Lord of Mysteries: The Dream That Waits

The doors slammed shut.

But this time, the cycle did not restart.

Silence pressed in like the weight of the ocean, thick and suffocating. No wind stirred the floating pages. No whispers echoed through the abyss of parchment and ink-stained air. Klein's breath was shallow, his chest tight, his mind reeling. Something had changed.

For the first time in what felt like eternity, the doors did not creak open again.

His hands trembled at his sides, fingers twitching from phantom exhaustion. He felt sick, his limbs aching as though he had walked through a thousand doors, a thousand loops, each one grinding him down, stealing something he couldn't name. His very existence felt worn thin, like an old manuscript whose ink had been rewritten too many times.

And Yeaia—

Yeaia was shaking.

They weren't just cold, weren't just tired. Their entire being was trembling, like a candle flickering in an unseen storm. Their breath came unevenly, their mismatched eyes—one silver, one red—wide with something that Klein could only describe as deep, visceral terror.

They had known.

For longer than him.

For so much longer.

How many loops had they endured before Klein even noticed?

How many times had they woken up, walked through those doors, spoken those same words, only to have it all stolen away again?

How long had they been trapped?

The thought sent a violent shudder down Klein's spine.

"…Yeaia," he rasped. His throat was dry, raw, as if he had screamed without remembering. "How long?"

Yeaia's lips parted, but no words came out. They swallowed, shaking their head once. "I… I don't know."

A whisper of something else flickered behind their expression.

A horrible, horrible thought.

Something worse than just not knowing.

Klein's stomach twisted. "What do you mean?"

A pause. Yeaia's fingers curled slightly, as if grasping at something unseen. "I don't remember." Their voice was hoarse, unsteady. "But… I think I did, once."

The words sent a jolt of ice through Klein's veins.

They had remembered.

At some point, they had known how long this had gone on. But now that knowledge was gone, erased, leaving only a hollow, gnawing sense of loss.

That meant—

Klein clenched his jaw. His breathing was too quick, too uneven. His body felt like it didn't belong to him, like he had lived and died too many times in a single place.

His gaze flicked upward.

The Visionary's Vault loomed around them, its endless expanse stretching beyond sight. The pages that had once swirled endlessly now hovered motionless, as if reality itself had been caught in an incomplete sentence.

And in the silence, the laughter came again.

Soft. Slow. Mocking.

A presence unfurled in the air like ink bleeding into parchment, creeping, consuming.

A storyteller. A writer. A being that dictated the script of reality itself.

The one who had been watching.

The one who had been rewriting.

"Ah… now this is interesting," the voice mused. It was neither male nor female, neither loud nor soft—it simply was, as if spoken from the pages themselves. "You finally noticed, after so many times. How delightful."

Klein forced himself to stand straight, every muscle aching. "Who are you?"

A slow exhale. "You are still asking the wrong questions."

The wrong questions.

Klein's mind sharpened despite the exhaustion dragging him down. The weight of endless cycles crushed against him, memories half-formed, half-forgotten. Who were they before this? Where had they been before the first loop?

His head throbbed. The harder he tried to remember, the more the memories slipped through his grasp, like ink washing away in the rain.

His lips parted—then froze.

Because Yeaia wasn't looking at him anymore.

They were looking past him.

Not at the Vault. Not at the pages.

But at the doors.

The doors that had slammed shut.

The doors that should have locked them inside.

But they weren't closed anymore.

They were open.

Wide. Gaping.

But beyond them—

Beyond them was not the world they had come from.

Not the Archive.

Not the ruins.

Not anything that should have been real.

It was themselves.

A corridor stretched into infinity, and within it—thousands of them.

Thousands of Kleins.

Thousands of Yeaia.

Each walking through the same set of doors, each playing out the same steps, each trapped in their own repeating nightmare.

Klein's vision swam. His pulse pounded in his skull.

This wasn't just one loop.

It was an infinite web of them.

Every possibility, every rewrite, every failed escape—all playing out at once.

And yet—only one of them had noticed.

Only one Klein.

Only one Yeaia.

The realization hit like a physical force. This was why the being had laughed. Why it had spoken in riddles. It had never needed to trap them physically—because their own minds were the prison.

They had been stuck in these loops for so long that they had begun to believe they were real.

And even now, countless other versions of them were still trapped, repeating, unaware.

Klein's breath came faster. His fingernails dug into his palm. This was wrong. This was wrong. This was wrong.

Yeaia had stopped trembling. Their mismatched eyes were unreadable, their expression caught between fear and something far more dangerous.

Acceptance.

No.

No.

Klein's hand shot out, grabbing their wrist. "We're leaving."

Yeaia blinked at him, as if startled.

Klein didn't wait for an answer. His heart was hammering, his vision blurred with exhaustion, but he refused to let this end here.

The doors were open.

Which meant there was a way out.

The voice in the air sighed, almost amused. "And where do you think you are going?"

Klein didn't answer. He pulled Yeaia forward—

And stepped through.

A sensation like falling through ink swallowed him whole.

The weight of a thousand lives, a thousand mistakes, a thousand unwritten pages collapsed onto him—

And then, the world broke.

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End of Chapter 58.

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