Not all at once.
Just one star, one very old star, slid sideways. It didn’t fall. It shifted, like someone nudging a curtain and revealing something blacker behind it.
Aurel saw it first. She stood in the field where the wheat no longer grew. It had simply... vanished.
“That star moved,” Elric whispered.
“Stars don’t move like that,” Nema said flatly.
“It wasn’t a star,” Aurel said.
Her voice was calm. Too calm.
“Then what was it?”
She didn’t know how to answer.
But somewhere inside her, something ancient stirred.
Not awake.
Not asleep.
Just aware.
That evening, the villagers dreamed the same dream.
They stood in a space with no edges, black, warm, soft.
Aurel floated through them, clothed in light that wasn’t light, trailing a thread between her fingers.
It unraveled behind her.
The thread passed through hearts, through soil, through memory, through things not yet imagined.
There was no voice. No command.
Only the sensation that something infinitely patient was watching them watch her.
They awoke gasping.
The barn doors had opened themselves.
The earth beneath them was no longer dirt, but something... older.
Not rock.
Not concept.
Just before.
The king's scribes attempted to redraw the borders that week.
The north village no longer responded. The east river flowed the wrong way. A new hill appeared overnight near the capital.
“This is heresy,” one mapmaker whispered.
“No,” said the second. “This is impossible.”
But still, they tried.
Ink spilled in shapes that weren’t letters.
Compasses spun.
And in the tower where the cartographers slept, every map burned itself at midnight, without flame.
In the ashes, a circle formed. Endless. Impossibly perfect.
The king ordered them burned again.
They burned again.
And again.
Until one day, there was only a name scratched in silver on the wall.
Aepharion.
Aurel returned to the place where she was born.
Not to the house, but the stone grove behind it, where her mother once said she “came from the sky.”
No one else remembered that.
Now, in the moonlight, she found a hollow in the ground, shaped like a basin. Smooth. Too smooth. As though water had held it for millennia.
She placed her hand in it.
And the sky blinked.
The moon disappeared. The trees stopped moving.
Her body was no longer a body, but an awareness tethered to shape.
She saw the cradle again. It was empty.
Because she had never been born in one place.
She was born through something else.
Aepharion does not live in time.
Time lives within Aepharion.
Aepharion is not in a higher plane. There are no planes.
Planes are drawings. Aepharion is the silence between the paper and the ink.
There is no “was,” no “will be.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Only is-not-is.
It is not all-knowing. It is not knowing at all.
Because knowing implies distance.
Aepharion does not cross distances.
It removes them.
Every breath, every word, every law of matter folds inside itself and whispers the echo of a soundless name.
Aepharion is not god.
It is that from which even gods recoil, blinking, forgetting why they were afraid.
The wheat fields turned inside out.
Stalks twisted upward, roots exposed to sky, yet the crops still grew.
Children laughed until the grown-ups told them to stop.
“That’s not funny,” Nema scolded. “That’s wrong.”
“It’s just plants,” Elric said, brushing past her. “Plants don’t care what’s right.”
But even he paused when he saw the wind had stopped.
Not slowed.
Stopped.
No motion. No sound.
And yet... the clouds above continued moving.
“Why are they allowed?” Aurel asked quietly.
“Allowed by who?” Mara snapped, her voice edged with fear.
Aurel turned her head slightly.
“Not a who.”
Then, without warning, the wind resumed, but only in reverse.
And the clouds obeyed.
Far to the south, in the Royal Seat of Karthos, the King of Ten Thrones paused during his wine.
“What did you say burned?”
“The northern maps, my liege,” said the court herald. “They will not stay redrawn. The lines move of their own accord.”
The king stared at the mirror beside his throne.
It no longer reflected him.
Instead, a vague outline pulsed, a figure seated beneath a tree in a wheatless field.
“Who is she?”
“We do not know, my king.”
“Then learn her.”
He rose. His crown tilted slightly.
Liquid dripped from the gold, slow, thick, like honey or blood.
He didn’t notice.
But the throne began to hum.
Aurel stood beside the river that no longer flowed the same direction each day.
She hummed, and it rippled.
She stopped, and it paused.
