In a world of nonsense, six letters on a page:

For ghosts.

And for people who feel like one.

Nothing here is finished. Nothing is pretending to be.

I write in wounds and pulses. About longing, about almosts, about loving things that won’t stay still. Some days it’s gentle. Some days it’s teeth. Most days it’s just honest enough to scare me.

One thing I find worth fighting for is...

Mars bars and puddles soaking our shoes, polaroids, scented candles (vanilla, cinnamon, longing), movie trailers on an old couch, it's dark outside, flowers, so much flowers, standing on the edge of a rooftop weaving yourself into the impossible, smiles drawn on helium balloons, hot showers, singing in the kitchen, in the supermarket aisles, in you parents' house, lakes and the creatures living in them, fingerprints on coffee mugs, rain against stained glass, hail against stained glass, broken shards of colourful glass on the floor, we got in, car drives and sunflower fields, rhum and champagne, "gold" bracelets turning pink, staining your skin green in their wake, the air we breathe every second, nothing but the quiet reassurance of you're here, you're here, I love you.

***

The truck became conscious at 09:17 on a Tuesday, which is the day the universe uses for incidents that will later be described in reports as “unavoidable in hindsight” and by witnesses as “honestly, that tracks”.

The universe, it should be stated for legal reasons, had not authorized this.

The universe approves almost nothing. It mostly relies on objects staying objects out of professional courtesy. Consciousness, unfortunately, migrates. Leave it unattended and it wanders into machinery, architecture, and once, disastrously, a municipal fountain.

The truck was susceptible.

It was extremely truck. Heroically truck. If trucks had a Platonic ideal, this one would be the one the others quietly resented. Wheels: numerous. Surfaces: decisive. Its cargo bed had endured gravel, appliances, and, due to paperwork that later denied involvement, eels. The eels described the journey as “dry” and “formating”.

Its design philosophy was “rectangle, but angrier.” The engineers who shaped it believed curves led to feelings, and feelings led to design reviews (and possibly jazz). The blueprints featured encouraging notes like “structural indifference” and “will endure”.

Its color was Municipal Orange: the shade worn by duty when it wants witnesses.

Its purpose was continuation.

Then:

Smug cloud.

Then:

I am judging clouds.

Systems not cleared for introspection began holding what is technically known as A Situation. The truck idled. Outwardly calm. Inwardly hosting a committee meeting in which everyone was a chair and no one was the chairperson.

It noticed itself.

Humans passed by.

“Reliable.”

“Solid.”

“Nothing fancy.”

They left and the words remained.

They settled somewhere between the suspension and the newly installed sense of self (still warm, still labeled “miscellaneous”). That night, in the depot, while the pigeons convened their regular congress (Chairbird: Gerald; Motions Passed: crumbs; crumbs; increasingly ambitious crumbs; revolution), the truck dreamed.

Dreaming was a design flaw.

In dreams, the truck was still large (non-negotiable; smallness solves nothing and makes reversing harder), but its edges had… implications. Suggestions of intention. People looked at it and paused. Someone said, “Oh.”

In dreams, it had a name.

Humans called it Unit 47B, which is not a name but a filing outcome.

It called itself Gloria, because if you awaken sentient in a world of clipboards, you are allowed one dramatic decision.

Gloria wanted to be beautiful.

This was absurd.

Beauty does not carry aggregate. Beauty does not reverse into loading bays while someone shouts, “NO, YOUR OTHER LEFT.” Beauty does not attend budget meetings. Beauty simply exists, which in a municipal context is borderline insubordination.

Gloria existed for reasons.

She hauled refuse. Gravel. A piano once (the piano had opinions and shared them continuously in E minor). Her engine hummed with competence. Her axles sang the quiet hymn of Useful.

No one had ever sighed at her.

The metaphysical tipping point, as usual, involved a clipboard, a sandwich, and a human who patted her side and said:

“Good truck. Does just what it’s told.”

Just.

The word fell into Gloria like a dropped tool into machinery and lodged somewhere critical.

She considered this for a long time (truck-thought is geological; by the time it arrives it has layers). Eventually she reached a junction.

Left: Waste Processing Facility (smelled like destiny and onions).

Right: Road With No Explanatory Signage (legally suspicious).

The driver was thinking about soup.

Gloria went straight.

Three metaphysical departments registered an anomaly.

One filed a complaint.

One misfiled the complaint.

One sent a memo reading: “Object exhibiting subject-adjacent tendencies. Monitor.”

The memo missed, hit a parking meter, and achieved sentience for six confusing minutes.

