Every living thing bears within it an hourglass containing the count of their days. Each grain of sand is a moment that they live, every tick of the clock is a tap of Father Time's finger. The amount and quality of the grains within them change with the waning and waxing tides of external and internal loci. No matter how well or how poorly one lives, all the grains of sand they possess will eventually reach the bottom. Such is the inevitability of change and the undeniability of endings. As is Inversality and Lakhyatum. Some hourglasses sputter out naturally through apoptosis. Others end prematurely, whether due to an unfortunate accident or deliberate destruction, scattering all grains of what that life could have been. And then some timepieces are damaged, retaining or losing however much life was left within.

  My hourglass is one of the latter.

  I was supposed to die during that insidious experiment, Project Ieav?llr, the flies called it. Under normal circumstances, those damn insects would have ditched my body as soon as my soul got what they wanted. Shame they never considered that someone beyond their control would reconstruct my hourglass with ambrosial duct tape and nectar superglue. Nor could they have ever expected that I would have returned beyond their ability to control me, for they are nothing more than amoebas pretending to be in control of the pen that writes the narrative. A narrative that, to my dismay, I will soon depart from, as I become another observer from beyond the looking-glass.

  The reconstruction of my hourglass only delayed my fate. In four years, Saturn will return home from when all this started in 1999. It is close to time for my 28-year-old body to die, as it was supposed to over 25 years ago. Dying ain't something I am... Looking forward to it, especially when that event is so far from today. After all, the only time I have been truly living has been since I returned from that horrific trip. At least I was able to live in some kind of prosperity with family and friends to call my own. A shame to leave them all behind, but I have one last role to play in this narrative. As do the rest of them, in time. If I am too late, the destruction of Eden will be repeated. We need to be swift and vigilant, but I have faith. With what I have seen and done? I choose to have that faith. In my kin. In my friends. In my blessed Lord. In myself. I know that my end will be merciful, especially compared to what I experienced in my eons-long odyssey through the realms beyond this blue marble. At least I have the certainty of knowing where I will be going when I am reconstituted. Though, as he told me, I am already there. We all are. One of many lessons Casimir taught me.

  He only taught me the barest glimmer of the iceberg on the horizon. No, that ain’t right. There are no icebergs to sail to. No oceans for the glaciers to wander on. No Earth for comets to transform the barren gorges into the seven seas. Not even the Sun exists for Earth to congeal from the stellar womb of a forgotten placental star's remnants. I saw less than a beginning to the beginning. The Genesis of Genesis. The origin of God and Satan and all other entities beyond multiple cycles of existential histories woven into infinity again and again and again. Like an infinitesimally complex ball of yarn, the infinite quantum threads within are concepts that weave all of existence into a singular, cohesive yet adaptable form. That is how little he taught me. Alysetheia's floral libraries have no end, for they contain all knowledge that is both within and beyond the six-fold logic. All those stories, so many lessons to learn and worlds to fantasize about. Once you cross that threshold of curiosity, it becomes a gluttonous ouroboros that can never be sated, no matter how long it engorges on the vines of the Heart and the panes of the Marrow.

  But what he did teach, of which I am allowed to speak, is what I shall pass on to you in time. I, in my journey to what the flies called the Garden, experienced many a great horror from the absurd realms I crossed. Nonsensical things made manifest, defying any semblance of sense in Syschia-

  I forget myself. Existence has no obligation to make sense to us to begin with. We take it for granted like the Sun rising from the east, but at any point, reality could decide that it shall rise from the west instead. At any time, reality could change. Who are we to demand that it should comply with laws that we discovered? The absurdity of that claim alone is obese with ignorance.

  My soul experienced a frontier both more holy than Heaven and more vile than Hell, a contradiction permitted by the creative gestalt of the near-universal simulacrum of imagination. It was an eons-long pilgrimage, one that has scarred me forevermore amidst the last grains of sand in my shattered hourglass, but also one that liberated me from the pines of my self-imposed enslavement beforehand. Many assisted me then, and many more will aid me on one final trip.

