Chapter 172: Where the light bleeds
Even before I could understand what my eyes were seeing...
My heart folded in two.
Not from shock, nor from fear, but from an older, rawer emotion — like a thread pulled too tight that snaps, clean, all at once. My throat tightened immediately, stifling any possible scream, and my breath, too, escaped. Cut short. Forgotten. Swallowed by what I had just grazed with my gaze.
Because before me...
Opened a valley.
But not a valley of this world. A suspended valley. Literally. An immense space, weightless, hanging between two worlds that nothing seemed to connect, like a dream between two sleeps, like a scar split in the very fabric of reality. A valley of pale shadows, absent lights, impossible curves, placed there, with no origin or end, in a depth my eyes refused to admit.
And I had the feeling that it was there...
That everything had begun.
And that everything would end.
An impossible landscape.
A cosmic dream, spread before me like a soft wound, wide open but without apparent pain — a place that didn’t bleed, but still breathed, slowly, as if the universe itself had laid here its most fragile side. It was an unreal world, cradled in unstable balance, where light and darkness no longer opposed each other, but embraced.