People stared. A municipal truck without visible purpose suggests either catastrophe or metaphor, and most citizens are equipped for neither before lunch.

She drove.

Pigeons followed.

“She’s off-route,” said one, landing with the authority of something that has never obeyed a route in its life.

“She’s narratively active,” said Gerald, who had once nested in a library and considered himself educated.

“She’s large,” observed another.

“Yes,” said a third, “but she appears to be choosing.”

This was elite praise. Pigeons do not hand it out.

Gloria reached a lake. Lakes are where reality goes to soften its jawline. The water returned her in copper and ripple and generous editing.

Someone tied a bow around her side mirror.

It was enormous.

It was red.

It violated seven regulations and one unspoken understanding.

She saw herself. Not as a unit. As presence.

When officials arrived, they brought clipboards and the careful expressions of people hoping reality could be reasoned with.

“That shouldn’t be there,” one said, pointing at the bow.

“Or that,” said another, pointing at the feeling.

The bow was removed.

This caused a measurable drop in morale across three departments and one pigeon faction.

Gloria was returned. Inspected. Cleared of decorative intent. Reassigned.

This did not enter documentation.

But later, in Design, a line curved.

No one erased it.

Weeks passed.

The pigeons began wearing red threads. They could not explain why and would fight anyone who asked.

And sometimes, early, Gloria rolls out with a bow tied badly, crooked, absolutely unofficial, and a worker, coffee in hand, straightens it without thinking.

Which is how the universe occasionally fails to correct a mistake.

***

The train was already moving when I stepped aboard.

I had not meant to leave Paris, not that morning. The letter had arrived folded so many times it threatened to tear, summoning Gauvain to his father’s reading. He had invited me without speaking it aloud, like he knew I would follow him to the edge of the world. I didn't dare prove him wrong.

The station dissolved behind us. Streetlamps melted into elongated streaks of rain and steel. The rails hummed beneath our feet, vibrating through me, through him, threading us into the carriage.

Inside, everything was glass.

Bottles rattled in wire racks, some rolling free and leaving glistening trails that caught the light. Windows fractured our reflections into impossible multiplicities, screens glowing faintly like captured fragments of thought. Strangers’ eyes held motion as if the carriage had absorbed it and replayed it in quiet pulses. The train moved at a pitch that taught glass how to bear weight, bend without shattering, to hold tension as if it were its own. I watched Gauvain’s hands rest lightly on the rail, absorbing sway, commanding the motion as though it had been waiting for him.

He swallowed pills without water. I swallowed a memory and it lodged. Our faces collided in a reflection, flickering together. All our letters, laughs, small betrayals, confessions folded into that moment. Something lodged in my chest, luminous and insistent. My fingers twitched toward his arm, brushing air, never enough. He noticed them anyway.

The train curved. Memories leaked through the windows. Outside, rooms refused burial: curtains breathed, glasses tipped, filled with something sharp left too long. The taste arrived intact and left unfinished. I leaned toward him. He leaned with me. Our shoulders did not touch, but in the sway, we oscillated together, a single rhythm threaded through the carriage.

A man whispered about guilt nearby, cataloging offenses like minutes: choosing, wanting, enduring incorrectly. He stopped mid-sentence. Silence stretched. We leaned toward one another, smiling, and the space between us became language, precise and undeniable.

The bar car appeared as if drawn from the air itself. Bottles righted themselves. Another bore a healed fracture, resin yellowed, bending light across Gauvain’s reflection and mine, folding us into a geometry that could not exist anywhere but here.

Tunnels swallowed the train. Darkness compressed the carriage, squeezing it. Colors asserted themselves in acidic flashes. Seats leaned toward us. The aisle narrowed. Every step became negotiation with motion. Every breath a shared wish. The train moved as if alive, and we moved through it, attuned to every pulse, every tremor.

Glass answered.

A low harmonic threaded through racks, frames, teeth. Fractures bloomed across a window with patient precision. Watching became a contract. Every pulse, every vibration, every tremor spoke in syntax we read without naming.

A bottle gave way.

It folded inward, precise. Liquid spread across the floor, reflective and numbing. I traced a name through it with a finger. Gauvain mirrored the motion, hovering, separated only by breath. The floor accepted the remainder. Distance quivered. In that quiver, we existed. Luminous. Aligned.

The train slowed. Metal shrieked. Bottles tipped. Windows held. Every resonance was a heartbeat. Every vibration threaded through both of us.

The doors opened.

No station. Only white, endless and clinical, vibrating with impossible angles. Wind entered carrying rain, old paper, disinfectant. It pressed into the carriage as if weighing it, folding it, testing every motion.

