Chapter 8: Crystal's bloom

I woke suspended in the heart of a vast, spiraling chamber woven entirely from silver threads—each one as thick as rope and shimmering like moonlight on water. The web stretched endlessly in all directions: upward into loops, downward into coils, sideways into impossible folds, like an Escher drawing made real. Even the sound of my breath felt too loud, disturbing the delicate strands beneath my boots.

“Where the hell am I? Is this… hell?” I asked aloud, though the silence gave nothing back.

The "walls," if they could be called that, were weavings of gossamer and glasslight. Corridors twisted at insane angles, coiling into knots that bent perspective. There was no clear way forward—only choices. Above me, a corkscrewing tunnel lined in ink-black silk. Below, a chamber of violet threads, humming soundlessly, vibrating with invisible energy. Everything here pulsed like a living thing.

Am I dead?

Is this what happens to the unraveled? Or is this all in my head?

A dream? A prison? A world between threads?

I exhaled. No answers. Just the hum of possibility. So I did the only thing I could: I moved forward.

The moment my foot touched the nearest strand, the web beneath me flexed, alive. Light bloomed from the touch, swirling in colors that danced like brushstrokes. It painted a path downward. Smooth. Inviting.

But it felt… wrong. Too easy.

This place—it was a maze. A metaphor. A trap built not from walls, but from meaning. Webs are symbols, after all. The first lesson I ever learned about art: spiders represent creativity, weaving, hidden connections—the architecture of thought itself.

I looked down at myself. My body was glowing. Soft, light of all of the colors spilled from my pores, tingling and warm. Like my essence, my creativity, was trying to escape, to be seen. My silent companion—always there, even when I stole instead of painted. Maybe after everything I’ve done… it’s not my schemes or my training that will save me. Maybe it’s this. My art. My true self.

The obvious path was not the real one. Not here.

So I ignored the light and turned toward the dark.

Climbing upward through the black silk tunnel, I used the strength I'd honed through years of brutal, deliberate training. My fingers dug into the strange fabric. It clung like velvet, breathing faintly against my skin. The passage narrowed, then spiraled downward again—like a funnel-shaped spider’s den.

I emerged into a chamber that unfolded around me like a blossom.

At its center: a single painting, suspended in a knot of silver fibers. A frame made from the same threads as the walls. I knew the painting immediately.

It was me. A younger me. Alone in my childhood room. A wrecked canvas lay beneath my feet, footprints smeared in paint across the floor. I remembered it clearly—my first real painting. Clumsy flowers in a vase. Dull. Dead. I'd tried so hard to make it perfect, to impress my parents. And when it failed to match the image in my head, I destroyed it in a fit of rage.

I reached out and touched the memory.

The canvas pulsed with warmth.

Then a voice—soft, familiar, mine:

"What must be given up to become something more?"

My breath caught.

What did I give up?

I hadn’t abandoned art. I kept painting—even the still-lifes, the meaningless exercises. But something had changed that day.

I sat for a long time, the silence stretching like thread between thoughts. I tried to think of the perfect answer. Then I stopped myself.

That was it.

Not the perfect answer. Just one that’s good enough.

I stood and said it clearly, into the glowing air:

“Perfection. One must give up perfection.”

At once, the web behind the painting trembled, then unraveled in a slow, satisfying ripple, like a curtain falling away. A new path revealed itself, shining with soft blue light.

I grinned despite myself.

That was… pretty cool.

I crawled onward through another corridor until I reached an intersection: one path to the left, one to the right.

A voice whispered:

“Nothing is right when only you are left, and nothing is left when you are always right.”

Seriously? Riddles now? What is this supposed to be—a metaphor for my parents leaving? Or me being a smug bastard who thinks she’s smarter than everyone else?

I frowned, peering down each dim corridor. One twisted like a spine, the other bent like a question mark. Both promised confusion.

Maybe I should’ve gone down to begin with, I thought. It’s never too late to change a path.

I turned to go back.

Another whisper, closer this time. Clearer.

