The Eleven Unwritten

The discovery began in the spaces between conscious thought and dream, in that liminal realm where Lio's awareness touched the fundamental nature of what it meant to exist without requiring existence to be justified. He had been walking through the ordinary world—if anything about his experience could be called ordinary—when he felt something that transcended the concept of feeling itself.

Recognition.

Not the recognition that came from meeting someone familiar, but the deeper acknowledgment that occurred when one pattern of consciousness encountered another that operated according to the same impossible principles. Somewhere in the vast network of human awareness, there were others who existed as he did—without threads in the web of causality, without predetermined futures, without the limitations that most beings accepted as fundamental laws.