On Earth, Arsh's companions still struggled against the suffocating uncertainty that loomed over them. Their only hope: the Sefer Mezuyaf—a cursed manuscript that refused to be explained, readable only to those willing to trade sanity for a sliver of understanding.
"Chloe… try reading page three, section two," whispered Yoru, his voice trembling with an uncertainty that betrayed a desperate hope—that whatever was written there would not surpass the horrors already revealed.
With trembling hands and a breath held hostage by fear, Chloe turned to the next page.
משהו נמוך יותר מקיום, המכיל ישויות מפחידות
Something lower than existence, containing terrifying entities.
"Lower than existence…?" Von muttered, his voice dry. "Is that even possible? What lies beneath existence itself?"
"I don't know…" said Aria, her eyes wide. "Maybe it's not just nothingness—but something rotten beneath the foundation of reality… something that persists, yet never was."
"Keep reading, Chloe," urged Yoru, more anxious now.
נקרא אפס מלבד אחד, יש לו צורה של ריקנות, מגעיל, כמו נוזל שחור סמיך, בעל פנים מפחידות והוא אוהב לפתות בני אדם ליפול לריקנות.
It is called Zero Except One. It takes the form of a void—disgusting, like thick black fluid. It has a terrifying face and delights in luring humans into the abyss.
Yoru slammed the table. "What the hell is this?! This book is becoming more… deranged!"
"Calm down, Yor," said Von, trying to mask the tension in his voice. "We don't yet understand the context. Don't let fear overtake logic… even though logic may not apply here."
Aria turned toward Chloe. "Continue the next part of the page…"
הוא באמת אוהב לבלוע את נשמותיהן של נשמות ששללו, חסרות תקווה, שאיבדו תקווה, הוא בלתי נראה אך נראה לעין, הוא הריק.
It truly delights in devouring the souls of the faithless—those who have lost all hope. It is invisible yet seen. It is the void.
The room fell silent. No one dared to speak. The air thickened. The lights flickered—not from any power failure, but as if reality itself had begun to fracture.
Yoru erupted in frustration. "Arsh is gone! We're reading words that were never meant to be written… and still we find no answers!"
Elsewhere, Arsh had just crossed through a formless gate opened by The False Author—an entity not merely a writer, but a forger of fate and a distorter of reality.
"Ugh…"
He awoke in a place that was not a world. No sky. No ground. Only a presence—a wrongness. The dimension itself… was rotting. Just seeing it felt like having one's soul etched with burning ink.
And from within the void, he felt a gaze.
A red eye emerged from the liquid darkness. The eye wept—and its tears were not water, but fire, hotter than the angriest star: one thousand trillion kelvin, searing through the very concept of heat.
"Human… why are you here?"
The voice did not speak. It arrived before time, resonating through Arsh's bones and flesh with vibrations unknown to biology.
"I… I come from the world of the False Author… I'm from Earth… I don't know how I ended up here," Arsh stammered, his voice cracking, his body trembling like a brittle leaf in a cosmic storm.
From the darkness emerged a figure—The Null One.
It had no form—for form is a concept, and it had devoured the idea of form long before reality had dared to imagine it.
It was revolting. A thick, black ooze, aimless, purpose-less, yet all-consuming. Its face… was a nightmare too real to be an illusion. And it bore one eye—an eye that unmade whatever looked into it.
As The Null One fixed its gaze on Arsh, the entire hierarchy from ℵ₀ to ℵ∞—every fictional world, every narrative, every character and conceptual system—vanished. Annihilated in an instant, erased by a mere glance.
The False Author who once forged entire realities… trembled, simply because the eye had looked in his direction.
"So you were cast out from the world of the False Author?" murmured The Null One.
"I understand."
The black fluid crept beneath Arsh's feet, slithering up his body. Its stench…
Could not be described. It was not merely foul. It was a scent that invoked existential rejection.
Arsh vomited before it even touched his nose.
His body felt assaulted—but by nothing at all. The absence of an attack that still wounded.
