A Dream Of Colour

  The sorcerer dreams of colour.

  Not merely the colours that the eye can see, but those buried beneath perception—hues that hum beneath the fabric of the world, whispered in a language older than breath. Not paint or pigment, but essence. Red, not as seen but as felt: pulsing, searing, alive. Blue, with a depth that mourns. Yellow, radiant, ringing with the clarity of bells at the beginning of time. These are not colors of the world, but of thought, of law, of the bones of being and the shifting skin of creation before it takes form. They float—no, they dance—around the sorcerer like threads unwound from the loom of existence. Threads they know. Threads they understand. They lift a hand, and the colors respond. A ripple. A pulse. The heartbeat of something immense, something patient, something older than stars. Then—shapes. Forms. Not shapes that obey matter, but the roots of form itself. A spiral that exhales. A triangle that folds inward and sings in ultraviolet. Lines that split and weave themselves into motion. Perfect geometries unfold, layer by layer, unfurling with the patient logic of stars. They speak—not in words, but in truths older than time. Gravity bends around thought. Time coils obediently. Matter kneels. There is no ground, no sky, no direction—only the fabric of existence itself, stretched vast and thrumming, woven into a single living field shaped wholly by the sorcerer’s will.

  The sorcerer exists at the center of it. Or outside it. Or perhaps they are it.

  They walk, or float, or glide—not by motion, but by will. Their feet do not touch ground, for there is no ground. Only a field of shifting potential, bright and alive and infinite. They reach out, and their fingers thread through the architecture of reality, brushing against quarks, against probabilities, against the hum of what-was and what-might-be, stirring entropy with a gesture. It is easy. It is glorious. It is right. And they understand. They do not question how or why. The sorcerer feels it—each thread of the universe humming beneath their fingertips, each pulse of existence waiting to be touched, to be turned. They are not a wielder. They are a conduit. A breath drawn by the cosmos to speak itself aloud. They reach. They shape. They command, and the cosmos responds—not with resistance, but with recognition. A flick of the wrist, and gravity bends in place. A whisper, and entropy stills. A gesture, and flame curls upward in the form of an idea, coiling around the curve of thought like a lover, like a dream. The sorcerer remembers now, in the way one remembers warmth or breath. Magic is not a tool. It simply is. It moves through them because it was always meant to. They are the answer to a question the universe asked when it was still cooling from fire. The sorcerer breathes in magic, and breathes out new law, and for a moment—just a moment—they know what it is to be eternal. Infinite.

  The stars drift closer.

  Time folds inward. The notion of "before" and "after" becomes meaningless, collapsing into the single point of now—expanding, blooming, radiant. The dream sings in patterns: fractals of memory, geometry of will, the language of the arcane not spoken but embodied. The universe is no longer a mystery to be solved, but an instrument to be played. And the sorcerer stands within it, master of all they touch. They laugh. Their voice echoes through the lattice of space like starlight bouncing down the halls of a cathedral. And the dream answers: petals of impossible color, lattices of gold-threaded silence. A symphony of thought and motion, harmony in every fold. Their will writes new axioms in the bones of creation.

  The sorcerer opens their hands.

  And the colours change.

  They shift. They warp. Red bleeds into green where no overlap should be. Angles jut at impossible junctions, too sharp to exist. Then comes sound—bright at first, crystalline, almost beautiful—until it cracks, then buzzes, then vibrates. A hum begins in the bones. A pressure behind the eyes. Limitless potential, swirling on for an eternity.

  And then—something changes.

  A note falls out of tune. A chord buckles. A line shifts too far, bends at an angle that should not be. The sorcerer blinks. Once. Twice. Shapes blur, not with motion, but with wrongness. A spiral becomes a helix, then something else. Something that loops back into itself, but not cleanly—not completely. Color bleeds into sound, sound fractures into shadow. Then a throb. A scream emerges—not heard, but felt—rising not in pitch, but in inevitability. The sorcerer tries to speak a word of binding. The syllables collapse. The words unravel. Each sound folds inward, collapsing into letters that won’t stay still—letters that twitch like limbs, that wail like open mouths. They try again—reach again—but the threads unravel beneath their touch. They reject the sorcerer. Slick as oil. Fleeting as smoke. Splintering like glass. A gesture misfires. A command devours itself. Geometry fractures. Equations scream. Runes split open and bleed. Magic thrashes in their grasp like a wounded animal, and their hand—their hand—trembles. Magic no longer obeys. It writhes. It recoils. It grows teeth. Or changes. Or escapes. It slips beyond language, beyond symbol, beyond command. The sorcerer calls a name of power.

  It curdles.

  And the echo that returns is not theirs. It is something else. Something vast. Something ending. The patterns continue to spin, but now they drift. Collide. Collapse. Above—if such a thing still exists—the sky ruptures. Mirrors break. Light stutters. Shadows split without reason. Time spasms. Moments begin to overlap. A heartbeat precedes the breath. A memory comes before the moment it recalls.

