# From the Rift — Story (3/4) · chapters 13–17

> **Part 17 of 126 · Story** · This page contains the COMPLETE text of this part (From the Rift — Story 3/4 (chapters 13–17); ≈ 34k characters).
>
> Notation of the story: > *…* = thought of the narrating voice (a thought cloud in the browser) · **Name:** = speech · * * * = pause · [Image: …] = image sign.
>
> Text-state signature: 84e6e0ba (identical on all current full-text surfaces; a mismatch between fetches = at least one came from a tool cache).
>
> HTML: https://spindle-of-reality.org/volltext/geschichte-3
>
> Before: From the Rift — Story 2/4 (chapters 8–12) — https://spindle-of-reality.org/volltext/geschichte-2.md · After: From the Rift — Story 4/4 (chapters 18–21) — https://spindle-of-reality.org/volltext/geschichte-4.md
>
> Structured source (typed blocks): https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-13.yaml · https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-14.yaml · https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-15.yaml · https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-16.yaml · https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-17.yaml

## XIII. Sailing Ship

Nothing had happened, the riddle unsolved, no door opened. I applied some pressure with my finger on the hollow and felt a slight vibration. I let my gaze drift over the grain, but nothing had changed. I searched the entire wooden panel for possible alterations and small cracks to find hidden mechanisms, but had no success or lacked the necessary patience.

I leaned mentally exhausted with my shoulder against the wood in the wall, nothing happened. I stared at the gray concrete wall beside me. Gray concrete wall - I turned around - another gray concrete wall - between them the beautiful wall with wooden grain.

> *I must finally have gone mad and succeeded in locking myself in my inner world - it was beautifully cruel, cruelly beautiful. As my dreams always were.*

I closed my eyes and spoke a small prayer:

I sat in silence
Stood in the storm
Drank the emptiness
Spat everything full
Lay in pain
And never ran away

I opened my eyes and stood, contrary to my hope not again in the corner of the tea shop, yet still confined to two square meters before the beautiful wall. Astonished, I turned around, I had heard a clear clinking behind me - glass on glass. I was not alone on these deep levels and there must be a way out of this confinement.

> *And this path had opened directly before me, on the fourth side of the tiny room opposite the wooden panel was a seven-stepped ascending staircase of concrete, it seemed to lead me up to muted yellow light - perhaps a corridor, perhaps a path into new expanses.*

I stepped before the first step of the staircase and felt a slight unevenness under my left foot. I took a small step back and on the floor, chiseled in concrete, a ship was visible with a small inscription. The ship was embedded in a smooth wave that explored its depths to the left and its heights to the right, the ship was a simple semicircle, open upward, with a straight mast in the middle bearing a triangular sail in the wind. The ship was centered in the wave and seemed to sail from left to right.

*[Image: Sailing ship]*

The ship sailed through my thoughts and I was ready - for whatever would await me above.

On each step was another small inscription and they seemed to want to communicate something to me. From below, the first step, to above, the seventh step, I read the following:

wholly down
wholly empty
wholly there
wholly here
wholly up
wholly full
wholly still

Entirely still was obviously not true, I had heard glass clinking again on the third step and now, where I was at the very top, looked into a long, narrow corridor with four simple wooden doors on both sides.

> *Seven steps to the eight decisions - or what?*

Intuitively I assigned each door an inscription from the stairs. The four doors on the right side were from front to back: wholly down, wholly there, wholly up and wholly still. The doors on the left side were from front to back: wholly empty, wholly here, wholly full and the rearmost door I paid no attention to for now.

It was not thinking, the decisions fell from the raging stream beneath my consciousness directly into my action. I took five steps and stood before the second door on the left side, pressed the handle down and entered "wholly here."

I stood in a large storage room full of shelves and large chest freezers, the shelves filled with hundreds of boxes and canisters. Directly left beside the door was a large shelf with thousands of small beakers that could hold no more than a hundred milliliters.

I was just about to venture deeper into the room and examine the freezers more closely, but I heard sounds again from the corridor, then footsteps, a door opened, a few loud steps across the corridor, another door and then there was silence.

I held my breath.

> *Friend or foe?!*

From the footsteps in the corridor I was certain it was a woman - the heels had given it away.

