales in Flauros's heart did not tilt at that moment.

It broke.