I looked up… or perhaps it was the sky, vast and mute, that bent down toward me, as if it had been watching me in silence all along, waiting for me to finally notice it.
A staircase emerged from the mist, sinuous and spectral, like an endless spine, twisted by centuries of waiting, translucent, floating between worlds.
It rose — or perhaps sank — into a kind of cosmic milk, a substance both dense and soft, white to the point of oblivion, alive like a dream you brush against without ever grasping.
It was impossible to say whether it led upward, inward, or simply… elsewhere. To a place that language cannot name. To a place that obeys no direction anymore.
My foot reached the first step. It was warm. Not warm like a sun-heated stone, nor like living flesh — a strange warmth, enveloping, almost intimate. Its substance was neither hard nor soft.
