Zaar memories #3
TUNNEL, SOMEWHERE BENEATH THE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT – DEEP NIGHT
Darkness. Complete. The kind where there are no spectators, where even you yourself are not you.
Footsteps. Barely audible.
A stone slips — a sharp sound, like a blade on bone.
He walks.
The one. Our hero. Nameless. Aimless. For now.
He wears the baggy white clothes — gifted, not chosen. The lamp in his hand trembles from an inner tension, not from the wind: there is none here.
He descends to a place the locals don't even speak of aloud.
The tunnel opens into an old hall.
On the walls — not bas-reliefs. Not frescoes. Not pictograms.
More like... traces.
Shadows of touch.
As if someone had burned their own pain, fear, hope into the stone with their fingertips. Or all of it at once.
In the center of the hall — a circle.
And it is pulsating.
A woman stands there. In grey. The same one who gave him porridge yesterday.
Now she is... different.
– "Do you still think this place is a sanctuary?" — her voice sounds as if it's coming from inside his own head. Like the voice of a conscience you banished long ago, but it returned anyway.
He doesn't answer. Just looks at the circle.
It begins to slowly rotate.
– "Once, we were like you. Too loud. Too human. And then..."
She doesn't finish.
SETTLEMENT STREET – SAME TIME
Nothing in the sky.
And suddenly - something.
As if someone had ripped a piece out of space and thrown it back without looking.
A shadow. Black, elongated, violating the geometry of the air. Not a bird, not a machine.
More like a negation of everything you knew about gravity.
It doesn't fly. It is present, and because of it, everything constricts.
A woman in a house drops a bowl. An old man in a chair freezes. Children in the caves suddenly fall still.
And no one says anything. Because there's no need to.
He (our hero) in the hall — tastes copper, as if blood is rising from his heart to his brain. His hands rise on their own. Or fall. Or... he's no longer sure.
– "Have you seen Him?" — she asks. But not as a question, as an acknowledgment.
And suddenly the circle goes dark.
As if a living heart was switched off.
She comes closer. Takes his face in her hands.
Looks into his eyes.
– "Your body is ready. But you are still empty. This... is normal."
He wants to ask what, why, how.
But in his throat — not a sound. Only a pulse. And a tremor.
COMMUNITY KITCHEN – MORNING
He sits, eating rice. Around him — everything is as it was. The Whites are smiling. Talking about the weather, about the herb harvest.
– "You're pale," someone says. "Bad dream?"
He doesn't answer.
Because he is no longer sure that he is awake.
NOTES IN A NOTEBOOK BY THE WALL
A notebook found with pages torn out. Cover: Watkins' Mind Body Spirit, 2037 issue. On a torn piece, in pencil:
"...if the theory is correct, then the three corners of the triangle are not just symbols. They are reset points. Crossroads of memory, will, and dream.
If one of them is activated — the rest will become visible.
