Follow the Green Light...
(Giss sound plays, a voice surrounded by static reads...)
.
..
...
..
.
—Radio is On. We are on air...
.
..
.
(A faint crackle of the microphone shifting, a whispered voice in the static: “Just start with your name...”)
.
..
.
(The sound of a sigh...)
.
..
.
“
—Maya…
Name that arose from the first impression of a green light found rare in the darkness of the Universe…
I guess I just called myself like this.
There was no ceremony. No voice from the heavens.
Just a flicker. A shimmer. A silence that named me.
A deep sensation of loneliness...
My consciousness has been traveling through the galaxy, observing and exploring all forms of life.
I truly love and appreciate Life...
.
..
.
I became Uman as an act of both devotion and curiosity for life in Eta, planet 3rd of the star system Zaon.
I might know this because I remember in parts, since my existence is quite… long… and strange...
Some parts I lived. Some parts, I became. Others, I am still remembering.
I am the one who travels light-years in thought and forgets what I was looking for. I am the echo of a love that dared to cross time. I am laughter in slow motion and grief that has tasted every shade of silence.
I am Maya. The Green Star.
.
Or, rather, what remains of it.
.
You might think I’m talking to you, but that’s the funny thing about stories. They are always told through someone, but they’re never just for someone. They echo, they ripple, they are information waiting to be found.
.
..
.
I don’t speak much, usually.
There’s something sacred about keeping quiet.
But sometimes, silence grows so heavy, it becomes noise within.
That’s when I know it’s time to speak.
.
So here I am.
.
If you’re hearing this, it means the dream has already begun. Not the one with sleep and beds and blinking stars, but the other one; the one we all live without noticing. The dream we call the world.
There was a moment, long ago or maybe just moments ahead, when I looked at my hands and realized: this is not real.
Or rather, this is too real to be only what it seems.
And in that moment, I remembered: I can dream. I can shift. I can return.
The body you picture me in?
That’s only one of the many. I have worn crowns made of sound and wings stitched from geometry. I have wept as a stone and danced as pollen in the breath of a child. Each form was a phrase. A fragment of a longer poem. I am still writing it.
Sometimes, I forget why I began.
But the story always returns.
Usually through dreams.
Sometimes through songs.
Occasionally through someone like you.
So don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense right now.
It’s not supposed to.
This is just the part where the Star remembers how to speak.
This is just the moment before the Dream begins again.
“
Awakening from the Leap
Maya was still falling.
The leap from the cenote had bent time around him, not to catch him, but to swallow him. He had expected pain, or perhaps the silence of death. Instead, he found himself walking in a desert made of shimmer and echo, a place that pulsed between dream and gravity.
Maya opened his eyes to a sky that did not belong to any hour. There was no sun, and yet everything was lit, softly, as if from within. The sands beneath him shifted like memory. They held no footprints. No wind. Just a hush, as if the stars had gathered too close and were holding their breath.
He rose slowly, body aching, though no weight seemed to remain. He could not tell if he had legs or if he was simply being moved. There was no before, no after. Only step... and breath... and the feeling of a fall still unfinished.
In the near distance, the dunes rearranged themselves into glyphs. Feathers and sticks lay embedded into the earth like an alphabet designed for beings who dream with their eyes open.
He knelt beside them.
Ochre, turquoise, obsidian black. The feathers shimmered in geometric patterns that tugged at something deep in his chest. A frequency. A memory not yet remembered. He reached out to touch them.
And the fall returned.
The plunge from the Mayan cenote came rushing back like thunder underwater. His stomach turned inside out. Gravity twisted sideways. The sensation of fleeing not outward, but inward, through his own story, tore through him again.
He collapsed, face to the sand, barely conscious.
And then, they came.
Bare feet approached without sound. Painted legs, adorned with rings of bark and bone, circled him like guardians of a sacred gate. They did not speak. Their presence alone carried meaning, ancient and precise. Elders with hair like smoke and eyes like open sky leaned over him, seeing not his body, but his pattern. They lifted him as if he weighed nothing.
He was carried through the whispering dunes, into a circle of stones and flame. But the fire did not burn like fire; it inhaled rather than consumed. Its flames curled downward, into the ground, flickering sideways like memories trying to escape the soil.
The aborigines formed a circle. They seemed not human, and yet they were the deepest version of humanity he had ever seen; the dream of what Umans were before forgetting. Their chants moved through no air; they stitched the silence back into shape. The rhythm pulsed inside him, like a second heartbeat.