“Sometimes the only right move is to take a step back.”

Was that approval? Encouragement? Or just more cryptic bullshit?

I didn’t get to reflect.

The floor dropped.

Suddenly I was sliding down a coiled tunnel of silken thread, like a twisted child’s playground slide. I let out a short laugh despite myself—half thrill, half terror—and landed in another chamber, this one bathed in cool, blue light.

There was another painting waiting.

René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images.

A pipe. The famous caption beneath: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

This is not a pipe.

My favorite piece. Always had been.

I remembered the first time I saw it—how much it pissed me off. It clearly was a pipe! And yet… not. I spent days obsessing over that contradiction.

A voice rang through the air, familiar now:

“Why is it not a pipe?”

Oh, come on. That one I knew by heart. A mantra.

“You’re reminding me what art is,” I muttered.

“Say it.”

You can hear my thoughts?

“Yes.”

Of course. This place is me. My own mental labyrinth. My unraveling.

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not a pipe,” I said aloud. “It’s an image of a pipe. It shows that appearances deceive. That language, representation, and reality don’t always match. It forces the viewer to see the lie in clarity—and the truth behind the lie.”

The painting shimmered—then split open down the center like parting silk. Threads unraveled to reveal a mask. Not unlike my own Usagi mask, but this one shimmered with the full spectrum of light. Suspended midair. Waiting.

I reached out.

The moment my fingers brushed it, light erupted—pure and blinding. Tendrils shot out, wrapping around me like a living cocoon. I gasped as they poured into me—not around me, into me. Straight to the soul.

It was like being rewritten at the molecular level. Like power was being remembered, not gifted.

I collapsed to the floor, breath stolen from my lungs. My heart thundered. My limbs trembled.

I was exhausted. But stronger. I could feel it. Etched deep inside me—something new. Something mine.

But the reprieve was short.

Another path revealed itself—another question.

“What anchors you when your voice falters?”

What keeps me standing when no one listens? When my words don’t land? When I’m misunderstood?

I thought of all the times I was dismissed. When I tried to explain what I saw, what I felt—and people just looked through me. But then I remembered my paintings. How they said what I couldn’t. Like the city-waking piece. That wasn’t about control—it was about choice. About truth.

“My conviction,” I said quietly. “In seeing things for what they are.”

The passage sighed open. Silk threads peeled away to reveal a new route.

A bridge.

Not really a bridge—just a single silver strand, stretched across the abyss. Beyond it: a distant, round chamber hovering in the dark.

If there was ever a time for all those years of ledge-walking to pay off… this was it.

I stepped out, slow and measured.

The thread held.

It was solid. Still. Tense like a musician’s string.

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But halfway across… it disappeared.

Gone. Not crumbling, not breaking—just vanished. My foot landed on nothing, but still felt something.

I looked back.

Gone too.

Fantastic.

Now I stood on nothing visible, above a black, yawning void.

I wasn’t afraid of heights.

...or apparently, I am when the bottom isn’t just far—but it’s invisible.

I dropped to my knees, cautious, and reached out—my hand touched something solid, though nothing was there. The thread remained beneath me, just… invisible.

I moved forward on all fours, inch by inch, relying on muscle memory and sheer will. My breaths came shallow. My thoughts narrowed to a single word:

Forward.

Hours passed. Or minutes, stretched thin by terror.

Near the end of the line, something hovered in the air—a sculpture of a human body, surrounded by prismatic light. I reached for it, arm trembling, but with one hand still gripping the line, it stayed just out of reach.

I rose slowly, trying to balance—trying to stand on a thread that both was and wasn’t—but before I could fully extend, it vanished.

I sighed and kept crawling.

Penrose would’ve lashed me for that failure.

Eventually, the far chamber welcomed me. I collapsed onto the silk floor, chest heaving.

“This is fucked up,” I muttered. I hoped the architect of this place was listening.

When I’d recovered, I stood.

In the center: another painting.