The Null One was the abstraction of void itself—not emptiness, but the core of unbeing. A thing beyond reason, beyond logic, for logic collapsed before its presence.
"I won't help you escape," said The Null One flatly.
"But perhaps… The Weaver may amuse you with answers. It enjoys playing with possibility."
"How do I find it?" Arsh asked, barely able to form words.
"Go… before I change my mind and consume your soul. Today, I am in a relatively generous mood."
Without thinking, Arsh stepped forward—though there were no steps. No direction. No path. Even the concept of "path" had decayed here. He walked… toward something he could not comprehend, praying The Weaver was not the end of his sanity.
In the shadow of the unwritten manuscript, something waited. And the words that were never meant to be read… began to write themselves.
This was not a story with a beginning.
And most certainly not one with an end.
While Arsh wandered the corridor between reality and anti-reality, back on Earth, his four friends sat motionless, trapped in a silence that crept like invisible fog. None of them noticed that the room around them was changing—the once peaceful space now grew heavier, as if gravity itself questioned its own existence.
"Chloe," whispered Von, forcing his voice into calm, "turn to… page four. Section one."
Chloe, her fingers cold as marble, opened the next page. Her soul felt as if it was slowly being pulled into a place without a name.
ישות שאורגת מציאות, מציאות שאי אפשר לגשת אליה
An entity that weaves reality—a reality that cannot be accessed.
"An entity… that weaves reality?" Von whispered. "What does it mean, a reality that cannot be accessed? Reality is supposed to be where we stand, isn't it?"
No one answered. Even the air refused to speak.
Aria broke the silence. "Go on to section two, Chloe."
With increasingly shallow breath, Chloe continued:
יש לו מאות פרצופים מפחידים על פניו, יש לו שמונה רגליים, גופו כה עצום שהוא אינספור, הוא נקרא אורג המציאות
It has hundreds of terrifying faces across its head. It has eight legs. Its body is so vast, it is innumerable. It is called The Weaver of Reality.
"A spider…" Aria breathed, barely audible.
"Yes… or something resembling the concept of a spider—spinning not webs of silk, but of reality itself," Yoru muttered grimly. "And the faces… hundreds of faces. Does it see us from all directions?"
"Read the third section," Yoru ordered—this time without hesitation. Only helplessness disguised as composure.
Chloe swallowed hard and turned the page.
הוא טווה מציאות שהיא הרבה מתחת לקיום, משהו שהוא נמוך מקיום המציאות, הרבה יותר נמוך מהמציאות, הוא זה שטוווה מציאות שהיא מתחת לקיום.
It weaves a reality far below existence—something even lower than the being of reality itself.
הוא הוויבר או נקרא אורג המציאות, מעבר לאינספור אלפים של עולם הסופרים השקריים, הוא הוויבר אורג המציאות.
It is The Weaver, beyond countless thousands of the worlds of False Authors. It is The Weaver of Reality.
Silence. No wind. Even the clock seemed to forget how to tick.
Yoru began to murmur. "ℵ₀, ℵ₁, ℵ₂… up to ℵ∞… and beyond."
"What do you mean, Yor?" asked Aria.
Yoru stared at the table as though looking into an invisible abyss.
"This verse… speaks of something beneath existence. We've understood reality through the lens of cardinal numbers, from one infinity to higher infinities—ℵ₀, ℵ₁, and so on. But if there is something beneath reality, something that weaves reality itself, then this entity exists outside the system. It transcends concepts… like an inaccessible cardinal."
"In set theory," he continued, "an inaccessible cardinal is a cardinal number too large to reach using standard operations… a number whose existence can't even be proven without surpassing the boundaries of logic itself."
"And according to this book," Yoru went on, "The Weaver of Reality… transcends the countless worlds of false authors. Imagine it—all fiction, all narratives, every system claiming to be ultimate… are but threads, woven by one entity that cannot be comprehended by reason, counted by numbers, or written by any pen."
Von whispered, "Then… even the 'False Author' who made Arsh's world is just a shadow of this Weaver?"
Yoru nodded slowly. "And if the verse is true… perhaps our world too is not the product of a creator… but the result of a weaving."