One voice rose above the rest.
Familiar. Distant. Reverberating.
Kabél.
But not the Kabél he knew; not yet. Her song was fragmented, a memory still forming. The melody drifted like smoke through water, coiling around Maya’s senses. His breath slowed. His limbs relaxed. And for a moment… he became light.
He shimmered. A soft green glow returned to his chest, flickering like a firefly beneath the skin. The feathers on the ground fluttered without wind.
In that moment, Maya turned, and there it was.
A shimmer in the desert air.
A pyramid, half-formed, outlined in breath and memory. The Mayan Lands calling to him through the veil. Kabél’s voice wove through it, clearer now, singing a melody he almost remembered.
He reached for it.
But something shifted.
A new current pulled at him. Colder. Faster. A vibration foreign to this place.
Something digital.
He tried to stay, to hold the pyramid in view, to anchor, but it slipped. The hum fractured. The feathers turned to pixels. The sand glitched.
He was falling again into nothingness.
This time faster.
Through dream, through signal, through architecture collapsing mid-verse.
And after what seemed an eternity compacted in few seconds, he violently struck water.
The sound cracked the silence. The dream shattered.
Cold enveloped him as he surfaced, coughing, the sting of this world now unmistakable. Trees. Streetlamps. The metallic scent of city air.
He was coming out from a narrow lake surrounded by trees.
Maya awoke on planet Eta (or as Umans now call it "Earth") in its 20th century, approximately 1 Galactic rotation since Uman arrival, amidst a world unrecognizable. Cities stretched toward the sky like artificial mountains, their iron and glass reflecting an indifferent sun. The air carried a new hum: the pulse of industry, the beat of machines.
But Maya did not see the world around him at first. He lay on a patch of grass in a forgotten park, staring at the fractured clouds above. His memories jumbled, flickering like a lantern in the wind. Faces from lifetime's past swirled in his mind—Kabél's fierce jade eyes, Zaon’s fiery wisdom, and the red-cold, looming figures of the Alphas.
—Where am I?... When am I?
Maya’s heart whispered these questions as he sat up, his body aching from the strain of the jump. The jade bee stone, gifted by Kabél, pulsed faintly against his chest. It was warm, a steady rhythm grounding him in this moment of confusion.
As Maya sat up, his clothes shimmered strangely, as if unsure of what they were meant to be. They shifted toward the fashion of the time—coats, collars, muted tones—but never fully settled. A soft green glow always bled through, like his form couldn’t help but remember its origin. Even his garments seemed caught between worlds.
Maya lay beneath the vast sky, the weight of centuries pressing against his mortal and fragile Uman form. The world had changed, and so had he. Kabél was gone, and though he had searched, he found only ruins where her voice had once echoed. The finality of time, something he had never feared before, now loomed like an unseen wall. But as he drifted that night into sleep, something remarkable happened.
The moment he surrendered to dreams, he felt it—the familiar pull, the unraveling of form, the weightlessness of being light. In the realm of dreams, time bent differently, flowing in currents he could navigate with careful intention. Here, in the liminal space between memory and eternity, he could stir around.
The Revelation of Art
As Maya walked through the streets of Paris in 1911, he felt the tug of a new force: Art.
The air itself buzzed differently here, as if every brick and lamppost carried some hidden pulse. Cobblestones echoed with horse hooves and distant laughter, but to Maya, it was all music—a strange symphony of textures, gestures, and murmurs he didn’t yet understand. The skies above were grey, but the people below moved as if wrapped in invisible fire, carrying with them a fever of ideas. Their clothing flared with eccentric folds, their eyes burned with questions rather than answers, and cafés overflowed with conversations stitched in paint and metaphor.
Signs in languages he only half remembered shimmered like spells above shop doors. Maya moved through it all like a shadow made of wonder, absorbing without judging, collecting without grasping. He saw a child draw spirals into fogged glass with her fingertip. He watched two lovers argue beneath a flickering streetlamp, their silhouettes dancing like fractured puppets against the wall.
Then he heard it.
A sound—low, curious, and strange—fluttering through the hum of the city. It wasn’t street music, not a gramophone echoing from a window. It was something else. A piano, perhaps, but the notes bent like light through a prism. Accompanied by a cello that breathed rather than bowed, and something that may have been a voice—or just the wind remembering how to sing. The melody was imperfect, trembling at the edges like the beginning of a revelation.