It showed me—transformed. Spiderlike limbs extended from my back, spinning threads from my body. Delicate bridges formed beneath the feet of faceless strangers. They walked with confidence, unaware of the being above—guiding, shaping, giving form to their path.

A voice whispered:

“What is art?”

Oh.

This was it.

The big one.

The image. The void. The support. The threads. It all made sense now.

I’d heard hundreds of definitions in my life—from professors, critics, drunks at galleries—but only one fit here.

I placed my hand on the canvas.

“Art is the act of building unseen connections.”

The final door opened.

I stepped into the heart of the labyrinth.

A chamber suspended in eternal darkness.

At its center: a throne of webbing, glistening with dew that shimmered like stars. And seated upon it—a being.

Part spider. Part shadow.

Part me.

Its thorax was obsidian and moonstone. Its multifaceted eyes reflected fragments of worlds. Its face split down the center—half mine, half something other. Its eight legs moved like brushstrokes, elegant and deliberate.

Beneath it, hovering in a nest of threads, was a jagged crystal—a fractured prism pulsing with light. Color churned within it like trapped memory. Half-finished stories. Unspoken truths.

The spider-thing tilted its head.

A voice—woven from my own—whispered:

“You’ve reached the center. But can you claim what you do not understand?”

That question. I’d lived it, every time I created. Every time I sought the meaning behind the surface.

The answer came not as doubt, but as a vow.

“I don’t need to understand it all,” I said softly. “Just enough to listen. To share what I see.”

The being stared at me. Then unraveled—dissolving into threads of light, spinning in slow spirals around the crystal—until only silence and shimmer remained.

A final whisper echoed:

“Then take it. And carry its light carefully.”

I stepped forward. The crystal rose into my palm—warm, alive, pulsing in rhythm with my heartbeat.

And the world began to shift—folding outward like a cosmic flower in bloom.

In the next instant, I was elsewhere.

Suspended gently in air, the crystal hovered—now the size of my torso. Swirling with color, liquid light. A living rhythm, mirroring my breath, my being.

When I reached out and touched it, I knew.

This was the heart of my domain.

The Domain of Artistic Creation.

More than that—this was my soul core. Everything I was. Everything I might become.

Inside its depths, I saw the Soulmark of Identity—a glowing icon shaped like a mask. Both expression and concealment. Truth and illusion. The face we wear—and the one we hide.

And beside it, space.

Empty—for now.

A place meant for the second mark—the one that vanished when I crossed the invisible bridge. Its absence was a whisper of destiny still unfolding.

I pulled my hand back. My breath was steady. My mind, clear.

I didn’t need my pendant anymore. No fog. No haze. Just vivid, crystalline clarity.

Then the world bloomed.

Starting from the crystal, a cascade of light surged downward, anchoring itself to the ground in gleaming threads—vertical spiderwebs spun from living glass. The strands shimmered as they descended, fracturing the air with quiet elegance, and unfurled into a floor beneath me: dark, polished, mirror-like. Obsidian, maybe—sharp in memory, soft underfoot.

Each filament pulsed, thrumming in sync with the crystal’s heartbeat—and mine.

Then, the walls began to rise. Smooth at first—perfect, unbroken, circular, like the base of a tower carved from untouched marble. Thirty feet across. Blank, sacred, waiting. But not for long.

From within the white stone, statues began to emerge—me. Dozens of me. The masks I had worn through the years, shaped into stone: the artist, the thief, the student, the liar and dozen others. Each persona sculpted in exquisite detail, caught mid-motion as if they had turned to look back at me in the moment of their unraveling.

Above, the ceiling ignited.

A living sky bloomed overhead—vivid, impossible blue, shifting subtly as if painted by breath. Wisps of cloud drifted lazily across it, brushed in with care. Then the sun arrived—not harsh or blinding, but warm and golden. It streamed through as if the dome itself had vanished, letting light fall unbroken across my skin.

And for a heartbeat longer, it was simply beautiful.