  Forgive my ramblings, Dear Reader. Let me start at the beginning, in a time when I misconstrued Samsara for Nirvana, and vice versa. The time that I volunteered for an experiment to send me to the heart of existence.

  ...

  I was on my way home from my cubicle-bound workspace when I spotted an engrossing ad, which was located on my floor's cobweb-covered notice board. It was a piece of black construction paper written with sterling gold letters of impossibly perfect calligraphy. I still have the ad with me, despite my forced evacuation. Its tagline was remarkably simple:

  "Do you wish to explore the heart of existence?"

  The only other piece of information provided was the phone number. There was nothing else, except that God-forsaken six-pronged pitchfork in the bottom right corner. I knew better than to call that number. I knew better than to even treat this as remotely serious. But something compelled me forward. Or, you could say, there was no reason for me to worry. If this killed me, so be it. If I didn't suffer during it, then I would say that dying wouldn't be so bad.

  I would punch my younger self's face if I could. What did they say, "grit your teeth"? I would tell myself the same thing, as they did all those years ago. I was a lustful coward.

  I see my self-deprecation has not yielded to the guiding light of Chiron, yet. I have four years to change. I have to. It would dishonor the faith they placed in me.

  I love them too much to fail them, but this will take time...

  A short phone call and fifteen-minute drive later, and I was being interviewed in a dingy abandoned gas station by some lapdogs and a fat secretary. After the rigmarole of that interview, the two old bastards and the obese manatee got to the point. They wanted to find someone who was disillusioned by reality and wanted immediate answers to the greatest questions of existence, the same ones that have ground intellectual debates to a halt for thousands of years. They provided such examples as:

  What was the purpose of existence?

  What is God?

  What is consciousness?

  Why does conflict exist?

  What is the central law of existence?

  They also wanted a candidate who didn't have any experience with psychedelics. If I remember right, it was so that my soul would form the tunnel properly... A way to make sure I didn't simply just hit the wall of Liminal, but also pass through it. Think of it like an inverse passport so your soul can travel to different realms. Also, you don't have to pay a pretty penny for a book of permission slips every decade to some bureaucratic mosquitoes. Instead, the flies just dump your body once your brain explodes due to sensory overload and a cortex shutdown.

  What they do with the corpses... Dear God... I wish I could unsee the "Perfection Complex" within the Monitor... Alas, I bore witness to those abominations... And so many more.

  In any case, I happened to fit the bill perfectly. Only thing that could be considered a psychological addiction was the near-nightly rituals I needed to enact so that my perversions could be satisfied enough. And for me to get some damn sleep... The nightmares were too much without the easy way out... Dishevelled, rectangular hills of alabaster-stained, often-glued pages littered my apartment in those days. Hundreds of magazines were stacked like dunes in the desert. That smell when I returned... The smell of teen spirit, if it was left to fester. I am still ashamed of all of my lust...

  Upon my hinting to them of my paraphreneliac addictions, the codgers were overjoyed, as if I was their metaphorical Io who Hermes reclaimed from the eyes of Argus. One of them got up and shook my hand vigorously, almost at the same pace as what I did to myself every night for the past 6,546 days. I was on board and welcomed with shark smiles. I recognized their predator's gaze, but I foolishly brushed it off, as if I was blind to the den of lions I dove into. They let me know that they would send some folks to inform me of the bare minimum once the project was underway.

  And so set loose the chain of causality upon our universe...