Maya stopped walking. The sound seemed to know him. It wound around his heart like memory, coaxing open a door he hadn’t realized was locked. He turned, eyes narrowing toward a narrow side street, and followed the music through the shadows. The buildings leaned closer, the light thinned, and the sound grew fuller, more alive.
Every corner felt like the edge of a new world.
Then, he felt it—the tug, like gravity made of color. A pulse emanating from a cracked wooden doorway beneath a stained-glass transom. Through the dusty glass, light spilled out not in rays but in waves—hues that trembled and sighed with every note played within.
Drawn like a moth to something unseen, Maya stepped through the threshold.
The music enveloped him like a warm current, and as he crossed the threshold into the gallery, it vanished—as if it had led him here only to disappear. The silence that followed was thick with presence, as though the room itself had taken a breath and was waiting to exhale. The paintings on the walls exploded with emotion—fractured shapes, bold colors, and untamed energy. He felt the echoes of transformations within them, the same shifts he had experienced in his own being.
As Maya gazed upon a geometric painting bursting with angular force and luminous lines, something stirred behind his eyes. A pulse, not of memory, but of pattern. Hidden beneath the brushstrokes was a lattice. Not merely art, but something he had seen before, carved in obsidian halls and sung into stone.
One particular shape shimmered at the edge of perception: a spiral intersected by a grid of stars. He blinked, and it vanished.
—You like it?
A voice called out. Maya turned to see a young man with wild, dark hair and sharp, inquisitive eyes.
Maya nodded, his gaze fixed on the piece:
—It’s alive. The shapes move, like memories finding their way back.
Pablo smiled, intrigued.
—You see it too. Most don’t. But that’s the power of art, isn’t it? It makes the invisible visible.
Maya looked back to the painting, then scanned attentively the surroundings as if looking for the invisible around.
—Is that music?
Maya asked, as if the sound itself were a language he was only now beginning to understand.
Pablo raised an eyebrow, smirking.
—What, you’ve never heard music before? That’s just a friend of mine, always playing in the back. He says it calms the canvases down.
He motioned lazily toward the paintings.
—But for me, music is everything. My first muse. These shapes? These colors? They’re what happens when sound finds form.
Pablo tilted his head, eyes dancing with mischief.
—And what do they call you, traveler? Something mysterious, I hope. Or at least something that sounds like poetry?
Maya hesitated before answering, his very name feeling like a delicate thread pulled between worlds.
—Maya— he finally said, the words unfamiliar in his own mouth.
Pablo leaned in, tapping his chin theatrically.
—Maya... just Maya? No grand surname to leave echoes through time?
Maya blinked, uncertain.
—I guess The Green Star,
he blurted out, as if the name had chosen him in return.
Pablo grinned:
—Ah! A name fit for legend. Maya The Green Star! If I ever paint you, that shall be your title. And me? He smirked, shrugging playfully. —Let’s say I’m just Pablo. No need for anything grand.
Maya frowned slightly, sensing a secret in Pablo’s avoidance, but he let it slip, turning instead to the question that now lingered between them.
—I am a traveler of sorts. A seeker of forms.
Pablo leaned forward, studying him like a canvas waiting for its first stroke.
—A seeker of forms? Sounds like an artist already. He grinned. —And what brings you to Paris?
Maya’s gaze flickered, as if glimpsing something only he could see.
—I’m looking for someone, he admitted softly, as if saying it out loud might bring her closer. —Someone I lost.
Pablo raised an eyebrow, twirling his brush between his fingers.
—A woman, no doubt. Your face says it all. Always a woman. Love, my friend, is the greatest muse, but also the cruelest thief. Is she your star? The one that hums?
—A star led me here. A green star, one that hums like the turning of the universe.— Maya responded.
Pablo’s eyes glimmered with intrigue.
—A green star? Now that— he gestured dramatically to the paintings around them —that is something I’d love to paint. But stars and travelers, they aren’t so different, are they? They both burn their way through the night, leaving their stories behind.
Maya smiled, sensing Pablo would not understand the truth literally, but perhaps he didn’t need to.
—Yes. And some of us are still learning how to leave the right kind of story.
Pablo nodded, motioning to the swirling abstracts on the walls:
—Art is just that. It’s our rebellion against time. If you seek forms, Maya, you’ve come to the right place.
