Is this the end?

Step by step, Arsh crossed something that could not be called a path—he walked not upon the ground, but across a thread of narrative woven by entities beyond understanding. He no longer distinguished between body and will. His breath did not quicken, his legs did not tire. It was as if he had been absorbed into a system of being that rejected the very laws of entropy.

He did not accelerate through time. He erased time. He did not surpass space. He dissolved space. Arsh had become something that no longer walked within the world—he flowed between texts, between pauses and full stops of fictional and metafictional narratives.

Then, from the void that births existence, he saw light. Not light like the sun or electricity, but a brightness that transcended the logic of illumination. A radiance that emitted not photons, but emotion—and that emotion was ancient fear. Within that flare of light, he stood…

…before his house.

But it was not the house he remembered. Its walls had faded, the windows stared like eyes, and the door—aged, rotting—groaned as it opened, as if it resented his return.

Arsh stepped inside. Every creak of the floor whispered to him, in a language of tremors and fragments of dimension. He moved toward the study, and there… His friends waited—but not as they once were. Their faces were pale, their bodies hollow, as if time—or perhaps reality—had thinned around them.

Von was the first to speak.

"Arsh… You—you're back?" His voice cracked like an old tape played in reverse. He embraced Arsh—not just as a friend, but as someone who had seen the impossible and returned.

Chloe and Aria wept in silence. Yoru—ever the believer in logic and equations—stared with a fear no formula could contain.

"I'm sorry… I can't explain it all," said Arsh, his voice echoing as if it came from two worlds at once.

"The book… Sefer Mezuyaf… it's not just real, …it's a gateway to something beyond reality itself."

Yoru stood abruptly, his hand slamming the table nearly to splinters.

"Nonsense! It's a forgery! You're… you're raving, Arsh!"

Yet beneath the anger, fear crept in—not because he disbelieved… but because he was beginning to believe.

"Do you remember the first passage we read? About fictional and metafictional worlds? I've seen it, friends. That world exists. The False Author is real. And he holds all fiction—including us."

The room fell into silence. Only their trembling breaths remained. Von nodded slowly.

"Then all of it… the theories about entities holding the alephs— ℵ₀, ℵ₁… to infinity… and the world beneath existence… they're true?"

Arsh nodded. His eyes glistened—not with sentiment, but with memories of forms no human language could express.

"Below Existence… that place is not a world. It is rejection itself. A domain belonging to The Null One and The Weaver, beings who spin reality beyond the reach of even numbers."

Yoru bowed his head, his voice shaking.

"Then we must stop this. This isn't research anymore… this is digging a hole into the pit of non-being. It's worse than madness."

Von, who had quietly learned Hebrew, buried his fear. He knew more than he let on. Some passages he'd read were never spoken aloud—for their meanings refused to be remembered, refused to live in the human world.

Aria and Chloe agreed. There was nothing more to be done. What they had touched was not the secret of the world, but its disgrace.

They parted that night—no embraces, no goodbyes. None of them wished to speak of what had been opened. For to speak it… was to invite it back.

Arsh remained.

He sat alone in the study. Shadows stretched through the night. The lamp flickered as though reluctant to shed light. And before him… The Sefer Mezuyaf.

He could not stop. Because he knew… His father had not died insane. His father had ended his life—because he had seen something that must not be seen.

Arsh gripped the book's cover. Blood from his fingertip dripped onto the first page, which began to open on its own…

And fiction looked back at the reader.

In the silence that cloaked his existence, Arsh sat alone by the study window that no longer felt like home. The dim lamp lit his gaunt face, his hollow eyes filled with unrest no time or language could resolve.

He had lost everything—his friends, his trust, and gradually… himself.

And in that destruction, he found a strange resolve. A will no longer born from within, but echoed from beyond reason, like a whisper from a nameless entity.

"I began this… so I must finish it," he said softly, to the empty room that now felt more real than the world he had left.

The book—Sefer Mezuyaf—no longer felt inert. It breathed, or perhaps it thought. Its pages did not turn—they permitted themselves to open. And within, Arsh found verses that struck his conscience like waves from an unfathomable depth:

בני אדם הם יצורים חלשים בהשוואה ליקום הקר הזה Human beings are weak creatures compared to this cold universe.

הם רק גרגר אבק לעומת גודלו העצום של היקום האינסופי הזה They are but specks of dust in the vastness of this infinite cosmos.

אפילו בני אדם שהגיעו לגבולות הגבוהים ביותר של כל צורות ההבנה... הם רק כמו אבק גרידא Even those who reach the highest limits of all understanding… are but mere dust.

These verses pierced into his soul, touching parts of himself he had never known. Emptiness. Insignificance. The reality that all human achievement is nothing more than faint scribbles upon the deaf skin of the cosmos.

Days passed. Arsh no longer counted them. He read, scribbled, muttered, laughed alone. The boundary between reason and madness blurred—and he no longer tried to restore it.

"I don't know… I don't know… I don't know…" he murmured, again and again, eyes hollow, staring out the window.

"I can't stop… I can't…"

And then he laughed—not with joy, but in a scream disguised as laughter. Laughter like claws scraping the inside of his skull.

"Ha… ha… HUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

At the peak of his descent, Arsh climbed the mountain. He did not remember how he got there. No road, no time—only the pull of a narrative written by an unseen hand.

In his hand, the Sefer Mezuyaf. In his eyes, the night sky—but it was too vast. Too black. Too silent. As though it watched him in return.

"Is this… what my father felt?" he whispered.

"A madness not born from broken mind… …but from knowing too much?"

He looked at the stars—not as celestial bodies, but as eyes of foreign beings peering through the veil of reality. Each star was a pinhole into void, and he felt… naked before them.

Then, Arsh stood. He faced the chasm behind him—a bottomless, formless abyss. A concept of nothingness shaped only by the desperation of the soul.

No sound. No tears. No hope. He stepped back. And fell.

His body drifted between reality and nonexistence. He did not fall. He was released.

And the Sefer Mezuyaf opened itself, its pages fluttering in wind not of Earth… …recording one more narrative.

The tale of a man who knew too much.

To be continued....