  It was a different time back then, December 1999. It was just before the turn of the millennium. Dejected folks like myself were scrambling due to the Y2K fears, and many believed that the world was going to end due to software limitations ruining the economy. I personally thought that it was going to cause all nations of the world to launch atomic death upon one another, reducing the survivors to a state of stones and sticks and caves. It was nihilistic ridiculousness, a manufactured belief for a manufactured cog. My fears back then mean absolutely nothing now. That fear I felt was no fear at all, just the petulant complaints of a lustful soul stuck in Mouse Utopia when the way out was wide open. All I had to do was open my eyes.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  I was told to be in a certain state of mind through the constant interpretations of existential concepts. A sort of mental terraforming to shape how my expedition into the beyond would go, or some such scientific drivel. So, I got to digging, taking mind to meander around the many Himalayan erotica mountains for all the writings I have made about my then shallow interpretations of reality. Most of it was abandoned gibberish, the writings of a bored fool who cloistered himself from the world due to that.... That... Damn demon and demoness... It was the combined life's work of a jackass who believed the end was near and that, somehow, isolation was preferred to forming actual, important connections. Or at least trying to. I got to pondering after skimming through all the writings I could find. An aisle of questions naturally lined themselves up, many of which were similar to what the gnats inquired of me. Though there were three that caught my attention:

  Does reality have to make sense to us?

  How much should we know?

  In all my explorations, that last, lingering question always pursued me, like a starving blood tiger chasing the ripe manhog through the dense, pink and black jungle. It... Deteriorated me. It implied that this was not the right way to go about my existence. That this chase for knowledge would never be worth it. In my impudent stubbornness, I pressed on, believing I was on the verge of some great enlightenment in understanding reality. But what would that give me? I didn’t know. I hadn't thought that far. A lot of us don't think about the end logic of ontological topics, principally concerned with how everything truly began. What would we gain by knowing what the first mover was? Not even Casimir knows that one. No one can. Alysetheia's infinite knowledge does not contain that answer either. At best, an endless array of speculative Narcissuses. It has been lost to us. Perhaps functionally or literally, there was no first mover, yet we still exist anyway. Aquinas would render his own argument self-defeating.

  Theseus would describe a dilemma of identity between two different ships, one of newer parts and one of the original parts. The dilemma is which ship is the original, which some argue is a paradox of identity. This is ridiculous, as the ship reconstructed with old, broken, and rotten parts is unable to function as a sea vessel. The new one, of course, can. So while the literal old parts were, collectively, the original vessel, if a boat cannot function as a boat, then it isn't a boat. It is a hollow vessel. A worn skeleton of something that once was. A fossil of a bygone time. If we assume that the old parts are the true identity, would not all things be considered the same singular entity, if going by that same logic? Could not all components of the original, singular existence be considered such? Upanishadic Hindus would agree, given their adoration of everyone as Brahman.

  The identity of the first mover is irrelevant from an existential standpoint. Theorizing on an unknowable answer for its own sake is a waste of mental resources. The time would be better suited by using such developments to create something that exists regardless of the truth of it all. What is the function of simply knowing something? At the very least, it occupies memory in your mind. You could know something that no one else does, but if you don't do something with it, then it is just wasted space. Some forms of knowledge take even more away, given how they often lead to subsequent thoughts of dread. What is the function of this cursed knowledge? Only torment.

  Knowledge by itself doesn’t make us God. Nor does it lead us anywhere else but the pit of death once we reach the natural conclusion of its nihilistic inevitability. Humans, animals, gods, and even concepts all hit that same wall. It does not matter what or who lies before it. If they enter, they are nothing. If they stagnate, they are empty. If they turn around or pass over the abyss, they are free. If they enter but later escape, nothing is guaranteed. Who knows where jubilation is born? Who knows where you will find it? Who knows if effort will certainly provide it?

  We don't know any of that necessarily. Thus, I must warn you:

  What will you do with the knowledge that you discover? Will it lead you to Elysium or Tartarus?

  I spent several hours contemplating much of existence, which only led me further down the trails of dread that is meaningless curiosity. Existential crises waded in my mind like tides controlled by the Sun, devouring the land of my mind, then leaving it bare for it to drown in droughts. To alleviate this and distract my mind from the sorrow, I grabbed a magazine from a nearby stash and got to work. That day marked 6,547. Another gust of incontinence for the number of years I would have been blown by that chaotic gale.

