Sleep came unwillingly. It was not rest but surrender, as though the weight of silence forced my eyes closed. In that uneasy darkness, a voice stirred—faint, ancient, neither male nor female. It did not speak to me; it resonated through me.
The Whisper
“Their new will…” it murmured, like the sigh of wind across forgotten ruins. “It is not new at all. It is the echo of the Origin.”
The words were not heard but carved into the marrow of my being. They quivered in me like the resonance of a broken bell, a sound that refuses to die.
I tried to speak back, but my lips moved soundlessly. The dream had no room for my voice—only for the whisper that was older than stars.
A Vision of the First Reset
Shadows twisted into light, and before me unfolded an image I could not name. It was not a history I had known, yet it carried the weight of memory older than my soul.
I saw a universe collapsing into itself. Stars blinked out not with explosions but with sighs, as though extinguished by a careful hand. Oceans drained into void, mountains unraveled into dust, and cities of countless beings faded like chalk washed by rain.
Then, from that silence, a hand of light reached forth, drawing threads of existence together again. The cosmos was reborn—not into something new, but into something eerily familiar. The pattern was the same, only dressed in a different dawn.
The whisper deepened:
“They call it liberation. They call it rebirth. But it is repetition. A wheel already turned once before. And now, again.”
The Father’s Doubt
I shivered within the dream, not from cold but from recognition. The vision pressed upon me a dreadful suspicion: What if Wind’s plan was not a daring new will, but merely the reenactment of a forgotten cycle?
Had the universe already been reset once before, scrubbed of memory, dressed in false dawn? Was everything I knew—my son, my world, my own heart—just another echo within an endless repetition?
The thought clawed at me. Liberation was no longer the question; identity itself faltered. If the whisper was true, then every soul’s story was already written and erased before, doomed to walk in shadows believing they were free.
The Weight of Revelation
I tried to push the vision away, but it clung to me, draping itself over my mind like a shroud.
“Choice,” the whisper continued, softer now, “is the illusion that sustains the wheel. To reset is not to free. It is to bind again.”
The dream fractured. I saw Wind’s face, radiant with conviction, declaring a new will. But behind her shimmered another face—faceless, ageless, an echo of the first hand of light that had already reshaped reality once.
And in that moment, terror blossomed: not only that Wind’s faction would erase us, but that we were already living in the afterimage of erasure. That history itself was memory denied, replaying endlessly under the guise of dawn.
Awakening
I woke gasping, the silence of the chamber pressing down on me like a verdict. The dream dissolved, but the whisper lingered, carved into me like fire beneath the skin:
Their will is not new. It is the echo of the Origin.
For the first time, I wondered if resistance itself was futile. Perhaps I was not fighting for survival, but for the memory of a story already told and erased. Perhaps all we were clinging to was not freedom, but the fading outline of a forgotten beginning.
And that doubt, more than fear, hollowed me.
