B"H

The sky tore itself into a million screaming fragments, each shard a sun burning backward through time, hurling across dimensions that were never meant to exist. Eitan’s body no longer belonged to him; his flesh dissolved into particles that knew the geometry of infinity, vibrating in the spaces between reality and nonexistence. Air was molten memory, wind was liquid thought, and sound was a knife slicing into the spine of existence itself.

The Awtsmoos stepped—not into the world, but through it, a presence with no edges, no center, no name. Every atom of the universe quivered with recognition, every photon paused mid-flight to bow in awe. It was in the rocks, the rivers, the diamonds, the trees—but also in the void between them. Everywhere and nowhere at once.

“Eitan,” it whispered, and the word was a tidal wave smashing against the fabric of his soul. “Do you understand yet? Or shall I tear comprehension from your mind and rebuild it in chaos?”

He tried to scream. His lungs were fire. His voice was magma. Yet the sound that emerged was the history of the cosmos itself, speaking in tongues older than silence. Every word birthed stars, then extinguished them in the same heartbeat. Time itself bent backward, forward, sideways, dissolving into fractals of impossible duration.

The earth beneath him erupted in revelation. Mountains folded like origami. Oceans inverted, spilling stars instead of water. Trees uprooted themselves, their rings unraveling into threads of pure thought. Diamonds combusted into light, then reassembled as consciousness, then exploded again into meaning. Eitan felt every heartbeat of every living thing, every thought of every being that had ever existed or ever would exist, compressed into the unbearable density of understanding.

“You ask why creation appears old,” the Awtsmoos said, and its voice was all voices, all languages, all silence. “You ask why diamonds shine, why rivers flow, why men remember what they never lived. You do not yet see: the appearance of age is mercy. The coherence of reality is my gift. The fact that you can even perceive it—this fragile illusion of time—is my kindness. And that, child, is beyond your reckoning.”

Eitan’s consciousness shattered. Pieces of him became galaxies. Pieces of him became ideas. Pieces of him became the fire that birthed universes. He understood too much, yet understood nothing. He felt the Awtsmoos inside his neurons, inside his soul, inside the uncreated void that was never created.

“Everything you think is solid is liquid,” the Awtsmoos continued. “Everything you call real is thought. Everything you call thought is my breath. I am the beginning of all things that were never formed and the end of all things that will never exist. I am the lattice in every diamond, the pulse in every tree, the echo in every star. And you… you are a witness. A mercy. A collapse.”

The river rose from the earth, twisting into itself, turning into a staircase of unmade realities. Eitan climbed it, each step dissolving into infinity, each breath splitting into a thousand temporal threads. His hands touched the Awtsmoos, and in that touch, he felt existence bleed. Every law, every constant, every symmetry unraveled and rewove itself around him, as if the universe itself were a tapestry being rewoven by a blind, infinite hand.

And then the final revelation: Eitan realized the Awtsmoos had never hidden. Every rock, every river, every diamond, every tree—was the Awtsmoos itself. Not symbolically, not metaphorically, but literally: creation was the Awtsmoos expressing infinitude as form, yet simultaneously never existing as form at all. The universe’s appearance of solidity, age, and coherence—everything human minds cling to—was only a mask of mercy, a pattern imposed so that consciousness could endure without annihilating itself in terror.

B"H

The wind spoke in dry arithmetic, counting grains of sand on the riverbank as if it were auditing eternity itself. Eitan walked, the soles of his feet pressed into heat and stone, and every step echoed not into space but into possibility. Behind him, the river murmured secrets older than memory, yet each ripple shimmered with a freshness that defied age.

“You see it,” said the Rav, his voice thin as stretched metal. “The river is both yesterday and tomorrow, but it owes nothing to you.”

Eitan stopped. The water reflected his face, and in the reflection he saw lines that weren’t his. Lines that spoke of hands that carved clay before humans remembered clay. Trees bent over the river as though to drink, and their roots intertwined with secrets older than the stars themselves.

“Why does it all exist this way?” Eitan asked, voice cracking. “Why do diamonds form, why do trees grow, why does man inherit knowledge he never earned?”

The Rav leaned on his staff. “Do you think the Awtsmoos is bound by your reason? Look around. Every structure you call old, every pattern that seems deliberate—those are not lies. They are the choices of kindness, the mercy of order.”