I reached into my jacket, which I had never taken off even in the tea shop. To my astonishment it was not a black staff but a handgun that I drew from the inner pocket. Not so astonishing, really - the shape had already suggested it after the yellow sea. But the woman in the yellow sea, her words, her actions, had something magical about them. With her objects it was surely no different.

> *I pushed all thoughts away. I had no time for the constant natural phenomena that say as much as they blind.*

I closed the door behind me, moved slightly to the left and pushed some beakers aside and placed the weapon on the shelf. Then I retrieved a small plastic bag from the outer right jacket pocket. I removed all bullets except one from the magazine and packed the bullets in the bag and put it back in my jacket pocket.

Then I examined the handgun more closely, it seemed to be a custom piece, after the meal in the yellow sea she had briefly talked about special materials - polymers, ceramics, woven fibers, names that slipped from me as soon as they were spoken, though there it was about the coming mission to Mars, in which she had been indirectly involved for years, and not about weapons - or who knows really.

I had listened to her for a long time and had asked only one question, when she hinted that evil had already made it to the red planet.

**I:** How do we get evil under control?! Is it even good to want to control evil?

**Woman in the Yellow Sea:** If you want to tame evil you need a good fishing rod with a hot, no burning line. And you better hit the eye - No, precisely the iris.

Now I stood in a storage room full of chemicals, beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks, and who knows what was stored in those chests. I had pushed the magazine with a single bullet into the unique Glock and was about to open the door to the corridor, ready to cast my line.

The corridor was empty and all seven doors were closed. I pulled the eighth quietly shut behind me and crept through the silence.

I stood for some time before the door, back right, and listened attentively. Nothing was to be heard.

And then she opened the door and I stood before her, weapon loose in my left hand, my right over my heart, she with white lab coat, black leggings, mid-high black boots with small heels, black hair tied back in a ponytail, round black glasses, a beaker with some transparent liquid in her left hand, a pipette in her right and a gaze through dark brown eyes that sends weak people to their hell.

**I:** May I come in?

## XIV. Dark Eyes

**She:** Stay completely still

I did what she said, while she took three steps past me and looked down the corridor, toward the stairs from which I had come.

**She:** Did he send you?

**I:** No one sent me, I follow a melody. But yes, I spoke with him, drank some tea. I only wanted to go to the bathroom. Now I stand before you with weapon in hand.

**She:** You got here without his help?

**I:** Well, he pointed me in the direction of the bathroom. However, I couldn't find it.

**She:** Come in first, I hope you had a calm crossing?!

I went through the open door into a modern laboratory - any biomolecular scientist's wet dream - she followed me and pulled the door shut behind her. I asked:

**I:** Crossing to where?

**She:** Not so important, your boat drifts. Good that you found your way to me.

**I:** As well as one can drift in the currents of a storm. Beautiful laboratory, I see many different solvents on the tables, beside all the high-quality equipment, what are you working on here?

Her eyes opened somewhat, probably slightly pleased about the attention to her work. Her gaze remained serious but no longer hostile.

**She:** There is much to dissolve. The sea on which you drift is a complex landscape that only spans across in flow. Death must always dissolve anew its wholeness in the emptiness, thus life flows through intangible reality into the eternal, far above the clouds on the horizon. I dissolve lived death into experiences of being. Death is mirrored in every cell that weaves life. I break their patterns in solvents, such as acetone, ethanol, hexane, sometimes chloroform or naturally most of all in simple dihydrogen oxide - my beloved water. One brings light, the other weight, water protects the balance.

**I:** I believe I am here to learn, to experience, how we dissolve the line to be in the overarching equilibrium. The feeling overcomes me that reality is not graspable, as described by you, yet thus I never know what dissolves in my hands

**She:** Help me a little to span the chaos in the laboratory and we will crystallize your experiences into something wondrous. You spoke of seven-tea - optimal, it catches the light, hovers above darkness, and creates a landscape of weight in the pull of equilibrium.

She looked deep into my eyes and raised the beaker under my face and said simply:

**She:** Spit into it

I still had the taste of the seven-tea on my lips and did what she demanded. She took the beaker with her to a table and set to work directly. She first took a small glass rod and stirred the saliva with the solution that was already in the glass. Then she filled the contents into small plastic tubes, cylindrical at the top and conical at the bottom. Closed the sealing lids of the six tubes and opened, with a finger press, the round lid of a small box, about 40x40cm, that stood on the table beside her.

