He landed on the trunk of a Tree a place more sketched in graphite than written in words of his own.
Even the Tree had no race, no origin but it bore a fruit, which fell silently to the ground.
On that infinite hill, where the sky seemed to have color or none at all.
"Did you wake up…? It's been decades since you fell asleep!"
A little girl in a white dress whispered gently toward him.
"I'm Adela."
"Hey… Adela? Where am I…? I was in a library!"
He struggled to recall the place from which he'd come.
"Well, for starters… at least tell me your name," she said, as if demanding some moral balance.
"I'm sorry… I can't remember it. It was something like… EddVlass!?"
Still unsure if that was truly his name.
"Alright then, EddVlass. You're in the place where realities are born.
Where ideas have beginnings… and endings.
You're inside the Creative Flow, simply known as… The Aetheris Tree."
"Wow… I never imagined such a world could exist," he said, stunned by the revelation.
"It's a world everyone can enter, but few can truly live in," the girl explained.
"Time doesn't exist here… because time has not yet been created.
But something is missing.
And from what I see you're missing something too.
You're asleep to yourself."
The moment the word "asleep" was spoken everything shattered.
It was all a dream.
(Footsteps in a hallway)
(Doctors murmuring)
(A woman sobbing)
(The sound of a fading heartbeat)
As he opened his eyes for the first, and perhaps final time.
He saw his wife, on her knees, weeping before the doctor.
"Please save him… Do something… He's still so young…"
Her voice broken, head bowed before the sterile white coat.
"We're sorry… There's nothing more we can do… It's too late."
The doctors' voices cracked with the weight of helplessness.
"Please… When you reach that place above…
Watch over your children…"
She screamed, sobbed, pleaded — gripping his lifeless hand like a candle going cold.
He departed again back to the First…
Blue eyes glowing like sky.
The white dress… it was Adela once more.
"Good evening. We've come with the death certificate.
He had Alzheimer's… and cancer…"
The woman didn't even look into her eyes as she handed over the paper.
(Echoes of weeping)
Another voice another doctor in the same room:
"She's in labor her water broke! Quickly!"
Adela was giving birth.
The child's name would be Drek.
Would he inherit the same curse?
Or could he be the key to a New Eden?
"Somewhere between death and life, between the fading idea… and the newborn child…
the Flow continues."