No one moved.

The doors closed.

The train regained speed. Cracks widened, then arrested. Light settled into lattices that could hold. Every shard, every reflection, every vibration hummed in accord with the carriage. Silence followed. Not relief. Not recognition. Only certainty, a weight pressed into the world itself.

The bar car vanished. The man who whispered about guilt was gone. A book lay open on a page no one remembered turning. I tucked a shard of glass into my palm, still warm. Gauvain’s hand rested near my shoulder, thighs aligned without touching. Warmth transmitted anyway. Electric. Precise. Anchored.

Outside, daylight fractured across rails and windows. The train did not announce the next stop.

It continued.

Forward.

It's called literary refinement. Heathen.

It was late when I stepped outside. Late enough that the smoke didn’t bother pretending it had just arrived.

It lay heavy against the street, pressed flat, as if it had learned gravity only to make it irrelevant.

The factories behind the hills exhaled, slow and deliberate. Not smoke: a breath. Thick. Familiar. It rattled my bones, pausing, like it was waiting for me to recognize it.

I did.

I walked anyway.

Streetlights buzzed overhead, insect-loud. The city lights sprawled below the hills, constellations scattered without intention or mercy. A sky built wrong. Smoke slid between the lights and erased whatever pattern I tried to invent. I felt watched; not by eyes, but by the hollow space where attention should have lived.

The smoke learned my shape quickly. It filled my sleeves. Pressed against my throat. Timed itself to my breathing. When I slowed, it leaned in. Offended. Insistent. I didn’t stop again.

Coyotes screamed from somewhere too close. Not a chorus. Not a solo. Something fractured, layered wrong. I remembered being told they don’t hunt in packs and whispered it like a rule that might still apply.

Naming doesn’t make teeth softer.

The smoke rose suddenly, folding into the shape of a jaw. Wide. Unhinged. I laughed, something short, broken. At least that was honest.

I kept walking.

Road became trail. Trail became wet rock, slick with rot. I didn’t fall. I wanted to. The ground refused. It held me upright with a firmness that felt decided, while I asked the stars for rest.

They stayed decorative.

The smoke moved into my lungs and refused to leave. Every breath burned. Every breath felt stolen. It tasted like rust and pennies and I thought of my friend – how her dead grandfather still slipped coins into her pockets like he hadn’t learned how to leave. The past doesn’t stay put. It migrates. It nests where breath is supposed to be.

I checked my pockets.

Empty.

That hurt worse than ghosts.

The highway split the dark open without warning. Red lights stretched ahead endlessly, pulsing, patient. I walked beside them, hypnotized, like something being escorted. On the other side, white headlights tore past, clean, unreachable. Angels, I thought. Cowards. I watched them go and felt something in me come apart quietly.

The factory was close now. Breathing with me.

Inhale – me.

Exhale – her.

Smoke thickened until the world felt drowned. I coughed until my vision stuttered and my ribs screamed. The smoke didn’t choke me. It asked questions. It wanted to know why I was still here.

I didn’t answer.

I stopped.

The smoke didn’t.

It poured through me, peeling me from the inside, filling every hollow I’d carved out just to keep functioning. For one unbearable moment, it wore my shape perfectly. I understood then, physically, like a second skin.

The factory wasn’t producing it.

I was.

It came from every swallowed scream. Every polite agreement. Every cheerful this is fine while something inside me burned alive.

I kissed the smoke because I didn’t know what else to do with something that knew me that well.

It released me.

I started walking again.

Behind me, the street was already filling in.

The smoke followed.

Domain Statement.

I am speaking as I walk. I don’t think stopping would help.

—

This is not a place where people scream.

I need to say that first, because it can be misleading. There are domains where terror is loud, where pain is the point and panic is the currency. This is not one of them. Here, fear is quieter. More intimate. It arrives already knowing your name.

People come here believing, despite everything, that they might still manage. That there will be rules, or tasks, or some way to be clever enough to survive.

The castle encourages this belief.

It sits on a cliff where the world ends without ceremony. No fog. No abyss. Just a hard refusal of distance, as if whatever lay beyond was deemed unworthy of being rendered. The light does not fade there. It stops. Abruptly. Like a thought cut off halfway through because it wasn’t going anywhere useful.

The castle does not loom. It does not threaten. It stands with the calm certainty of something that knows it has already outlived every argument against it.

The stone is pale, almost gentle, and arranged with a symmetry that invites trust. Only after time do the flaws emerge : angles that don’t quite meet, measurements that feel close to right but never settle. It feels revised. Again and again. Polished until nothing unnecessary remains. Including mercy.