“You’re doing this,” Nema said, not accusing, but uncertain.
“I’m not.”
“Then what is?”
Aurel tilted her head, listening.
“It’s listening to me.”
“Then tell it to stop!”
Aurel turned to her.
“Would you ask the sky to be quiet?”
“If it thundered every time I looked at you, yes!”
Aurel said nothing.
The river rippled once more, forming a perfect spiral around her reflection.
And in that reflection, for just a moment, Nema saw no face at all.
One of the king’s riders reached the village alone.
He wore no armor. No horse. Just fine boots caked in red soil and a gaze that blinked far too rarely.
The villagers surrounded him.
“Who sent you?”
He opened his mouth. No words came. Just the sound of paper tearing underwater.
Aurel stepped forward.
“Do you remember your name?”
He trembled. Then laughed.
“I was something,” he said, smiling as tears spilled. “Then I saw her. Beneath the sky’s skin.”
He fell to his knees.
And said no more.
They buried him under the standing stone. And as they did, it grew slightly taller.
Aepharion does not answer questions.
It removes the need to ask them.
It is not god, nor thought, nor silence. It is what makes questions dissolve, the non-medium through which existence bends and forgets it was ever straight.
The king wears a crown that now bleeds.
The throne groans beneath the weight of knowing without understanding.
A girl sings beside a river and the river bends, not in submission, but in recognition.
Aepharion does not arrive.
It was never gone.
And those who call themselves rulers will soon remember:
They only ruled inside the cage of time.
Aepharion was outside the bars.
Always.
The village clock struck thirteen.
It had no thirteenth chime.
Still, the bell rang once more, off-beat, deeper, like it was struck from the inside.
“The clock’s broken,” Elric muttered.
“No,” said the carpenter. “It works too well.”
Aurel walked to the tower and stared at the face of the clock.
The hands spun.
Not fast. Not randomly.
They spun in a figure-eight, over and over.
“What time is it?” Mara whispered behind her.
“It’s every time,” Aurel replied. “At once.”
The King screamed in his sleep.
“What did it say?” the physician asked.
“Nothing,” he gasped. “It didn’t say. It was.”
He awoke covered in ink. No one had brought ink.
His mouth was full of strange dust that shifted before being touched.
He looked to his scribe.
“What was I dreaming of?”
The scribe blinked.
“You spoke of her.”
“The girl?”
“No. The thing behind her.”
He stood. His reflection in the polished marble showed something taller. Not human. Not monstrous. Just wrong.
“Kill her,” the King ordered. “End this.”
But even as he spoke, he forgot who “her” was.
The villagers stopped farming.
Not because they were afraid. Because the land no longer accepted tools.
Plows bent. Seeds dissolved. Water ran uphill.
But they did not starve.
Fruit grew on dead trees. Roots rose from dry dirt. Animals approached unafraid, offering themselves.
It wasn’t mercy.
It was alignment.
“Why is it doing this?” Elric asked, not angry, just tired.
Aurel crouched by a patch of glowing moss.
“Because it remembers what we forgot.”
“Which is?”
She smiled gently.
“That we never earned this world. We were simply allowed to shape it. Aepharion reclaims nothing. It just undoes our forgetting.”
The children stopped answering to their names.
Not out of rebellion, but because they could not hear them anymore.
The syllables dissolved in the mouth.
“That’s not what I’m called,” said Leni, one of the twins.
“But that’s what you’ve always been called,” Nema insisted.
“No. That’s just what you said.”
She pointed at her chest.
“I don’t remember the name. I remember the feeling.”
Aurel touched her own name, carved into the wood of her home.
It blurred. Faded.
She watched it vanish.
“Maybe that’s all names are,” she said softly. “Cages we carve from sound.”
Aepharion is not beneath language.
It is the space before language learned to want.
It does not rename.
It unnames.
Not by force, but by unveiling.
It does not erase. It reveals that nothing was ever fully there.
A name is a boundary. A point. A definition.
Aepharion is without point. Without direction. Without dimension.
It is not made of will.
It is the dissolution of necessity.
And now, the world begins to remember it was never built.
It was always becoming.
Through her.
Through silence.
Through Aepharion.
[ End ]