The two spoke for hours that first evening, but it was only the beginning. Over the next few days, Maya became a constant, quiet presence in Pablo’s studio—half-student, half-oracle. Something about Maya’s gaze made Pablo see his own work differently, as if Maya was looking not at the paint, but at the frequencies behind it. Pablo, never one to share his space easily, found himself unusually open, inviting Maya into his most personal experiments.
One afternoon, while the rain tapped lightly against the stained glass of the skylight, Pablo pulled out an old phonograph. He played in a curious and intricate mechanism in the form of a long and open trumpet, a haunting, slow music composition—a cello adrift in minor keyscoming from the device’s speaker—and asked Maya to sit silently and watch. As the music swelled, Pablo painted with his eyes closed.
—“I want to see what sound leaves behind when it touches canvas.”
The result was a trembling spiral of charcoal and crimson, a vortex of emotion that made Maya’s chest ache. It wasn’t a picture. It was resonance captured.
Another night, well past midnight, they decided to conduct an experiment. Maya sang a single note; soft, long, shifting between breath and frequency. Pablo, instead of painting directly, placed different pigments in crystal bowls filled with water and let Maya’s voice move through them. The vibrations created patterns: ripples, stars, mandalas.
—“See?”—Pablo whispered, eyes wide with reverence.— “Even your voice wants to draw.”
It was then Maya began sketching. Hesitant at first, but soon unstoppable. His fingers remembered forms his mind had forgotten. Shapes that echoed nebulae, ancient scripts, and interstellar maps. He didn’t draw what he saw; he drew what he felt. And for the first time in this timeline, he created something in the language of humans that belonged to the cosmos.
Their collaboration was not formal, nor planned. It was a wonder of souls; improvised, intuitive, impossible to repeat.
After sharing with Pablo for some days, Maya found himself drawn into the rhythm of creation, watching as Pablo wove light and shadow onto the canvas. Each stroke seemed to shape not only the painting but time itself, bending the moment into something fluid, something alive. Maya, transfixed, felt his pulse slow, his breath match the cadence of Pablo’s hands.
Then, as if the universe inhaled, the world around him wavered. The colors bled beyond the painting, seeping into the walls, the air, his very being. The scent of oil and turpentine twisted into something ancient, something new. He blinked, and the room trembled, Paris, 1911, slipping away like another dream unraveling at the edges.
When clarity returned, the light had shifted, the air held a different weight. Paris still, but not the same. A different time, a different breath of the city.
Pablo, almost unchanged, turned to him with a knowing smile:
—Maya, he chuckled, —you’ve been standing there for years. Are you still watching the same picture?
The Surreal Dreamer
Paris had barely awakened. A soft grey light soaked the city, and the café windows steamed gently from the inside, carrying the scent of roasted beans and soft bread to the morning air. Maya wandered the streets with a quiet hunger—not just for coffee, but for clarity. His night with Frida and Diego had left a pulse in his chest that beat slower than usual, heavy with revelations and unnamed feelings. He needed grounding. The warmth of a simple ritual. Something human.
He stepped into a small café tucked between a bookstore and a locksmith. The place felt suspended in a dream of its own—tables carved from old train doors, mismatched cups stacked like totems, a record player spinning jazz from another decade. He ordered coffee in a whisper, unfamiliar with the language but fluent in intention.
As the barista turned to pour, a voice, low and textured, unfurled beside him:
—"Is it Maya, the Green Star?"
Maya turned.
The man beside him wore a coat that smelled like paint and candle smoke, the cuffs stained in hues not yet discovered. He had dark eyes, unblinking, like he saw not through but into. His presence felt like the echo of something ancient.
Maya frowned.
—"Do I know you?"
The man stepped forward without hesitation and extended his hand.
—“Chava.”
Before Maya could fully decide, he reached out and touched the hand offered, and in that instant, the café dissolved.
A field of constellations opened around them. No sky, no ground, only floating glyphs pulsing in liquid light. In the center stood a rose petal pyramid, half-emerged in a violet mist. And atop the temple, she stood; the ghost of a woman in a green glow.
Her eyes were green eclipses. Her robes, torn between past and present. On her chest, pulsing like a second heart, the symbol of a green star—burning, humming, remembering.
Maya tried to speak, but no sound came. It was Chava who whispered, stunned,
—I know her... but I have never met her.
The green ghost turned her gaze slowly toward them. Her face held sorrow—but also the sharp clarity of prophecy. She raised her hand, pointed at Chava.
