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.