The walkway is not a walkway. The moment my sneaker touches the luminous surface, I realize it has no solid substance. It's like stepping on compressed light. A feeling for which the human language has no word. It is springy yet absolutely stable, cool yet permeated by an inner energy. Below me is still the infinite, velvety blackness, but it now seems less like a void and more like a sleeping ocean. The glowing path stretches like a white-hot seam through the fabric of the night, its end lost in the distant darkness.
I start walking. Every step feels monumental. I cast one last glance back. The island with the singing stone tree has already shrunk to a small, glowing dot. Gone. The past. Before me lies only the path.
The two stones in my jacket pocket have a noticeable weight. Not heavy, but present. A physical anchor in this surreal existence. The foundation is laid, the script had said. Now I have a double portion. Maybe it's like in those games where you can stack items. I now have "Foundation (2)" in my mental inventory. I have to smirk. My brain clings to these gaming metaphors like a drowning man to a life raft. It's the only way I can process this holy, transcendent madness without going completely insane.
I just dissolved my own, old doppelgänger into light by pressing a stone into his hand. This is not a standard quest. You won't find this in any walkthrough. What would have happened if I had attacked him? Would I have fought against myself? Would the result have been the same? Or if I had ignored him? Would he have sat there forever, an eternal monument to resignation? Questions upon questions, and the only answer is the gentle hum the path of light emits beneath my feet.
My humor, that tough, sarcastic survival instinct, takes the wheel again. "Congratulations, you've completed the quest 'Confront Your Midlife Crisis.' Reward: +1 Stone, +10 Existential Dread." Better than a new suit of armor, I guess. That wouldn't have done me any good here anyway.
As I walk, I notice something stirring in the blackness around me. At first, they are just fleeting impressions at the edge of my vision. Phantoms flitting by. But slowly, they become clearer. They are words.
Single, luminous words float like ghostly fish through the void. They glow in a pale, ethereal blue. Hope. Alone. Maybe. Why. Forgotten. They swirl and dance in silent currents. They are not my words. They feel foreign, imbued with the emotions of countless, unknown souls. It's as if I am walking through a sea of unsaid thoughts and unanswered questions. Some words are full of pain, others whisper of quiet joy. Forever. Never. If only.
It is an experience as unsettling as it is beautiful. I am a silent witness in the ocean of the human soul. The Library of Lost Words.
The farther I walk, the denser the stream of words becomes. They form sentences, fragments of conversations, echoes of prayers and curses. "I love you" floats gently past an angry "How could you." A desperate "Please help me" crosses paths with a resigned "It's over." I try not to touch them. They feel too intimate, too private.
After another timeless walk, I see my destination. It is not an island like the last one. It is a building. A huge, impossible structure, floating freely in space. It looks like a colossal, gothic cathedral carved entirely from dark, almost black stone. Its spires and flying buttresses rise hundreds of feet into the cosmic sky, so sharp they seem to pierce the silver mists. Countless stained-glass windows adorn the facade, yet they do not glow from within. Instead, the bluish ghost-words swirl in from outside, drawn to the windows like moths to a flame. They disappear inside the building.
My path of light leads directly to the massive main portal, a gigantic, circular gate that stands open, revealing a view into a dimly lit entrance hall. Standing before it, I feel tiny, insignificant. The scale is overwhelming. This is a place of unimaginable age and immeasurable importance.
The familiar, luminous script appears on the threshold of the portal.
Every word has a weight. Find the one that you have lost.
I swallow. The word that I have lost? I've lost a lot of words in my life. Apologies I never uttered. Compliments I should have given. The countless times I should have said "no" but said "yes." Which one does it mean?
I enter the cathedral. The silence of the forest is replaced here by a sound that sends shivers down my spine. It is a constant, quiet, overlapping whisper. Millions, perhaps billions of voices, all speaking at once, but so quietly that not a single word is intelligible. It is the sound of all the words I saw outside, captured here and woven into an endless, murmuring choir. The sound isn't loud, but it fills the vast space completely, penetrating through clothing, through skin, directly into my bones.
The interior is even more immense than the exterior. The ceiling is lost in darkness. Endless rows of gigantic shelves stretch in every direction. But there are no books on the shelves. Instead, countless small, luminous orbs float there, each one pulsing with a soft, blue light. Inside each orb, a single word is trapped.
I walk to one of the shelves. The orbs are arranged in no discernible system. I see an orb with the word Mother right next to one with the word Tax Return. An orb with Laughter floats above one with Pain. It is pure chaos. An archive of the entire human experience, sorted by a mad librarian.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
How in the world am I supposed to find a specific word here? This is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. This is looking for a specific blade of hay in a universe of haystacks.
I begin to wander through the aisles. The whispering is omnipresent. It's hypnotic. After a while, I start to pick out individual snippets. A child's voice asking "Why?" An old woman breathing "Thank you." A man angrily hissing "Liar." It's like walking through the collected emotions of humanity.
I try different tactics. I try to focus on a specific feeling, hoping to attract the corresponding word. Nothing. I try to search the orbs systematically, but the sheer number is daunting. I could spend centuries here. The frustration I had felt in the forest returns, this time stronger.
