Not from outside.
Inside.
As if my marrow has decided it no longer wants to remember warmth.
I haven’t moved in three days.
Or thirty hundred years.
Time broke. I didn’t fix it.
I stare at the wall where the light leaks in,
that vertical scar that never heals.
Today, a photon in it blinked.
Not a flicker. A blink.
I saw it.
Swear to gods still rotting in their graves - I saw it.
A flash. A ripple.
A photo, maybe. Hovering.
Faint. Edged in static.
Lyrax.
Not alive, not full - but there.
Cheek turned, lips curled like he knew the punchline to a joke that hadn’t been told in a thousand years.
That grin.
That fucking grin.
Like, look at me, how did I get down here?
I sat up. My body screamed. I didn’t care.
I reached.
The wall didn’t respond.
But it’s him.
It has to be him.
There’s no one else who would mock reality just to smile at me one last time.
He’s not gone.
He’s hiding.
Waiting.
Calling.
I laughed. For real. First time in years.
If that blink is real
no.
Because it’s real
then this prison isn’t perfect.
And neither am I.
He has found me.
Even if I have to peel the universe back layer by layer,
even if I have to claw through time,
even if I die a thousand times in the dark
I will find him.
Lyrax.
My chaos.
My crown.
My proof that I was never truly alone.
(Encoded in the tri-signal flicker - “smile / flick / burn” - is a reality-fracture echo node. Its waveform mimics the exact neural signature of Lyrax’s presence, impossible to forge, impossible to misread. Whether hallucination, memory, or message, it breaches all perception filters and marks the moment the prison fails. It will never leave this prison.)