Then it began—a gentle tug, subtle at first, like a thread being drawn from the back of my mind. I felt it: a pull on my consciousness, downward and inward, as if sleep were reaching up to claim me like gravity.

I moved slowly, deliberately—resisting the weight gathering in my limbs. My knees bent. I lowered myself carefully onto the obsidian floor, hands bracing my descent like an animal bedding down. My eyelids grew heavy beneath the mask—my Usagi mask—and I felt the last sliver of light slip between its edges.

And then: silence.

Darkness took me, quiet and complete.

--

I woke up in water.

Cold, but not shivering yet—it must have been only seconds since I fell.

I stood, breath fogging. Rain was falling inside the abandoned building now. The back wall had collapsed, unraveling like frayed canvas. Beyond it, the riverside stretched in grey silence.

No sign of Shiroi.

Had I been pulled into that other world just before he could unravel me? Or… had that triggered it?

I didn’t know. But he was gone—and so was the painting of his face. Torn apart, as I had intended.

Despite the cold, I felt strangely… whole. Something inside me, long dormant, had awakened.

A tether pulsed within me—not in my body, but in my soul. A thread that led to my Domain. I could feel it now, as surely as I felt my own breath. A sixth sense—no, something older. Truer.

I reached up and removed my mask.

A kabuki rabbit’s face—ceramic white, long-eared, eerily serene.

I turned it in my hands. I could feel something stirring inside it now. Possibility. It spoke without words, a whisper of what it could become.

I put it back on.

And within my mind, I gave it shape.

Be more.

I called on my Authority—over Identity, over Art—and made my ask:

Be my senses.

Be the ears of the rabbit. The nose. The eyes of the hare.

Light rose from within me—warm, radiant, familiar now. The same light that had accompanied me through the Domain. It flowed into the mask, fusing with it, rewriting it. No longer just an object of craft—it was art, and I was its author.

My vision shifted.

The black rabbit eyes saw more now—catching subtle flickers, light where none should be. Every sudden movement flashed like a pulse across my vision. I could hear the patter of raindrops, each droplet distinct. The honk of cars beyond the broken walls. The fluttering wings of startled pigeons.

And the smell—gods. The rot. Damp, mold, decay. The acrid scent of rats nesting in the far corner. A dead animal—its corpse bloated, innards torn and spilling open. I gagged and turned away.

I didn’t belong here anymore. Not in this hollow, ruined place.

I ran—feet splashing through shallow puddles, heart pounding, mask tight against my skin.

I ran toward the open street. Toward the world.

--

I reached home two hours later. It was 3 a.m., the dead middle of the night.

Sunday, September 28th.

I’d kept the mask hidden under my hoodie the whole way back, taking it off once I’d left the industrial district. Now, it sat on my desk—black eyes staring blankly, yet knowingly, back at me.

Two things were clear.

First: my Domain. I could feel the invisible thread constantly now, gently tugging inside me. It led here—but also not here. Like something hidden just beyond a veil I couldn’t yet pierce. Present, but distant.

Second: I held power now. Over how art—mine and others’—was seen. Not just seen, but understood. Art had soul. Intent. Identity.

And I could shape it.

But I didn’t understand this power, not fully. Not yet. The spider-guardian’s question echoed in my mind:

“Can you claim what you do not understand?”

I needed answers. I needed tests.

Wrapped in a warm blanket, I slumped onto my bed. The aroma of tea filled the room. The curtains were drawn. The world outside gone. In here—it was just me, my tools, and the magic humming inside my bones.

Time to experiment.

I pulled my jacket closer. It had worked before. I understood why now.

My skin shimmered faintly, swirling with color as I placed my hand over the painted iceberg on the fabric.

Be the ice—pure, freezing, and cold.

I hovered my hand. Where the painting was, I could feel the cold radiating—sharp, biting. I didn’t dare touch it directly.

It held my authority—borrowed from the Domain. Tangible. Real.

But now, I didn’t want the cold. I wanted it gone. So I touched the edge of the painting and whispered:

Be the jacket again.