> *In this box was something that looked like an embedded black wheel, it was a black rotor with thirty-two small holes around the edge - reminded me directly of roulette.*

*[Image: Centrifuge]*

I looked over her shoulder and saw that she placed the six tubes in positions six, seven and eight and in positions twenty-two, twenty-three and twenty-four, thus the weight of the rotor was in equilibrium. She closed the lid with a smooth hand movement and after three, four button presses on the front of the box with stylish ventilation slits on the lower quarter of the case, the centrifuge began to spin.

> *A vibration growing stronger with time carried itself, across the table, into the room.*

**I:** And now what are you doing with my saliva?

**She:** Right now I'm isolating the cells contained in your saliva from the rest of the solution. The centrifugal forces help me with that. Afterward we will break open the cells with some ultrasound and through the proteins equipped with, figuratively speaking, small fishing hooks, from the genetically modified seven-tea ingredients, get them on the hooks with the help of antibodies. After that we can purify the proteins that interest us from the lysate with a simple affinity matrix. Fused amino acid chains are folded into functional shapes, and some shapes love stress and fear - kinases, transcription factors, heat shock proteins are upregulated - the molecular patterns mirror what we have lived through. An optimal mirror of experiences - which we will try to crystallize - read up on it on quiet days, if it interests you. I'm happy to give you a few names.

**I:** That sounds like alchemy. You fuse fundamental patterns of my being, without which I probably couldn't walk in reality, and transform them into a new form, a crystal, with hopefully new properties that remain woven with me?

**She:** Yes, you grasp it quite well already, alchemy is not limited only to metals, every entity, whether atom, molecule, protein, cell, living being or beyond, can with force from within blossom anew in the outer flow. The crystal will influence your influence for a very long time - if you understand.

A laugh moved through her face, before she quickly covered it with her hand.

**I:** I want to say yes, but a strange pressure builds in my head when I want to speak it directly.

**She:** Let me guess! On the left side.

**I:** Yes, somewhat above my left ear

**She:** Trust your heart, listen to the rumbling from below and observe the storm above you, but grant it no fear.

The centrifuge beeped and the lid sprang open.

She took the samples out and I followed her to the back part of the laboratory.

She poured the liquid from the tubes and refilled them with a new transparent liquid, some buffer solution, using a pipette. She used the pipette to mix the cells deposited at the bottom with the new solution and collected the solution from all tubes in a small beaker.

The beaker was placed in a styrofoam ring and lowered into a much larger beaker, holding about a liter, filled with ice water. Then she inserted a thin stainless steel antenna mounted on a stand upside down from above into the liquid of the small beaker and gave me some ear protectors.

> *She made a few more settings on a box to which the antenna was connected via a cable at the upper end. Then she made a short hand gesture, I put on my ear protectors. And one felt and heard the first pulsating surge of energy that was sent from the antenna and hit my cells and faded in the ice sea.*

She turned around, walked past me with two smooth steps and had to say or indicate nothing for me to follow her out of the laboratory door into the room left beside it.

A room full of plants revealed itself, and by full I truly mean full. The room seemed quite small, but was clearly intended as a retreat. The air was a dream, oxygen rich, fresh, not too warm, not too cold, with slightly elevated humidity.

> *In the middle of the room was a large fern. Dark green were its fronds with reddish tips. They were arranged circularly, in the style of a lotus blossom, and grew directly from the black earth on which I stood. It was pitch black and transformed the room into a truly mystical place.*

Behind the fern was hidden a small, already set, wooden table and two simple chairs of dark wood. We sat down, took off the ear protectors and she poured us both a cup of tea.

We simply sat there. I was in a kind of trance state, since I had entered the room, and could grasp nothing that flowed past me on spiritual levels.

Then she suddenly asked with gentle and calm voice:

**She:** You want to tell me something?

Normally questions trigger thoughts, sometimes a whole storm of them. And somehow we believe that we derive our decision from them.