"This is impossible!" I say aloud, and my voice is immediately swallowed by the choir of whispers.
I lean against one of the huge shelves and run my hands through my hair. I have to think back to the lessons. Foundation. Listening. But what am I supposed to listen to here? This insane whispering?
I reach into my pocket and pull out one of the two gray stones. It's cool and smooth. I hold it tightly. What did it do on the last island? It grounded the echo of my old self, gave it peace. Maybe it can do that here too?
I hold the stone up, into the endless stream of whispers. And something happens. The stone begins to vibrate very slightly. The chaotic whispering that hits it seems to become ordered. The voices become clearer for a moment, as if the stone is filtering them. I hear a clear "I miss you" before it submerges back into the general murmur.
Interesting. The stone is a kind of tuning fork. A focus.
I close my eyes and hold the stone firmly to my chest. I ignore the billions of foreign voices and try to find my own echo. My own lost word. Which one could it be? Which word do I miss the most? Which one have I buried so deep that I don't even remember it anymore?
I think about my life. About the disappointments, the missed opportunities. About the nights in front of the screen, fleeing from reality. I called myself a failure. A loser. I wore words like hopelessness and meaninglessness like armor. But those are words I use, not ones I've lost. A lost word is one you once had. One that was important.
I think further back. To the time before the job, before the small apartment, before the resignation. To my university days. To my school days. To childhood. When did I stop believing in myself? When did I tie the permission to be happy to external circumstances? When I get this degree, then... When I get this job, then... When I earn more money, then...
The stone in my hand grows warmer.
I focus on the feeling. A memory flashes. Iâm maybe ten years old. I'm sitting at my small desk, drawing. A picture of a spaceship flying through an asteroid field. It's not particularly good, the perspective is crooked and the colors are wild. But I am completely absorbed, completely at peace with myself and the world. I'm humming quietly to myself. I am not Kael, the hero. I am not the failure. I am just a boy, creating something. Out of pure...
The stone in my hand pulses with heat.
The word appears in my mind. It is so simple, so unassuming, that I haven't consciously thought it in years.
Joy.
Not happiness, which so often depends on external things. Not fun, which is often just a distraction. Simply joy. The quiet, baseless joy of doing something just for the sake of doing it. The joy of being.
I open my eyes. The whispering around me is still there, but it has lost its menacing power. It's just background noise now. I know what I'm looking for.
I hold up the stone. It now glows with a soft, gray light. And like a compass, it pulls me in one direction. I follow its pull, walking through the endless aisles, past millions of words. The stone leads me unerringly, unstoppably. It leads me to an inconspicuous corner of the library, to a shelf that looks no different from all the others. And there, at eye level, it floats. A small, unassuming blue orb. And inside it, the word:
Joy.
My hand trembling, I reach out. As my fingers touch the orb, it shatters in a shower of warm, blue light that rains down on me. The word itself breaks free from the shattering sphere, a luminous blue construct, and flies directly towards my chest. It doesn't hurt. It feels like a long-lost puzzle piece returning to its place. A warm, radiant feeling spreads from my chest throughout my entire body. Itâs as if an old, dusty lamp inside me has begun to shine again.
In that moment, the entire choir of voices falls silent.
Absolute, perfect silence returns to the vast cathedral. It is a silence even deeper and purer than that in the forest. A silence of fulfillment.
I take a deep breath. The smell of old dust and regret is gone. Now it just smells⦠clear.
Before me, a small, wooden pedestal materializes on the floor. On it lies an old, leather-bound book. It is blank. Next to it lies a simple quill.
The luminous script appears above the book.
A found word is worthless if it is not shared. Write your own page.
I understand. I'm not just supposed to rediscover my joy; I'm supposed to manifest it. To make it into something tangible. To begin my own story.
I take the quill in my hand. It feels warm and alive. I open the first blank page of the book. What should I write? The story of my life? A novel?
No. The first step. Simple and honest.
With a steady hand that no longer feels like my own, I write a single sentence on the page:
Today, I remembered what it feels like just to be.
The moment I place the final period, the letters on the page begin to glow with golden light. The entire book shines with a warm, golden radiance. It lifts off the pedestal and floats to the empty space on the shelf where the orb with the word Joy had just been. It takes its place, a single, luminous book in a sea of sleeping words. My contribution to the great library.
A massive, deep rumble shakes the cathedral. The huge, circular portal through which I entered closes with the finality of a tomb. For a moment, panic grips me. I'm trapped.
But then, on the opposite wall of the cathedral, where before there was only solid stone, the wall begins to crumble. Stone falls away, dissolving into light, and reveals a new opening. Beyond it is not the cosmic void, but something else.
A warm, orange light streams through. I hear the crackling of fire and smell the scent of resin and dry wood. It is an inviting, warm, and profoundly human sight.
A new path. A new door. And I opened it by writing a single, honest line.
I pocket my two stones again. They feel like old friends now. With the rediscovered feeling of joy glowing like a small sun in my chest, I walk towards the new opening. It's time to step into the warmth.