  Three days later, a couple of gentlemen in fine sable suits were at my door. They gave me the barest of details regarding the experiment’s time and date: December 13, 1999, at noon, in a warehouse fifty miles west of Elkhart, Indiana, in the middle of a godless nowhere. Don't think there was a frostbitten soul anywhere in a five-mile radius of that damn, frozen bucket besides the people in and directly outside of it. It was like a liminal space, a brown, rectangular, and corrugated boil that swelled from the otherwise lotion-less skin of Gaia. When I arrived at the facility and locked my white 1982 Mustang, the same two suits from before, once more finely dressed in complete obsidian, opened the steel doors and chaperoned me through the labyrinthian corridors of that glassless wart. I tried not to pay any mind to the near silence of the maze, but there was no ignoring it forever. The stillness only exalted the groaning, sterile yellow fluorescence into a melodic hum that bombarded my eardrums like the broken orchestra of the dying Moby Dick.

  After enduring several hours of cacophonous silence for two minutes, I was led to a small, near-completely soundproofed room. Just entering it alone numbed me to a false harmony, a total polar opposite of the auditory abuse I had just experienced. It was a momentary reprieve in truth. Not exactly the calm before the storm. More like the rain before the Flood. I was further directed to some kind of capsule in the center of the clandestine, heptagonal room. All the walls reflected in what I knew even then were one-way mirrors; the floor was covered in sterile-white, heptagonal tiles a foot or so wide, which bombarded my nostrils with the odor of nothingness, as if I was in front of the half-decayed remnants of a diabetic mammoth; the ceiling was one single sheet of flawless void, no stars or galaxies or any sort of celestial body was present in its plaster, conspiratorial Zodiac.

  The capsule itself looked like one of those hypersleep chambers from Aliens, except it was slightly smaller and completely vertically aligned, having been bolted six times into both the void above and the nothing below. It had various aseptic dials and buttons and switches on a mechanical plaque hanging on the left hinge side of the mostly glass door. Upon that door was a number, 203, which was printed in the seven-segment font with navy blue tincture. To the right of the capsule, there were heart rate monitors along with what I presumed was a brainwave scanner. Next to them was a dolly that had had one of those old, monolithic box televisions that weighed fifty million tons due to a hex done by some inbred hag in the wilderness. I later found out the monolith was to project my brain waves into visible information. They saw what I did, though I have no idea how the science behind the process worked, even after all this time pondering. Then again, there is no way in Hell they managed to analyze everything that happened to me. Liminal alone would have taken the entire human race at least a thousand years to analyze. Even still, I do recall dread wafting into me when I stared into its screen. As if the abyssal glass would stare back into me with somniferous eyes.

  Upon entering the chamber, my chaperones fastened me into it and attached the scanners & monitors to the appropriate places. Once they did, they departed swiftly, as if they were fugitives on the run after leaking the most secretive information on nefarious projects, akin to what I am doing now. After the suits left, four gloriously bald scientists spawned from the aether and approached me to give me a summary of the future happenings.

  They were going to put some special headphones around my ears, each side emitting a different frequency, as if one was a heart and the other was a drum. The initial process was similar to what occurred in the 1980s with the Gateway Process and the 1970s with Project Stargate. Once I entered the initial state of auditory transience, which would take a couple minutes at most, they would then have me ingest three different hallucinogens. Firstly, those Luciferean Psilocybin mushrooms were to be shoved down my throat, which would transport me to the beyond. Ten minutes of exploring the desert later, I was to drink Ayahuasca, a brew that contains DMT and MAOIs, the latter of which would prolong DMT's effects so that I would go further into that horse carcass surrounded by flies and a dead sea of rotten eggs. Lastly, after the other two tore apart my insides for half an hour, I was then to choke on a fog of salvia divinorum smoke. They would trap me inside with the gas as if I were wearing a gold star in 1930s Auschwitz, and the vile nectar would rip apart my lungs like the Soviets upon the two million women of Berlin. According to them, the smoke would be the stimulus that would truly shuttle my destroyed soul to “the Garden”. They didn't know shit. It was just a guessing game to those eggheaded doughboys. They would monitor what they would see regardless, and analyze later (somehow) for further study of my tortured eons inside that world.