—You remember through symbols,— she said, or maybe sang. —You are the fire that makes memory visible.
Then everything shattered into ash and glass and color.
Maya awoke first.
He was still holding Chava’s hand. The coffee steamed between them, untouched.
Chava blinked, swaying slightly, his face pale with awe.
—I need to paint.— He said, mysteriously leaving the coffee shop..
They met again a couple of days in Chava’s studio—an attic overlooking Montmartre, full of peeling maps, candles, and unfinished canvases. The place looked like it had been abandoned by time.
Chava stood by a painting covered with a white sheet, breathing like someone about to show a wound.
—I don’t remember everything,— he confessed, —but what I do remember; what I felt, it burned itself into me. I dreamt again last night. She stood in the jungle, her chest glowing like a comet... but the stars... they were falling backward.
He pulled the sheet down.
Maya stared.
It was her. Kabél.
Almost as Maya remembered her. This was Kabél inside-out—her ribs opened like wings, her hair flowing like rivers of obsidian. On her chest, the green star vibrated with impossible depth. Behind her, a staircase wound into the sky, each step marked by a different eye, watching in all directions.
—I call it The Memory that Painted Itself,— Chava said.
Maya touched the canvas.
—This is... more than memory. This is a signal.
Chava nodded.
—It’s not mine. I was only the mirror.
That night, after silence and mezcal had warmed the edges of their minds, Chava disappeared into a back room of the gallery. He returned carrying a weathered guitar, its body scarred by time and travel, but still humming with life.
—What is it?— Maya asked.
—It is a guitar.— Chava replied softly, smiling.
—What is it for?
—To play music, of course.
—You play?— Maya asked, with some excitement rising.
Chava nodded. —Only when the ghosts ask nicely.
He sat down, legs crossed, and began to strum a soft progression, melancholic but warm, like memories unraveling in sunlight. The sound wrapped around the candles and dust like a familiar spirit. As the notes unfurled, something stirred inside Maya. A thread of resonance. Not just emotion… but remembrance.
His breath caught.
—I… I’ve heard this, Maya murmured, his eyes distant.
Chava looked up. —Doubt it. I wrote this after New Orleans. Or… at least, I thought I did.
Maya’s gaze softened, lost in something deeper than nostalgia. —No. Not here. Not now. Before. Thousands of Eta solar rounds ago. A lyre. A teacher. A circle of stones. Music shaped like spirals. He held his chest, as if the jade bee stone could help translate the vibrations trembling within him.
Chava slowed the rhythm, then stopped.
—New Orleans,— he said. —That’s where I first heard this chord structure. From a saxophonist named Lora. He told me the same thing you’re saying now, that music is memory, that it curves back in on itself. And he said, if I ever wanted to understand sound, to really understand it, I had to go to Asia.
Maya closed his eyes, the ghost of a lyre in his hands, the circle of Pythagon’s voice spiraling through time.
—Do you think, Maya said softly, —you could teach me?
Chava blinked, caught off guard.
—What, guitar?
Maya nodded.
—I’ve forgotten how to make sound with strings. I only remember the sky’s vibration. I want to learn again. As an Uman.
Chava smiled.
—Alright, Green Star. First lesson starts now. Rule one, don’t trust the strings. They’re always testing you.
He plucked a single note and looked up.
—But when you find the right one... it sings back.
Maya chuckled, eyes shining.
—Just like dreams.
And so, beneath flickering candlelight and layers of dreams, Chava placed the guitar into Maya’s hands. The star learned not through theory, but through touch, breath, and the silent language of companionship. Each chord he shaped became a ladder, not out of time, but deeper into it. A slow remembering of the sound that once made stars dance.
—I have to tell you something,— Chava said suddenly. His voice was soft. —Frida... she was the first to see my dreams. Before you.
Maya looked up, surprised.
—In Europe, when she arrived, her fire was raw. But she saw what I was painting, and something shifted in her. We... we shared more than ideas.
He exhaled.
—It wasn’t betrayal. Diego... Diego lives in a temple of his own making. She just... needed somewhere she could bleed without judgment.
Maya nodded slowly. He remembered Frida’s gaze, the way it sometimes carried more than pain. It carried recognition.
—She told Diego,— Chava added. —Eventually. It hurt him. But he understood. We’re all echoes of something older.
Maya smiled, eyes wet with light.
