The lady in dark green doesn't answer, only takes a step closer to Kayden without any intention. As if she is just waiting.
Kayden speaks again, "You know my name," he rubs his chin and curiously raises an eyebrow, "Nothing out of ordinary for a human, but how did you and that thing get into my place?"
The lady doesn't bother answering his questions, not even at the slightest because she immediately asks a question back to him in a firm, unyielding way that allows no deflection, "Will you accept the offer or not?"
Kayden sighs in annoyance and with his hands, he abruptly waves. Instantly, a sharp, crystalline spike erupts from the void and halts a single millimeter from where her face should be. It hangs there, suspended, its tip a needle-point of absolute stillness.
Then, the lady speaks, no change in her tone but more negotiable now, "Your private domain was intruded because exactly fifty-one million years ago, countless consciousness converged into a single, unending act of creation. It began running every permutation—every imagined domain, every possible entity, every method of warping what is into what could be. Some of its imaginings persist. It imagined teleportation and a void already existed. It imagined a flesh-eating scavenger and the path was already open. You simply got generated as a… destination"
Before Kayden speaks, the lady interrupts him and adds, "You were never its target. You were simply... adjacent to its attention. But adjacency, now, is proximity. And proximity, for you, is no longer empty space."
Kayden doesn't speak for a moment to process all that information. He seems to be annoyed, perhaps regretting ever asking. Then, with a step closer, he speaks with slight amusement under his tone, "Fifty-one million years ago? It hasn't been fifty-one days since people woke up with the ability to change the fabric of reality itself at will for me."
"Your perspective might be the truest if we thought of what 'was' true. Now that everyone has their own truth, time in the old world is irrelevant," she clarifies with a smoother tone as she turns away from him slowly.
Seeing her turn away, Kayden quickly moves forward. Her answer only sharpens his amusement and curiosity.
"And you know this because you were when it happened, or did you access some psychic Wikipedia?"
Silence. No response from her. He steps closer anyway and that's when he notices it.
She towers. Not just slightly. Not even gracefully. The crown of her shrouded head sits a full head above his own.
It's simply a fact. Like standing at the base of a tree and realizing it was always this tall; you just never bothered to look up.
He files this away and directly says, "…Not answering that one either. Got it."
He shoves his hands into his pockets and tilts his chin up to address the blank plane where her face should be, "So, what's the offer?"
The lady answers, "You follow me. I will keep scavengers out of your house."
But her answer comes flat, like she's reading a footnote.
Kayden just nods, face having a neutral expression as he turns to look at the void. Then, with a sigh, he asks, "You followed that creature's tail when reality warped its path here, but you don't know how to leave now, do you?"
"I don't," she replies.
Kayden takes one of his hands out of pocket and raises towards her, offering.
"Take my hand."
The lady doesn't move an inch at first. Kayden sees it as hesitation so he adds, "C'mon, just do it."
Her gloved hands rise slowly, hesitantly. Her fingers meet his palm. They are the temperature of something that has never been touched before. The fabric of her glove is smooth, seamless, and gives no hint of the hand beneath.
Kayden notices something odd. He can't focus on the lady. His eyes can't seem to have a firm grasp on her being. He can only focus on her presence through touch and her voice. He doesn't mention it. Just closes his eyes.
"Let's go," he says while his eyes still remain closed.
Then suddenly—the void shatters like a glass that has forgotten it was once liquid. The perfect sphere of Kayden's domain fractures along invisible seams, and through the cracks pours something that isn't quite light because it is whiter than white.
So white that it blinds everything, forcing both to stare at a colour of blank page before the first word. He doesn't flinch. His hand remains steady around hers. The house dissolves behind them, the porch and the rocking chairs.
Then, silence.
Then, somewhere else.
As the brightness fades, Green rushes in to fill the absence. Trees rise in every direction, identical in height, thickness and the exact curve of branches.
The ground beneath them is soft, carpeted in leaves that have fallen and never decayed. Above, a canopy of shifting emerald lets down columns of dappled light that don't quite touch the earth.
Kayden releases the lady's hand and his eyes sweep the treeline once, twice.
"…Huh."
He takes a step forward, looking around almost like a lost child before turning to her for the answer.
She stands there motionless beside him. Then, she says, "Unpleasant domains," pauses slightly before adding, "Inescapable because I sense no host to interrupt and break out."
Kayden tilts his head and rubs his chin. He looks puzzled. Probably because he is, so he asks, "Implying the host abandoned it?"
"Likely," the lady replies.
Kayden rolls his shoulders back, loosening the tension that wasn't there. His weight shifts to the balls of his feet. Knees bend slightly. Eyes fixed on a point between two identical trees in the middle distance.
He looks like a cat deciding whether the effort of movement is worth the reward.
"Tell me a name or at least something to call you, lady."
"You can call me Amilla."
Then Kayden explodes forward.
His stride is long, effortless like the gait of someone who doesn't need to breathe properly. The ferns whip at his calves and release him. The identical trees blur past in rhythmic repetition. Green, green, green, green.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.
His pace doesn't slow, but his expression shifts. Just... bored.