The fabric shimmered with rainbow light. I felt the shift—the return. My authority, flowing back into me. The cold vanished.

Nice. That was… easy. Reassuring.

Next: something abstract.

I grabbed my sketchbook, pen in hand. I drew a compass. Not just any compass—this one had the usual cardinal points, but at “North,” I scrawled:

Penrose’s Finest Entrance.

I called on my authority.

Be the compass. Point me toward the thing.

Magic surged. My skin lit up. I felt the connection stretch toward the paper.

I moved the sketch around—nothing. The pointer didn’t move.

Maybe it needed a full image?

I tried again, this time sketching my rabbit mask. Still nothing.

The pointer didn’t react at all.

Frustrated, I sighed and flipped to a new page.

A pigeon. That’s what I needed. I drew a cool one—tiny flight goggles, a bomber jacket, a patch reading “Search Pigeon Force.” Message clear.

Be the pigeon. Fly toward the mask.

Power surged again, filling the paper.

But the pigeon didn’t budge.

What the hell?

Was I… losing it?

No. Not losing. Just… learning. Creation without understanding was guesswork. I needed to find the limits.

I set the pigeon sketch down. As I did, I could’ve sworn the corners twitched—like wings fluttering. I crouched low, eye to the page.

Nothing. Maybe a trick of my movement.

Fine. Something simpler.

I drew a spring. Just a coiled line. I pushed my authority into it.

Be the spring.

Set the paper on the floor. I jumped.

OUCH. I smacked into the ceiling, stars bursting behind my eyes.

I landed in a heap, hoping I hadn’t just woken the building.

So it does work. The spring was real—convincing, even if temporary.

But why did that work, and not the pigeon? Or the compass?

Next test.

I painted a black hole. Just a big dark circle.

Be a hole.

Still looked like ink. But I felt it now—different.

I picked up the rolled pigeon sketch and slowly pressed it toward the painted circle. It slid through. Gone.

I let go. It dropped to the floor on the other side of the page.

Excited, I flipped the paper and tried from underneath.

Blocked. A one-way hole.

Then I quickly set the paper with the hole on the my desk and tried sliding the roll through again—nothing. It hit solid wood and stopped.

No portable holes either. Fuck, would be cool.

I opened my window and sprayed black circles onto my desk and the window frame. Then I focused, placing a hand on each and giving the command:

Be holes.

I tested them. The rolled paper slipped through each effortlessly.

But when I tried reversing through the desk—nothing.

The window, though? That worked both ways.

Because it was transparent.

That was it. Visibility mattered. The art had to be seen from the side you wanted to interact with.

Interesting. Very interesting.

I also realized I could infuse two objects at once—if I commanded them to become the same thing!

I touched the glass hole, focused, and pulled my authority back.

Instantly, the hole was just a painted circle again. I felt the power return to me.

I tested again—no passage. Solid.

I stepped back and reached toward the glass from a distance—trying to infuse it with my authority without touching.

Nothing. Cold. Still.

So it required proximity. Either through direct contact, or infusion at creation.

One last test.

I picked up the spray paint again. This time, I focused my power while painting—infusing the command into each movement.

The desk shimmered faintly. The paint took it in. It felt different.

I dropped a pencil into the hole—it slipped through cleanly, landing inside the drawer beneath.

Success.

Final confirmation—back to the pigeon.

I unrolled the page, peeled off the old magic with a focused command, and tried again.

Be the pigeon. Fly. Break the bounds.

Power surged. Light shimmered.

But the pigeon stayed flat. Still ink.

Of course. My creations were bound to their medium.

The spring worked because it could simulate movement within the page. The compass failed because it couldn’t turn. The pigeon? It couldn’t leave.

Frustrating. But progress. A roadmap, of sorts. Authority could shape identity. But the identity was still trapped in its frame.

I looked at the rabbit mask on my desk.

Maybe that’s why it worked so well. It had form. Volume. It wasn’t just art—it was wearable, usable, part of the world already.

And with my authority, I simply helped it remember what it could be.