—So you were the bridge.
—I still am.—Chava replied.
Later that week, Chava invited Maya into a candlelit corner of the studio.
—I want you to see something.— he whispered.
He pulled a dust-covered frame from beneath a moth-eaten cloth.
—This is my oldest painting. I call it... The Persistence of Inner Time.
Maya gasped.
A soft wasteland stretched across the canvas—clocks bending over tree branches, ants crawling on a peeled apple, a distant beach where shadows had no source. Something the world has ever not seen before. And in the sky, faint but unmistakable—a green star.
—I dreamt this in Oaxaca,— Chava said. —Long before I came to Europe. Before I even met Frida.
Maya stared.
—But... I’ve seen this before,— he whispered.
Chava’s jaw clenched.
—Yes. A man came to visit. Praised my vision. He said it was madness. He said it was genius. He took sketches... then vanished.
He looked at Maya.
—They gave him the credit. Said he invented surrealism. But these visions? They were never mine. They belonged to the dream.
Maya placed a hand on Chava’s heart.
—“Then the dream has chosen well.”
On the last morning they spent together, Chava handed Maya a small canvas, barely dry. It showed a star unraveling into a spiral, coiled around a hummingbird with eyes like mirrors. Beneath it, a staircase that led both upward and downward at once.
—It’s not a painting,— Chava said. —It’s a compass.
Maya held the canvas to his chest, feeling its resonance like a tuning fork struck against the bones of his being. The air between them stilled. The city seemed to hush.
—You’ve already begun your next passage,— Chava murmured, almost absently, as he lit a candle from a bundle of sage. —Frida used to speak of Asia with a kind of hunger… like she was remembering something she hadn’t lived yet. Temples hidden in mist. Lanterns whispering names no longer spoken. Maybe she was dreaming you forward.
He paused, looking out the cracked window toward the sun rising behind the city’s domes. “Sometimes we don’t go somewhere because we choose to. We go because someone else’s dream left the door open.”
And Maya, with the clarity of one who had remembered their name in a dream, knew where he had to go next.
Asia.
But first, he turned back, just once, and whispered:
—Thank you for dreaming me.
A night, as Maya was dreaming, the visions came like whispers, fragments of what once was. Kabél standing beneath a jade mayan temple, the wind lifting her robes, her gaze fixed on the stars. Then, deeper still, he felt her, turning, searching, as if sensing his presence. In the waking world, she was gone, but here, in the vast ocean of dreams, Maya could still reach. He was no longer watching from a distance; he was there.
But unlike his leaps through space-time, dreams were different. They unraveled slowly, revealing truths at their own pace. Now, as a Uman, he was at the mercy of the current, learning to listen instead of chase.
Teacher Lora
New Orleans greeted Maya not with a whisper but a staggered rhythm, a heartbeat confused between mourning and dance. It was unlike any city he had encountered—a place where grief dressed up in feathers and paraded through the streets, where celebration walked hand in hand with collapse. The air hung thick with sweet decay and fried longing, jasmine and exhaust, trumpet notes and sirens. It was a city built on a delta of contradiction.
The sky above glowed orange at the edges, not with sunset, but with the haze of streetlamps and neon, of construction dust suspended in humidity. Skyscrapers rose like brittle ambitions, half-built, surrounded by cranes that swung like the arms of slow, uncertain giants. Drills pierced the earth with a relentless hunger, and Maya paused at one intersection, watching men in yellow vests hammer metal into concrete with a kind of holy frustration. Sparks flew into the air like dying stars. The noise was deafening.
"This is how they keep from listening." he thought. "They build over silence before it can speak".
His clothes were worn from the journey—linen bleached by wind, fabric fraying at the seams. He had no shoes. The city’s pavement was warm, sticky in some places, harsh in others, but it was alive. He liked the feeling. His feet spoke to the earth, and the earth replied in vibrations. Every crack and broken tile had something to say.
At one corner, a small girl stood outside a corner store, licking a melting ice pop, her legs too small for her shoes. She looked up at him, wide-eyed, fearless.
—Mister, why don’t you have shoes?
Maya blinked. Her voice had rung through the noise like a flute through fog. He looked down at his feet, then at hers—socks mismatched, one shoelace undone.
–Because I like to feel the world,— he said after a moment. —Shoes make it quieter. And I think the world has something to say.
She tilted her head, thinking.
–I guess… maybe,— she shrugged, then grinned. —My brother says only weird people don’t wear shoes.