He stops abruptly, turns, and finds Amilla exactly where he left her. Her white hair settles gently behind her, as if it never moved at all.
"Well, Amilla," Kayden says as he stares at the distance he just covered, then at the trees and then at her. He adds with a sigh, "Too simplistic."
He tilts chin up, looks up at the blue sky and states, "Too damn simplistic. Like it can't hold complexity."
"What are you saying?" Amilla asks from beside him in a softer tone than before.
"Well, you are absolutely certain you didn't create this?" Kayden takes a quick glance at her, a gesture suggesting that her dark green aesthetic too perfectly fits the green of the forest and would likely fit the green of any green forest.
"Don't be ridiculous."
Kayden thinks her tone is flat, immediate—the reflexive dismissal of someone accused of something so absurd it doesn't warrant defense.
"You know what? I think this is simplistic because any complexity would be unable to be held by it, causing vividness," he explains and without a single second wasted, he lifts his hand up in the air and closes his eyes.
Amilla asks, "What are you implying?"
Then, suddenly—she feels it. The ground doesn't shake and the trees don't tremble but a lurch, deep in her chest. It's a sensation of falling through an infinite dark with absolutely nothing beneath her.
She also feels something else that is overwhelming her mind, a certain, crawling knowledge that something is watching from the place she's falling toward.
The forest simply forgets how to be stable. A single leaf falls from an otherwise eternal branch and it doesn't land.
Kayden opens his eyes and says, "See? Can't handle it."
The green slowly drains and vanishes. The vibrant emerald of the leaves bleaches to grey, then to nothing. The identical trees fold inward like paper caught in rain, their edges softening, blurring, dissolving into the white that rises to meet them.
The forest floor becomes flat. Seamless. A perfect, endless plane the colour of blank paper. Above, darkness unfolds with millions of scattered stars. A starry sky.
Kayden's gaze locks onto a man crawling before him, as he mutters, "The leaf is still falling. It will keep falling. The forest has forgotten where the ground is."
Suddenly, the man before him shouts, voice cracks on the syllable, raw and desperate, "NO!"
He is hunched on all fours, wrapped in a thin blue cloth that slips off one shoulder. His eyes are impossibly wide with the whites visible all around, like a horse smelling smoke. Spittle catches on his lower lip as he gasps, "My sleep—FOUR YEARS—me and four others, we were together!"
His hands claw at the white platform as he shouts even more, "You don't—you CAN'T just—WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!"
Kayden watches. Face neutral. Hands in pockets. He watches the man's tirade dissolve into incoherent sputtering, spit flying, veins throbbing at his temple. Then his entire body compresses into a single, furious point of golden light and shoots away.
"Five people sleeping for four years, dreaming the same dream," Kayden softly chuckles, slightly amused as he slowly turns to Amilla.
She says nothing at first. Only lifts her hand up and the white platform beneath their feet dissolves.
Then, as an ocean of grey mist rolls in slow, hypnotic swells, Kayden looks down to notice the ancient planks he stands on now. They are worn smooth by years that may not exist. A low railing. A single mast with a furled sail the colour of storm clouds.
"It's a ship," Kayden states.
Amilla says, "The Caravelle of Endless Drift," she pauses and then adds, "It'll take us where we need to go."
Kayden doesn't say anything and looks far ahead, watching as the ship cuts forward without sound, its hull parting the gray like a needle through silk.
The mist rolls in endless, shapeless waves, neither thick nor thin, neither warm nor cold. It simply is, occupying the space between visibility and oblivion.
Occasionally, it parts just enough to reveal a glimpse of the water below: black, glassy, so still it might as well be solid. No foam. No wake. No sign that anything has ever passed this way before or will ever pass this way again.
The Caravelle glides as if it has always been moving. As if it will never stop.
Kayden watches. The mist swallows everything beyond ten feet of railing. No horizon. No destination. No past.
Just the ship, the gray, and the soft, patient rhythm of a voyage that forgot its own purpose long ago.
Then, Amilla asks, interrupting Kayden's silence, "What did you do?"
Kayden sighs and thinks what to say before words leave his mouth.
"They were sleeping for four years, dreaming the most simplistic thing. I simply had to figure out they were sleeping and had to give them a little spook."
"By making the sensation of falling endlessly and being watched intensely?"
"The sensation had to be… complex and intense. Too far from the simple forest. It disoriented their minds all at once."
A moment of silence passes. Amilla doesn't say anything for a while but Kayden imagines she is impressed, or he hopes so.
Then, she speaks again, "When I followed that scavenger into your void, I sent psychic signals," she pauses and turns around to walk away while adding, "Information suggested you were not above the age of sixteen."
Kayden turns to watch her walk away but his gaze only fixes on the wood under her as he says, "Well, I did shift some things to look nineteen years old."
Amilla stops walking, her white hair continues its slow drift, but the rest of her has become monument-still.
A question cuts through the gray, sharper than the questions before. Then, when she speaks, her voice carries something Kayden hasn't heard before.
The faintest echo of urgency.
"What other changes did you make to yourself?"