It stretched on, towards the sky, towards the heavens, towards infinity; a tower with no beginning or end, no sense or purpose as it simply went on, an eternal spiral of madness ascending from where the boundless ocean met the edge of the world and fell towards oblivion, its darkness changing and shifting as if ink in a bottle, swallowing all that fell towards its abyss whole like a hungry mouth — and yet, if you were to find its bottom, the tower would still be there, forever unchanging. 

There, he slowly found himself becoming one with it.

It was a behemoth, not unlike the empty below, consuming him thoroughly as it digested him, eating away the remnants of his self until only the bones of what once was were left behind — and even they were slowly corroded by the unliving beast’s stomach acid, melting his flimsy existence until he became liquid and distorted, just like the starlight coming through the thick glass panes of yet another majestic window that drew pictures of scenes that his fragmentary and vacuous mind could not comprehend, as if they required him to seek a higher plane.

He then took another step.

In this endless staircase, the sound reverberated through the mother-of-pearl corridors to never find a destination, and through its endless maze, he found the door to the unknown, carved as a mirror and crowned with his bones.

— And there, he became infinite.

It was as if he no longer was bound to the endless flatline of time, or rather, the tower itself was free of the constraints of space and being as the room went on as far as the eye could see, with no ceiling, no walls, no opposition defining its existence; all that there was was the door behind him, and the endless green expanse of the meadow.

And through their open wounds, they let themselves in; countless small flowers of a shy purple color, embracing him coyly as if demanding the affections of a lover, dragging him further into the unknown, and as he threaded forever onwards to the heart of this monster, they scattered to the wind.

He knew not for how long he had walked in this walless maze, only that he found himself getting lost in it as the flowers became crushed beneath his heel. There was no more being as he was stretched in all directions at once, being pulled apart by the same gravitational force that called him further in — and his step sped up as it drew him in, from a walk, to a frenzied pace, to him running in despair, for he needed, he needed…—

There, he found him.

A twisted corpse of a thing that maybe could have been called “human” once.

At the dawn of this era, the Sun died, but once it lived among humans, when mankind was holy and whole — when they lived at the feet of the Throne of the Gods, before they left in order to wander aimlessly towards the East, seeking the vestiges of their once guiding light — and there, at the coral reefs of the Boundless Ocean, they rebuilt their lives anew: countless artificial islands created below fake stars, free cities to shelter them in a new era.

Shackles to chain them, all of them — for a faint smile curved his lips as he basked in his glory, feverish and maniacal at the sight of his beautiful God.

“Are you the one who has been calling me?”