Eitan clenched his fists. “But it’s so… misleading. So calculated. It feels like the world is mocking my questions.”

The Awtsmoos did not answer him in words, but in sensation: the forest shifted, the river hummed, the diamond glimmered like a heartbeat under sunlight. Eitan realized the truth before it could be spoken: the world does not lie. It obeys the Awtsmoos’ logic, which is not human logic, which does not need to make sense.

And yet… every piece of it fits together. Every river bend, every tree ring, every crystal lattice. Not because it must, but because it is merciful.

“You want fairness,” the Rav said softly. “The universe is not fair. It is coherent. That is all you are allowed to see.”

Eitan staggered, his mind trying to grasp it. Coherence without obligation. Order without reason. A diamond born fully formed, a tree that knew its own growth before it existed, a man who inherited memory he never lived—each of them a gift, not a puzzle.

And the Awtsmoos whispered through the river’s pulse: If it makes sense, it is mercy. If it does not, it is still mercy.

Eitan fell to his knees, feeling the weight of both anger and awe. The paradox crushed him: reality owes him nothing, yet reveals everything. The world looks old, yet it is not deceptive. Time is written into its surfaces, yet time is not there.

And in that realization, he understood: the Awtsmoos had no obligation to make a world understandable, and the fact that he could understand anything at all was grace beyond reckoning.

The forest seemed to lean closer, listening. Even the river paused. Eitan’s tears fell, but not from sorrow—they fell from the impossible, unearned beauty of a universe that cared enough to be coherent, if not comprehensible.

And somewhere deep inside every rock, every tree, every glimmering crystal, the Awtsmoos waited, smiling quietly: not explaining, not justifying—simply offering a glimpse of mercy.

B"H

The dawn did not arrive; it insisted. Light spilled over jagged cliffs, breaking itself against stone, shattering into shards that hovered like frozen whispers. Each shard carried a memory that had never happened yet had always existed, and Eitan felt it press into his chest as if the universe itself were inhaling through him.

He stumbled along a path that was not a path, stepping over roots that hummed with ancient songs. Each root vibrated with an invisible rhythm—the birth of worlds, the folding of stars, the sigh of oceans that had never touched land. Yet the song was intimate, personal, as if the Awtsmoos were whispering secrets directly into his marrow.

The Rav followed, silent, his eyes half-shadowed, observing not the world but its intent. “You search for explanations,” he said, voice like sand sliding down a cliff, “and yet the universe owes none. You want fairness. Coherence is what you get. That is the mercy.”

Eitan fell to his knees beside a river whose surface mirrored eternity. The water shimmered with a thousand reflections—rivers that had never existed, skies that had never opened, hands that had never reached for him. He reached toward it, and the water responded—not fluid, not solid, but something between, something aware.

“Why?” he whispered. “Why create diamonds that were never formed, trees that seem older than time, stones that cry of histories that never occurred?”

The Awtsmoos answered—not with words, but through the perfect impossibility of it all. The diamond at his feet reflected his own astonishment, the tree leaned as if acknowledging him, and the stone beneath his fingers throbbed with patient rhythm. The world looked old because it had to, because to be lived in it must appear coherent, layered, complete—but it was mercy, not deception.

“Do you see?” the Rav said. “The Awtsmoos has no obligation to make sense. The universe does not exist to satisfy your intellect. It exists to be inhabited. And when coherence emerges, when time seems to echo meaning, it is kindness. It is grace. Everything else is noise.”

Eitan’s mind cracked open. Anguish, awe, terror, and love collided into a singularity inside him. He realized that the patterns he had despised, the age he had doubted, the histories he had questioned—they were gifts, not lies. The universe owed him nothing, yet it had given him everything he could perceive.

And as the wind rippled through the impossibly ancient forest, carrying scents that had never existed yet felt deeply familiar, Eitan understood: the real miracle was not the age of things, nor the shapes they took, nor even the order of laws.

It was that any of it made sense at all.

The Awtsmoos smiled through the river, the trees, the diamond, the stone—and Eitan, kneeling in awe, felt mercy fold into reality itself, deeper than time, wider than space, infinite yet intimate, utterly incomprehensible, yet utterly kind.