AFC - Chapter 1.1: An Anomalous Presence

No one remembered how Niklas Vorn had entered. There were no fissures in reality, no recorded interdimensional portals that could explain his arrival. Time itself seemed to refuse to admit his entry. There was no record of his fall, no sign in the celestial channels or in the dusty archives of oblivion. Not even his name resonated among the humans of the Dréaventh universe, those unfortunate beings whose lives consisted of living off stories claimed by the deepest of voids. The most unsettling thing was that the Law of No-Return could be bypassed by Niklas by denying his own existence, a walking paradox that defied the very laws of this universe.

Niklas Vorn walked on the 99th Floor. This wasn't a space with defined walls or a ceiling, but a vast immensity where matter and energy danced at the edge of creation. The floor beneath his feet was a macabre mosaic of broken clocks, groaning with every step. Each creak sounded like a second that never occurred, a muffled tick-tock, an instant suspended in time and space.

Below, an abyss of dark, dense clouds stretched out, not of water vapor, but of pure thought, of memories and stories twisting in silent storms. From those depths, gigantic crystalline formations emerged, needles of solidified light that shone with a golden and white intensity, pulsing softly as if the very essence of dreams had frozen into imposing structures. They were the luminous traces of thousands of past, present, and future realities, forgotten by all, but not by the realm Niklas had reached.

The walls, surfaces of a material that was neither stone nor metal, were covered with ancient symbols that danced and changed, altering their forms and meanings in the corner of one's eye, becoming illegible when one tried to decipher them directly.

And the air smelled of burnt paper and drowned memory, a melancholic fragrance that evoked burned libraries and memories lost in the mists of time.

Niklas didn't speak. Neither with other beings that might appear on this 99th Floor, nor with himself in the silence of his mind. Language felt alien to him, a useless tool for communication. He no longer used words; his existence had detached from that need. He only looked. And wherever his eyes rested, things forgot what they were. It was as if his gaze were a dissolving force, capable of erasing the essence of reality, leaving a trail of non-existence in its wake.

A creature crawled towards him from the gloom, an aberration born of nightmare, something halfway between woman, serpent, and specter. Its jaws opened, eager to devour him, to claim what it perceived as a void. But when Niklas's eyes saw it in the heart of the 99th Floor, the entity stopped. Its predatory drive shattered and, in its place, a wave of profound sadness overwhelmed it. It began to cry, tears of blood gushing from its eyes until it died. Its dead body dissolved into the air of the 99th Floor.

"Who... what are you doing here?" the entity whispered, its voice a cascade of distorted echoes, just before its form broke into a thousand floating letters, each a translucent fragment of its existence dissolved in the vast space of the 99th Floor.

Niklas picked up one of them, an incomprehensible letter that radiated a pale, almost ghostly energy. He observed it with a curiosity devoid of emotion, merely the observation of a phenomenon. When touched, the letter screamed, an inaudible yet sharp sound, a silent agony that only he seemed to perceive.

"You are not part of this story..." whispered a voiceless sound, a murmur that came from everywhere and nowhere, the voice of the tower itself, resonating in the immensity of the 99th Floor, perplexed by the anomaly before it.

Niklas, without turning, without the need for lips to articulate words, answered with a resonance that vibrated in the very fabric of this threshold's reality:

"I do not exist; my existence should not affect you. Do not involve me in your restoration."

Despite his declaration, the tower vibrated with a resonance that spread through all floors, a tremor that shook even the apex of the 99th Floor, like a silent cry of dismay. The voiceless sound fell into stunned silence, as if Niklas's answer were a crack in its own logic.

He, a being who was not, claimed not to affect, and furthermore, to know the true name of the tower. His mere presence on the 99th Floor was an unbearable dissonance, an error in the fundamental equation of this realm.

Niklas took another step. He wasn't heading to any particular point, just moving forward through that non-space of this final floor. Behind him, the floating letters of the dissolved creature disintegrated into specks of luminous dust, which in turn became tiny tears that evaporated upon touching the broken clock ground of the 99th Floor. His step left no trace, because the concept of "time" refused to adhere to him. Every second he lived was an eternal, unanchored present.

Suddenly, a faint light emanated from one of the walls of this elevated floor. It wasn't a common glow, but a kind of dark luminosity, as if light were being absorbed rather than emitted. As he approached, Niklas noticed that the ancient symbols that once danced chaotically had now aligned, forming a kind of mosaic of dead words. It wasn't a language Niklas recognized, but the energy emanating from them was unequivocal: they were memories. Memories and stories ripped from distant universes, stripped of their context, floating in this limbo like rudderless ships, whispering forgotten truths.

He extended a hand towards the wall. The stone, which was not stone, became malleable under his touch, yielding like clay in the hands of an invisible potter. A door didn't open, but rather a tunnel that shouldn't exist on the plane of the 99th Floor. A tunnel made of pure absence, where even the air felt less dense, a kind of vacuum that pulled at his own non-existence.

On the other side of the tunnel, the scene was unalterable. A chair, a table, and a map. It was an ancient map, possibly the same one Niklas had glimpsed before, but this time, his presence here on the 99th Floor invested it with a new and terrible relevance. It didn't show the 99 levels of the tower, but focused on its foundations, reaching up to the 32nd Floor. However, on the next level, the 33rd, a disturbing symbol appeared: an inverted crown. And beneath it, written in a calligraphy that seemed to bleed from the parchment, a name appeared: Elia. All of this, a final revelation, arranged in the ethereal heart of the 99th Floor.

Niklas looked at the map, not with seeing eyes, but with a perception that transcended vision. The name resonated in the echo of his non-existence. And, against all logic, against the very will of the tower and the Law of No-Return, Niklas smiled. It wasn't a smile of joy, nor of victory. It was a smile born from the violation of a fundamental rule, a forbidden echo that resonated in the deepest part of his being, a grimace of defiance that promised chaos.

Because he remembered that name: Elia.

And he shouldn't have.

Remembering such a name in this realm of oblivion was an impossibility, a sacrilege to the very essence of the 99th Floor, especially one associated with the seal of the inverted crown at such a crucial point in the tower. His memory, which Niklas should never have possessed, was a spark in the darkness of the Dréaventh universe. And when Niklas Vorn remembered, the Dréaventh universe, the very Law of No-Return, and the imposing tower in which he stood, shattered a little more. Each fragment of memory he recovered was a wound in the very fabric of existence, a forgotten echo that began to resonate and destabilize reality itself.

Niklas's presence was not an error, it was a catalyst, and his memory of Elia, a trigger. The tower, the voiceless entity, felt it. A break was coming, driven by a being who didn't even exist, at the last threshold of its being. A cosmic crack, barely perceptible, began to spread through the very structure of reality.