> *This time nothing happened in me at all, I only instinctively turned my head in her direction and when I looked into her deep brown eyes it broke out of me - as if my heart had transformed into a geyser.*

Every pattern - damned to break
Every pattern challenges the flow for its streaming - waves arise
The wave breaks into asymmetry
Laden, mass plunges into gravitation
Thus enclosing the space that is not
So chaos comes in two forms
From nothing and everything that is
Be aware, it springs from chaos and flows away
Yet it forms loops
Being in mutual transformation in infinite orbits
Thus a beautiful movement stands against chaos
Being is a full Gestalt of empty forms
Chaos and beauty within it can do nothing but change
Change is life, being different and yet the same
Human like everyone, yourself like no one
Life knows not time
Time is not life, but only its will
Inside it is empty and outside mere form
It knows nothing and thus pretends nothing
Except that it wants back into the depth
But must first shake off this form
After it has gifted it to the whole
Has left the breeding ground of chaos behind
And bathed before the depth in the flow of true beauty

**She:** I know a beautiful place for bathing. What are you afraid of?

I know my fear
Have taught it to be afraid
Now they are afraid for good reason
I carry my past into the now
And it is dark - full of gray figures
They have led, guided and yet followed, have given and taken
Have gifted the poor, fought evil
As well as shot innocents in the head from behind without flinching
And then coldly pushed them into the ditch
All this lies behind me and is thus always before my eye
Have only dreamed it, yet truly overcome in them
Everything has remained the same and in one has become something different
I stand in their debt, because I am
But never am I, for I always transform
When I am not, their force steers me back
And their hope for an eternally-new-being united in my form of the I.

A long silence reigned.

**I:** May my self stand by me.. - Let us go bathing.

**She:** Let us first drink our tea in peace and eat a small something. We will need some strength and patience for descent and ascent.

## XV. The Descent

The tea was gone, the sweet lotus seeds settled in my stomach. She rose from the table and I followed her, past the great fern, back into the corridor, two doors further to the left.

As she pulled the door open, she turned her gaze toward me and spoke in a grave tone:

**She:** No matter what we are about to experience, be aware: wholly below, nothing is stored, yet all can be found. Wholly above, all is stored, yet nothing can be lived.

Then we descended, step by step, down a spiral staircase that had revealed itself behind the door. Further and further into the depths.

> *I could not see the next step. Everything was dark, or perhaps I was blinded by the beauty before me.*

We had been descending for several minutes, and slowly I could make out more of this wondrous descent.

The step on which I now stood was no step at all. It was three clear yet somehow blurred, rope-like strands spanning from one side to the other. I could see through them, yet saw nothing - except myself.

On the outer right ran a small ledge against the wall; a thin stream of water flowed there in a channel, like a miniature brook, following the curve downward. When I looked to the other side, the sight mirrored itself, yet the water here flowed with seemingly equal force, not downward as expected, but up.

> *From these two streams the stair-strands burst forth like fountains, on one side tinged blue-gray, on the other a warmer yellow. In the center of each step a swirling, mirror-like play of light emerged: blue-gray-yellow. At least, so it seemed.*

Of one thing I was certain: the stairs were made of water. If I fell through, at least I would not strike concrete, though I would likely drown, in time, somewhere in a deep sea.

> *A fair bargain.*

I entrusted my weight to the next step. As I did, I spoke to myself:

Here you shall carry me.
I offer to the element
that brought life into flow
my trust.

I walked on with resolve. It dawned on me that wholly below can be a long way, if one does not fall.

And the possibility of falling was ever-present: to the left and to the right, on the inner side as on the outer. This wondrous spiral staircase had no walls. Only the silver-gray channel of the brook wound downward in a gently jagged spiral, shimmering softly.

I took a step inward and dared to look down.

> *I saw nothing but darkness. A darkness that, deeper down, slowly coalesced into a hexagon with a silvery-gray outer sheen.*

I gazed into the blackness between the six corners and quickly lost myself.

*[Image: Hexagon]*

A dark voice crept from the undergrowth of dreaming attention and pulled at me. The words came slowly, one after another, rising from the black pit of my imagination:

Leave your counter-current behind
and come into my Nothing,
where you will finally find all
that you truly desire.

My right foot began to lift from the water's surface, ready to swing through the air toward the abyss.