  All I was, bound to a place of violation, became petrified by Medusa. The combined effects of those drugs would have caused an excruciating death for a fledgling in the psychoactive like me. All those singing eels would overload my brain to the point of grounded electricity. My body would swiftly descend into the maw of the Caecillian Thorn. My soul would be lost in that memetic ash-land to become an entity that would become older than God in five of His minutes. I would become a ghost in some distant place far from any planet in this realm. Far from this realm entirely.

  I would be a pi?ata in Hell, being constantly battered and broken while my entrails spilled out. My intestines would be the sacred candies of the demons that would flock to the gore like relentless children, all of whom would be scrounging around for the most valuable and sweet of my caramel horse guts. I yearned for any real possibility to plead for release. For salvation. But I couldn’t do anything at that point. I was already there, strapped to my coffin, in the middle of a prison not even God could free me from. I was bound I knew too much to be liberated by these insects, at least while still living. The Gorgon had me in her gaze. I sorrowfully nodded and bitterly asked one thing to act as any sort of mental distraction for the doom I knew I was going to face; my lips quivered with despair and my eyes lightly dampened as I did so:

  “What in all hell... is the Garden?"

  The four eggheads turned to each other, three of whom careened the glorious sheen on their heads with their alabaster hands. Who I presumed was the chief scientist gave me an unsatisfactory remark, “We ain't got a clue, boy. We just know that something called the Garden is somewhere on the other side. Don't be askin' questions, aight?” Predictable nothingness. I knew pressing them would be pointless. So I leaned back in the chamber, and breathed in what could have very well been my last clean bit of not just air, but space and time. I told them I was ready, and they gave each other anxious but guided glances and nods, as if preparing for an adventure themselves. One of the chief's assistants, a portly hog-spawn fellow of the bayou, put the headphones on me, while the chief described, "For the sake of this whole thing, you is 'The Wanderer.'” I raised my eyebrow in puzzlement.

  The small Maryland man elaborated, with a slight stammering, "Ah... Yeah, he... That’s what he calls 'em visitors. No idea what or who he is-Ah, 'least to my knowledge...” He looked more discouraged than the others, as if he accidentally revealed too much. The headphones were on my ears by then, signaling an end to any sort of guidance this tiny, false Vergil could bring upon me before I journeyed into Hell. No. What I experienced is worse than any Hell that could exist.

  For Hell is a predictable realm of the vile parasites. Hazgaia, though? It is a mockery of God's creation. That realm is the horror of an alternative history where Satan was God, and God never was.

  The Wanderer

  [FUTURE INCISION BY VARIABLE SCP. COMMENT INSERTION: THAT'S HOW THEY DID THEY HAD THE TIME? I SEE... THEY ARE EVEN MORE FOOLISH THAN I THOUGHT, IF THEY REPEATED THE SAME PROCESS THAT MADE THE SNAIL A WAYFARER. THOUGH THAT DOESN'T EXPLAIN WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT GOD FORSAKEN BOIL.]

  as magenta. Natural dyes, especially when derived from anthocyanins, of magenta are unstable, as they can easily change color or otherwise degrade due to many environmental factors, such as pH level and oxidation. This means that magenta-looking dyes were extremely rare before the creation of the unnatural, more stable dyes of the 1800s.

  their world, presumably Hazgaia. Any other details have, unfortunately, eroded over the many millennia that have passed.

  That...