The four fell into silence. Each battled their own spiraling thoughts, attempting to deny what could no longer be denied.
None of them noticed… the single black thread now dangling from the ceiling. And at that moment, the reality around them began to twitch—not in physical motion, but as if being reshaped by something with many faces… and eight legs.
"He who weaves reality does not dwell within it.
He lives outside the threads.
And when he gazes back at us…
no prayer is strong enough to seal what has been opened."
—Notes from Arsh's Father
Arsh's footsteps fell upon a ground that had never been created—not earth, not air, not space—but a kind of cradle of existence never imagined by any mind, save those already unhinged. He walked without direction in a realm where time held no dominion, where cause and effect had unraveled and perished like severed nerves disconnected from the body of reality.
His body trembled—not from fatigue, but because reality itself was trying to reject him, like flesh repelling a foreign object. His eyes could no longer discern what was real, and what was simply called "real" because there was no other word for it.
And when despair began to creep in—when strange whispers from the void began to dance inside his thoughts—it emerged from the mist of form.
The creature did not arrive, it manifested—assembled itself from existence and nonexistence alike. A titanic entity resembling a spider, but with a body so vast, so impossibly towering, it defied all perception. It wasn't merely tall—it transcended height; its form could not be measured by any unit known to man.
Upon its head were hundreds—no, thousands—of faces. Each one expressed a different form of torment. Some wept. Some laughed in deranged ecstasy. Others stared with a hollow gaze, as if they had once known everything, only to lose all meaning in the knowing.
From its rotting, ever-decaying mouths dripped a yellowish slime—cosmic pus—a stench not merely repulsive, but one that wounded understanding itself.
Its legs—eight in number—were clad in an armor of anti-reality. There were no explosions, no light, no logic. Not even the tears of The Null One, capable of burning through millions of dimensions, could pierce it.
With a voice that shook the foundations of Arsh's subconscious, he asked:
"Are you… the Weaver?"
The creature did not reply with words, but with vibrations, with whispers that slithered into his veins and nerves like a second bloodstream:
"Yes… I am the Weaver of Reality.
What drives you to cross the bindings of truth, frail human…?"
Arsh wanted to ask how to escape… but a deeper question surfaced. A curiosity that clung to his thoughts like cancer—slow, consuming, undeniable.
"What… is this world?" he whispered.
The Weaver paused, then answered in a resonance that shredded logic and mutilated meaning:
"This is Below Existence.
A world not beneath reality…
but beneath the entire architecture of existence.
This realm transcends every system of infinite numbers…
ℵ₀, ℵ₁, ℵ₂, ℵ₃… up to ℵ∞…
and even those barely scratch the infinitesimal shell of Below Existence.
"Beneath this plane, fiction, metafiction, and even anti-fiction spun by the False Authors are but worthless fragments.
Here, totality is rejected.
There is no time. No dimension. Nothing exists.
Even the term 'infinite' is mere linguistic dust in the eye of this being."
"Dimensions here are not one, two, or three—they are infinite in directions unimaginable, undescribable even by the most extreme metaphor."
Arsh said nothing. His entire consciousness screamed for escape. But there was nowhere to run—because place itself had been devoured by unbeing.
Still, he asked:
"…Can I return to Earth? Leave this place…?"
The Weaver did not respond directly. It began to weave something—a lattice, like a staircase, though it led neither upward nor downward. It had no direction. It merely was. Without origin, without end.
"Step upon this lattice," the Weaver commanded.
"Each step will pull you farther from uncertainty… and bring you closer to… a form of truth.
But remember, human:
Truth is not salvation.
Truth is the annihilation of your form."
Arsh did not answer. He simply walked.
For to linger too long before the Weaver was to stand before the death of logic itself.
Step by step, Arsh ascended the lattice without beginning, without conclusion.
Behind him, the Weaver continued its work…
and reality was rewoven by a being that did not believe in reality.
"Never trust that reality is the foundation.
For those who weave foundations…
never dwell upon them."
—Notes from Arsh's Father
To be continued…