> *I wondered how long I would fall, whether the silver spiral channels would accompany me to the bottom. _Or do I simply plunge into the water down there and keep on sinking?_*

A great riddle and a small temptation, to know what waits below. Unless it turns out to be above after all, and I break through the ceiling of the sky and trigger the greatest of falls.

In the midst of my step toward the abyss, a hand suddenly rested gently on my shoulder. Her voice, smoother now than in the laboratory or the garden, poured life back into my consciousness:

Water can fall,
plunge swiftly into the depths.
Water can float,
rise with ease into the heights,
as in warm humid air.

But what water loves is the in-between,
the flowing,
whether as dynamic cloud-painting in the sky,
as crunching ice in glaciers,
or above all as the liquid elixir of life
moving from brooks to raging rivers,
standing still in lakes,
swelling in the great ocean
where everything becomes small.

Being mostly water herself, she kept me from falling and guided me back onto the path between the opposing yet directionless channels, which only span across when I place my weight upon them.

> *They should break, yet I hover. They force me to walk, yet I do not know whether I will arrive above or below.*

In the end it matters not.
There are no goals,
they dissolve in the waves of the sea
like crystalline salt.

And when I hold white stones,
shaped by pressure, in my hand,
a flood rises within me
from the ashes of long-faded embers -
anthracite-glistening streaks
run through my blue blood -
it is about my images at the core,
not about insignificant noise at the edges.

And so I ventured back between the channels and placed myself into a river of movement. Not falling, yet drawn by a great emptiness, with the aim of arriving below, only to briefly look up.

## XVI. The Seventh Table

And so I suddenly found myself in a blend of café and casino. The room was quite spacious yet simply furnished. A bar equipped with everything needed for preparing tea, and behind a glass shield an abundant selection of sweet pastries.

In an asymmetrical arrangement, set diagonal to the bar, seven square tables were scattered across a room with an unusually low ceiling. Around each table stood four simple black leather armchairs, their seams shimmering faintly golden in the yellow light of large bare bulbs that hung straight down on plain black cords.

> *Somehow cheap, yet with immense style.*

Five of the seven tables were fully occupied. Three were filled with four elderly ladies each, all with gray hair or at least gray streaks running through black. They moved small white stones engraved with flowing, curved symbols across the green tabletop with cheerful ease.

The table in the far left corner remained empty, and to this day I still wonder why. Only three armchairs stood around it. A fourth was nowhere to be seen.

I had scanned the room carefully with a sweeping gaze, until at the end of my sweep my eyes came to rest on the seventh table. It stood directly before me, just a few steps away, to the left of the bar.

And at that table sat a single person, back turned toward me.

> *A plain black baseball cap on the head, short gray hair peeking out at the edges. The skin at the nape of the neck was a caramel brown in the yellow light, and even from a few meters away I could make out three moles arranged in a diagonal from lower left to upper right, crossing his neck.*

I must have stood there for half an eternity, staring, until a thought crawled up from the depths of time:

A line
reaching from head to heart.

Still half-lost in thought, I suddenly noticed movement before me. The old man had extended his right arm outward over the back of the chair and, with his fingers held together, made a gentle beckoning motion in my direction, his head remaining perfectly still, facing forward.

My legs set themselves in motion. My feet glided over the floor covered in red carpets, woven through with calligraphic inscriptions in white and black. What they meant I did not know, but their flowing Gestalt carried me into a lucid state.

> *The room dissolved into a black vortex; the elderly ladies, like the staff behind the bar, were gradually unraveled by golden streaks that connected and spiraled upward, weaving themselves into a larger pattern.*

In the center: the old man. He remained calm and composed in his armchair, his left hand enclosing an object I could not see. With his right he was just reaching for his cup of tea as I finally stood before him, intending to offer my hand.

The cap cast a deep shadow across his face, allowing no clear view of his eyes. He wore a plain white shirt and black suit trousers and gave a slight nod, indicating that I should sit opposite him.

After three savoring slurps of his tea, he placed the white cup, full of brown micro-cracks, as though it had shattered on a tiled floor and been pieced back together by a master of patience with the help of brown resin, onto the green surface of the table.

