A Choice of Paths

The air, if it could be called air, thrummed with a silence that was not empty, but pregnant with unformed sound. Da PrEAChEr stood, or floated, or simply existed, in a place that defied the tactile logic of his former life. The light that had once blinded him now seemed to be a part of him, an internal luminescence that cast no shadows, yet revealed no form. He was a thought made manifest, a whisper in the grand cathedral of the infinite. The breadcrumbs, the rope he’d once imagined needing, were nowhere to be found. There was only the vast, shimmering expanse, and within it, the disorienting freedom of being adrift.

He remembered the final push, the deliberate emptying of his mind, the audacious gamble that stillness was not an absence, but a doorway. And it had opened. But the landing was not on solid ground, nor was it a gentle descent. It was an abrupt immersion, a baptism in the unknown. He had sought a higher state, and he had found it, but the instructions for navigating such celestial seas had been conspicuously absent from his meditations.

“Where am I now, in this cosmic inn?” he mused aloud, his voice a faint echo that seemed to ripple outward, not disturbing the stillness, but becoming a part of it. “A pilgrim lost, with no map to begin?”