THE REALM WITHOUT A NAME

Part 15 🌒: What I'm Asking

“Why?”

“Because you came here.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“It’s the only one that matters.”

We stayed like that. Me on the floor,
him reclined in stillness,
and the realm pretending not to listen.
But it was.
The walls were always listening here.
And so was he.

“Can I ask you something?” I said, barely above a whisper.

He didn’t nod.
Didn’t blink.
He just said—
“You already are.”

I sat up straighter, nerves tightening behind my ribs.
“What are you?”

His eyes didn’t flinch.
No sharp turn.
No sudden retreat into shadows.
Just… quiet.
And then—“You already know.”

I shook my head. “No. I think I do. But I want to hear it from you.”

He closed the book of empty pages and placed it beside him.
The room dimmed, like it was bracing for something ancient.

“I am the breath between death and what follows it,” he said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the truest one I can give.”

He turned his face to the side, toward the crimson sky bleeding through the arched windows.
“I was not born. I was not made. I was left.”

“Left?”

“When everything else broke and scattered into light or dust… I remained.”

The shadows on the floor crawled a little closer to him.
Not to consume.
To cling.

“So you’re a god?” I asked.
He smiled. But it wasn’t proud. It wasn’t human.

“No.”

“A monster?”

“Not anymore.”

“Then what do I call you?”

He turned to look at me again.
“You already named me.”

And he said it like a secret I’d spoken in my sleep.
I swallowed hard.
He didn’t press me.
Didn’t ask me to repeat it.
He just watched.

“You don’t belong to this world,” he whispered again.

“But I do now,” I replied. “Because you’re in it.”

---

It started slowly.
A sound here.
A door left ajar when no one opened it.
A creature that stared too long but didn’t vanish when I noticed.
The castle was moving.
But not because of him.
Because of me.
The boy —
no, he —was still there. Still quiet.
Still watching when I wasn't looking.
Still lingering in the corners of moments like a half-remembered dream.

But this wasn’t about him anymore.
It was about what followed me.
What approached.
A creature with delicate spider-leg fingers offered me a cracked crystal like a gift.
I took it, unsure what it meant, and it nodded once before dissolving into fog.

A whispering thing in the mirror mimicked my expressions and frowned when I did.
So I smiled — and it smiled back.

And once, a floating lantern bobbed at my door until I followed it,
leading me to a stairwell I’d never seen before.
It vanished when I turned around.
I was being noticed.
Seen.

Then came the voices.

A noble with braided silver hair — not the one from before — offered me tea that shimmered like starlight.
“It’s strange,” I said, sipping from my cup. “You’ve been here so long, and yet the castle still bends when you walk.” he said .
“Bends?” I was confused at his words.

“As if it wants you to stay. As if it forgets you weren’t meant to exist here.”

I didn’t answer.
Because part of me wondered if that was true.
Maybe I was made for this world.
Or maybe I was breaking it just by being here.

Another creature — round, with too many eyes — tried to dance with me in the empty halls.
I let it.
I laughed.
And the walls echoed it back like a song no one had sung in centuries.
But even as I found companionship — strange and soft —he never came into those spaces.

He didn’t interrupt. Didn’t claim me.
Didn’t ask why. Because he wasn’t a friend, Or a lover, Or a brother.

He was all of those things.
And none of them.
He was.
And I was beginning to become.