> *My God, how beautiful is the violence of breaking.*

And from beneath the shadow of his cap, he began to speak in a muffled voice:

*[Image: Kintsugi]*

**He:** My boy, what great promise did you make to your past love?

**I:** I will turn stones into gold.

**He:** You devoted yourself to alchemy and sacrificed her for it?

**I:** Did I? If so, not consciously.

**He:** You are pure consciousness. Where do you think we are?

**I:** At your place.

**He:** It is mine as it is yours. Look at the flowing boundaries, how they drift along in golden streaks.

**I:** Truly beautiful, the way the ladies weave around us.

**He:** They are your curse that lifts you into blessing. Speak to them as if you were uttering a prayer.

**I:** If I must do that to learn alchemy, so that I can take the power into myself to melt the chaotic ice-desert and bring it through transformation to white-green blossom, then so be it.

**He:** Do not overreach yourself, you are already in the middle of it. I am only a rock standing in your current, making waves. And do not trouble yourself with the fate of others; I tell you from the heart: the silent Chaos comes, and the spanning Whole will judge them. Superficial beauty is in truth ugly, it fades as quickly as it bloomed. The patient Emptiness will pull them all into unfathomable depth. So live, my boy, your dying has earned you the aid of the dead.

**I:** You have nearly succeeded in putting into words what is sacred to me. But all that is sacred cannot be captured in words, is that not so?

**He:** You bring the world neither light nor darkness, it is a thankless task. Its transformation runs so deep that, for anyone who cannot dive beneath, it is barely perceivable. You mirror for them the rationally impossible act of eternal equilibrium.

**I:** So it is true... no one will ever thank me.

**He:** Only the unexperienceable levels of the smallest and the greatest are black and white. In the in-between, life dwells in gray, and only through the workings of change does empty space become wrapped in color. You need no thanks. You strive toward the blossoming of consciousness, willing to walk through the beautiful hell of life. Stand on neither shore, go bathe in the stream and invite them in. The shadows of those who leap are eternally in free fall.

He slid his teacup toward me, stood up, gave a slight bow. I returned the gesture. With surprising grace for his apparent age, he moved smoothly around the chair and walked in the direction from which I had come.

> *Then he dissolved into a spectrum of gray streaks within the black vortex, and I sank into my gray world, silent in the armchair.*

Shortly after surfacing, the black-gray vortex with its golden streaks slowly faded, and the room returned to its former state. Only now I sat alone at the seventh table, exactly where the old man had been.

I drank the remaining half-cup of delicately floral white tea, went to the bar, and was about to pay when I was asked:

**Voice at the bar:** So, had experiences that reach deeper than any knowledge?

I nodded gently and slowly pushed my way through the door marked as the exit with two characters.

## XVII. The Light

I stood in a narrow industrial back alley, wedged between two sheet-metal facades that rose at least a hundred meters high. The many rusty fire escapes overhead blocked any view of the sky. The alley wore a bleak, desolate air, and at my feet lay a swamp of pale-brown puddles of unknown depth.

To the right, a small river of foaming water blocked the way; it poured out from beneath a door that stood diagonally opposite. The spacing of the pale-brown puddles allowed me a relatively easy path to the left.

I simply wanted to move forward, without knowing where. My attention was devoted entirely to the filthy patterns on the ground: brown puddles, plastic waste, mud, and dark patches of asphalt. I followed the few beautiful threads my imagination could weave, desperately trying to break the chaos of the soiled forms into something resembling lovely patterns.

In the small, tapping steps I took across the dark spots, I found a quiet joy and lost myself in the space between mental vision and physical action -

> *Until a spring-loaded aluminum door slammed into my skull with full force.*

I staggered slightly backward, tripped into a large brown puddle, and ended up half-dazed leaning against the facade, unaware of what exactly had just happened. I tried to stand upright, but my vision turned inward. First it darkened, then slowly an orange-red warmth appeared.

And then I lay there, feeling how the right side of my head alternated between warmth and cold, until phases came where I felt nothing at all and sank completely into darkness.

At some point I began to dream, and the most bizarre scenarios played out: what she might meanwhile have done with my saliva in the laboratory. Created a crystal through which she could peer into my soul. Identified the greatest vulnerability in my immune system to smoothly dispose of me. Cultivated my cells with hers to create a new form of life. Injected herself to glimpse my memories.