  Stolen story; please report.

  And then the world opens.

  Not around them—beneath. A layer peels back. Then another. The threads they once understood unspool into knots they cannot untangle. Equations run backwards, inside-out. Particles behave like thoughts, and thoughts behave like rot. Shapes that once obeyed seamlessly now spiral away, fracturing across dimensions the mind cannot map. Intention dies. Shapes flee. Motion forgets where to go. The field of potential unravels. And there the sorcerer floats.

  But the space moves now. Not them. And it moves without rhythm. It folds. Tears. Screams. The colors turn. Not darker. Just wrong. A red that sounds like rust. A blue that smells like screams. A yellow that tastes wet. The sorcerer tries to breathe. There is no air. Not because they are choking, but because breath no longer belongs to them. The concept itself has shifted—slipped sideways into something other. Something with teeth. And that something has spoken: air is naught but an obsolete thought, a relic, stripped of meaning. And so it was unmade. Rewritten. Buried.

  The sorcerer opens their mouth to speak, to scream — and geometry pours out.

  What they see now is not shape but unshape. Not matter but rot. A kind of rot that infects the idea of structure, that eats the foundation of being. What was once a cathedral of understanding becomes a wound in space, and it is open, and it is looking. Magic surges, but it does not obey. It howls. It splits. It divides into parts that never recombine. Threads twist into knots no mind could untangle. Symbols smear, become eyes, become mouths, become numbers that scream. They feel their thoughts stretch thin, each one reaching for different meanings, different pasts. Memory shatters. They remember standing. They remember falling. They remember never having been.

  Time weeps in the corners of the dream. Possibility dies.

  The sorcerer reaches one final time—not to grasp, not to command, but to understand. But understanding is a closed door now, sealed and buried in the foundation of something no longer real. The spell—whatever spell this is—unfolds further. Wider. Hungrier.

  The stars blink out.

  The space around them convulses, then inverts, and the sorcerer sees. Not with sight, but with essence. Not vision, but inevitability. With a knowing that is not knowledge. A clarity that should not be. The ceiling of the dream splits. Something brushes against the skin of the world. A finger. A breath. A gaze. The sorcerer reaches to close the breach.

  But there is no breach.

  There is no wall to close. Only the tearing open of comprehension itself. Their understanding was never complete—just permitted. Their power was never mastery—just tolerated. The universe never sang—it warned. They fall upward. Or sideways. The directions fail. Light slows. Heat forgets how to behave. Colour becomes pain, and motion becomes repetition, each movement echoing into itself, a thousand times, a thousand deaths in a single step. Thought cannot hold its shape. Each attempt to reason fractures into spirals, into loops, into hungry noise. They see the shape of the world beneath the world. The thing that was always there, behind the veil of magic. The mechanism behind the veil. The engine of law that was never meant to be perceived. The god that is not god. The truth that is not truth. The mouth that never closed. The eye that never stopped watching. Too vast to name. Too silent to worship. It spans the dream like a mouth that has always been open, waiting not to speak, but to consume. They try not to look. But they do. Of course they do.

  And it is looking back.

  They scream.

  But the scream makes no sound. It makes only madness. The sorcerer floats, flayed in thought, each memory peeling backward into the void, the echo of who they were stretched long and thin across the surface of unreality.

  The colours dim.

  The shapes stop moving.

  The noise quiets.

  And in that silence—deep, vast, absolute—they drown.

  Not in water. Not in fear.

  But in the slow, final certainty that they were never meant to see. That they were never meant to know. That some truths are not truths at all—only the unraveling of thought masquerading as revelation. The sorcerer screams—but the sound does not leave their mouth. It loops, folds, doubles in on itself and becomes a second voice, then a third. Each scream peeling backward into laughter. Each laugh wrong. Wet. Inside-out.

  The shapes return.

  But they are different now—alive, crawling along the edges of vision. Colours with edges that cut. Numbers that twitch. Concepts that laugh with teeth. The sorcerer blinks—and finds that there is no more blinking. Their eyes are open, have always been open, will never close again. Their skin is inside their veins. Their thoughts echo out of sequence. Their magic breathes on its own now, shuddering in the air like a carcass that hasn’t realized it’s dead. They reach for silence—but it chatters at them. Clawing. Snapping. The runes they once knew shift beneath their skin, inked in fire, spelling words they never learned but always knew.

  And then—

  Laughter. Endless, echoing. From the magic. From the dream. From within.

  Not joy. Not malice.

  Just madness, ancient and pure. A perfect, howling spiral of comprehension that has eaten its own tail and found only hunger. The sorcerer falls into it, eyes wide, mind flayed, arms outstretched.

  The dream does not end.

  The madness grows.

  The self unravels.

  And then—

  They end.