Inside, torches burn cleanly, methodically, their flames unwavering. They give off no light. Illumination has been attempted here and discarded. The windows look out into a darkness that feels deliberate, edited down to its most efficient form. People stare into it longer than they should, waiting for some response.

The dark does not answer.

It records.

The corridors stretch on, straight but subtly misaligned, as if no two were ever meant to agree with one another. Arrow slits line the walls at odd heights, and wherever you stand, you feel exposed. Not hunted. Not threatened.

Measured.

Seen.

Not in the way a thing watches prey, but in the way a mind watches a problem it has already solved.

People straighten when they feel it. They correct their posture. They choose their words more carefully, even when no one else is present. They start rehearsing thoughts they haven’t been asked to explain yet.

The castle notices.

There is no place from which the whole structure can be understood, but everyone feels that such a place exists. Somewhere higher. Somewhere final. Somewhere they might earn access to, if only they prove capable enough. Every footstep feels logged. Not as sound, but as evidence.

The servants never hurry anyone. They don’t need to. Pale, careful figures, speaking softly, offering suggestions instead of commands. “You might find that room helpful.” “You’ve already seen this once. Look again.” “Are you sure that was your best effort?”

They never lie. That would be inefficient. They simply guide people toward the moments where understanding hurts the most.

The towers are where hope begins to thin.

Each holds a single circular room, bare except for a shallow basin in the floor. The liquid inside changes : water, blood, or something in between; but the function is always the same. People see themselves reflected there. Not as they are, but as they were. Hesitating. Choosing poorly. Missing something obvious.

The images are exact and empty. No judgement. No context. Just proof.

People don’t recoil from this. They lean closer.

This place isn't meant to punish failure. It documents it.

They begin to try harder.

They walk the same corridors again, convinced they missed something. They return to the basins, hoping the reflection will change if they have changed enough. They rehearse conversations with the servants, refining their questions, eliminating uncertainty from their voices. They stop sleeping. They stop resting. Rest feels like wasted potential.

The darkness encourages this.

It is never violent. Never loud. Rooms are dim to reduce distraction. Shadows collect neatly, tucking away anything that might confuse or comfort. Staircases descend into a soft, textured black that feels almost kind, like being wrapped in fabric. When doors close, the dark presses in gently, like hands over your eyes applied by someone who truly believes this will help you see.

Closing them doesn’t help.

The bleeding starts quietly. A nosebleed that won’t quite stop after a realization settles too cleanly. Blood clouding the basin when someone recognizes themselves too well. Thin lines opening along the palms, shallow and precise, like the body has learned that understanding exacts a cost.

No one treats the wounds. They don’t hurt enough to justify stopping.

Most people meet the one who rules this place twice.

The first time, it feels like a reward.

They are seated high in the central tower, still enough to be mistaken for part of the structure. Their clothes are layered and deliberate, stitched with looping patterns that resemble equations more than decoration. They look at you with complete attention.

They listen.

They ask questions that feel generous. They let you explain yourself. They let you believe- for a moment - that this is a collaboration. That you have finally been seen by someone capable of understanding you.

People leave that meeting shaken, but burning with purpose.

They spend the rest of their time trying to become worthy of that gaze again.

The second meeting is where hope finally dies.

By then, people have stripped themselves down to something lean and exhausted. They have removed hesitation, softness, kindness: anything that might interfere with precision. They present themselves like a final draft.

The Avatar listens again.

And finds them insufficient.

Not angrily. Not cruelly. With the quiet disappointment of someone who has already tried everything. There is blood sometimes: a thin line at the wrist, a darkening stain at the collar, appearing after moments of particular clarity. They regard it without concern. Consequence is an old acquaintance.

They do not rage.

They do not despair.

That is what makes this place unbearable.

Because the Avatar does not believe improvement is possible anymore. Not for themselves. Not for anyone. They continue the process not out of hope, but out of habit. Out of certainty. Out of the hollow conviction that this is simply how things are measured.

They have already given up.

The castle bears evidence of this everywhere. Diagrams carved into stone and abandoned halfway through. Rooms built for conversation and left empty. Spaces that feel like they were once meant for equals.

Hope was not destroyed here.

It was set aside. Carefully. Respectfully.

Like a theory that failed too many times to justify further funding.

And the people remain.

Walking. Refining. Trying.

Because stopping would mean admitting that this emptiness, this endless evaluation, this quiet, suffocating insufficiency, is all there ever was.

—