Why she would do such things remained unclear to me, and that was not the point. Perhaps she had already tossed the samples into the trash precisely so I would hallucinate these very scenarios.

> *And so I drifted in the sea of uncertainty, not knowing whether there was even a shore at all. That is how dreams are.*

Then the door was flung open, and even in my dreamlike sleep I felt the sudden draft of air on my skin. A few seconds passed, then I heard the rhythmic sound of high heels. Short intervals, clear and sharp, casting ahead of them a shadow of determination into my space.

> *All warmth fled my world; the shadow grew larger, and my interior grew colder.*

As though my blood, every molecule, every protein, every cell of my body, and with them every electrochemical signal and every experience woven into their flow, were slowly being dipped into liquid nitrogen, freezing instantly into fragile ice.

And in this metastable state of crystallization, my self became a mirror and sent the following words into my consciousness:

They have no idea
what wars have raged within you
without us ever standing on the front lines.

The blood of generations
has backed up far in the rear
and broken open the depths,
not before you, but within me.

I followed their calls,
sat amid the spiritual rubble
of present reality,
received their hope
and gave them mine.

They believe the future is what matters -
yet we finally know where we come from.

The words echoed through my crystal-clear yet completely frozen state of being. And the emerging resonance slowly cracked the ice, allowing a breath of real life to flow back into my body.

I could not move, could exert no influence on what was happening. I melted. At first everything was the familiar gray, until it became stranger, almost uncanny.

> *It felt as though I were walking high in the mountains across a vast snowfield into dense clouds. Everything white, completely blind, though no, because everything glowed.*

It was different, unfamiliar, almost eerie, but I tried to surrender fully to this new color of dream. Yet nothing happened; everything remained white, blinding white, and I utterly blind and clueless.

Until I realized that my eyelids were pried wide open, held in place by some kind of clamp, and a massive surgical lamp was centered directly on my pupils.

A familiar voice said:

**She:** I finally know where you come from. You are, without doubt... hmm, how shall I put it - charged.

**She:** It will be hard for you to answer under all this light, but I know you will understand me well.

**She:** I do neither good nor evil, I act in the spanning sense. You will understand what I mean better than I do myself. After all, your self came to me, which was a great riddle. It makes sense to give you something in return.

**She:** I took a closer look at the patterns in your cells to see whether you really are what you appear to be. I did not know what to pay attention to in the analysis, except that I expected significant differences and potential anomalies.

**She:** Everything seemed normal, until, in a last desperate attempt, I examined the epigenetic changes and modifications to your DNA, as well as the post-transcriptional modifications of your mRNA, even more closely. In real time, so to speak.

**She:** And it was truly fascinating.

Something stirred in me and wanted to ask, but no word crossed my lips. Too blinded, every forming thought drowned in the light. She seemed to see it in my wide-open eyes and answered:

**She:** I would call it synchronization of the parts, or harmonizing structural transformation. At your most fundamental biological level of being, you are able to recognize yourself in the stream of golden light.

**She:** Within your cells swim DNA and RNA complexes that rotate and coil. Like certain export channels in a cell, they simultaneously hold a crossed structure of mineral cofactors, individual ions of manganese, magnesium, iron, and zinc, in the flowing center of a movable amino-acid loop with the beautiful motif: PGEGGHGEGCGGP.

**She:** The rigid prolines, the P's at the ends of the amino-acid sequence, hold the loop in stable orientation, so that the loops stand in rapid equilibrium with the ion inside them as well as with other loops in the flow of light, reading it simultaneously.

**She:** The loops appear entangled and react to incident light: they reflect it, let it pass through, forward it onward, and a tiny number of photons are absorbed. It is almost a lens through which one sees into the greater whole.

**She:** You are surely wondering now why I am telling you all this while you lie here in blinding light, and why we are not sitting at the table sipping tea together. Why I did not invite you but instead picked you up half-conscious from the street. And above all, what will happen now.

**She:** Well, some questions I will answer; some questions one asks and should never believe any answer. And with that we come to the heart of it: we stand in the light.

**She:** I will give you a new vision, and take an eye from you for it.

**She:** For that I must face my fear, and I must get my trembling hands under control. A little white tea should help.

She left the room with the same rhythmic step with which she had entered.

Only a few minutes passed before a gentle floral scent filled the space.