Chapter 41: Origin
"Where am I?" Zephyr thought out loud. A large white expanse spread out before him, glyph lines running across the clear, mirror-like ground in beautiful chaos. He felt at peace here. A sense of natural belonging, like he was nestled in his mother’s embrace. The whole place, from the cold clear ground beneath his feet, to the chilly air he breathed in through his nostrils, and most especially... that.
He stared longingly at the— would he call it a shard?— that floated right in the center of the expanse, all glyph lines leading toward it and from it at the same time. He longed for it like nothing else he had ever longed for...
And what had he ever even longed for?... A vague, distant feeling bubbled up nearly to the fore of his mind, making him pause in confusion. It felt like he was forgetting something. But just as quickly as the feeling came, it faded away, the previous longing dominating his mind again.
It wasn’t even a longing fueled by a desire to possess, rather, to give. To give himself to this thing... this entity. As he drew nearer in a trance, he realized that it wasn’t the shard in particular that drew him. Instead, it was what it was connected to. He could see it now from the closer distance. The shard was only a fragment, a sort of gatekey— his gatekey to accessing... that.
He looked up at the faint glyph lines stretching into the sky and connecting to something distant that he couldn’t make out. The lines were harder to see the further up he looked.
Suddenly, it became extremely difficult to even keep looking. Like the place he was looking up to was sacred. A place not meant for his eyes. He cast his gaze down sharply in reverent shame, like a child being chided by his mother. The feeling he got from gazing up lingered like an aftertaste. It was very familiar. Again. But familiar to what?
He paused his steps, feeling frustrated as he tried to latch onto the vague sense of familiarity that was threatening to disappear at any moment.
He knitted his brows in concentration. What was it familiar to? He felt like it was important. He could sense something like urgency, mixed within the increasingly fading feeling of familiarity.
"Origin!" His eyes snapped open. "Origin." That was the word he could glean before the familiar feeling faded again. He’d once used the word Origin to describe the source of reverence he felt when looking up. That was all he could remember though. The circumstance in which he came up with the word was lost to him.