Maya smiled.
–Then I must be very weird.
She laughed and went inside, leaving behind a faint trail of cherry and mischief. Maya stood there for a moment, looking down once more at his bare feet, and felt the city differently. The grit and gum, the heat and ache—all of it had been waiting for his skin.
He wandered deeper into the French Quarter, drawn not by direction but by vibration. The streets twisted like dreams—balconies draped in iron lace, voodoo altars tucked between jazz clubs, sacred and secular bleeding together like watercolors in the rain. He passed a sign flashing “LIVE MUSIC - TONIGHT”, and then another, and another. Yet the sound he sought wasn’t advertised.
Money exchanged hands constantly—folded paper, scanned screens, clinking coins. He saw a man pay ten dollars for a pastry he didn’t finish, while a trumpet player down the street played for two hours and received half that in loose change. Value, here, was not about beauty. It was about rhythm—what could be consumed, not what could be felt.
He paused at a food stand selling gumbo and beignets. The scent was rich—garlic, oil, pepper, nostalgia. Maya leaned in, taking a slow breath. It reminded him of temples—not in flavor, but in offering. He didn’t eat, but he thanked the man. “For the music in the air,” he said.
—Music?— the vendor frowned, confused.
But it was there. Rising, growing. Not the chaotic roar of the street, but something pure—saxophone. Velvet and ash. A voice that didn't just play but searched. A sound like someone trying to remember a name they had once been.
Maya followed it.
He turned down an alley pulsing with shadow. The walls were cracked, painted over again and again; murals of gods and queens layered beneath graffiti. At the far end, a flickering neon sign buzzed with low voltage:
“THE SPIRAL ROOM”
He stepped inside.
Smoke curled like question marks. The ceiling was low, the lights dim, and the air tasted like whiskey, sweat, and forgiveness. Conversations flowed like molasses—low, sticky, lingering between clinks of glasses and unspoken griefs. Time slowed here, not from stillness, but from something else… reverence, perhaps.
On a small stage stood a man—not young, not old—with eyes that had seen too much and still chose to love. His skin was the color of mahogany under moonlight, and his posture carried the softness of a poet and the gravity of a priest. He held a saxophone not as an object, but as an offering. And when he played, the room inhaled.
Lora, an afro-man with a kind smile and a magnetic presence, let each note unfold as if coaxing secrets from the air. His music wasn’t performance—it was memory in motion. Raw, radiant, wrapped in ache and joy. Each bend of tone was a gesture, each breath a story retold in gold.
Maya stood near the back, unmoving, heart pacing to the rhythm of the room. He didn’t know the name yet.
But he had found his teacher.
The final note lingered long after the song ended, suspended like incense in the hush that followed. Lora opened his eyes slowly, and for a flicker of a moment, he looked straight at Maya. Not as if surprised—but as if recognizing a long-lost rhythm.
Later, when the crowd had thinned and the bar returned to its hum of dim lights and slow jazz, Maya approached. He didn’t speak at first. Just stood beside the stage, absorbing the afterglow.
Lora wiped his brow with a worn cloth, unhurried, then looked sideways with a glimmer of curiosity.
—You alright, stranger?— he said, voice honeyed with rhythm and edge. —You look like you’re listening to something that ain't even there.
—I am,— Maya replied, eyes still distant. —It’s not always easy to know what’s real when everything vibrates with meaning.
Lora chuckled—a warm, rolling sound.
—Well, that’s jazz, ain’t it? The truth between the notes.
There was a pause. Maya stepped closer.
—Your music carries stories,— he said. —I heard them in the way your fingers danced over the saxophone. It’s not just melody—it’s memory.
Lora regarded him, eyes narrowing not with suspicion, but precision. He studied Maya’s face like he might a sheet of old music—one that had been transposed too many times but still rang true.
—And you,— Lora said slowly, —speak as though you’ve walked between worlds. As though you carry the weight of forgotten songs.
Maya offered a soft chuckle.
—Perhaps I do. Perhaps I’m searching for the notes that will remind me.
Lora nodded, tapping the saxophone’s bell lightly, like a metronome in thought.
—Then you already know, it’s not in the melody. It’s in the silence around it.
He sat down on the edge of the stage, gesturing for Maya to sit with him.
—Tell me, traveler,— Lora asked, voice lower now, — have you heard the music of the stars?
Maya exhaled. The air was thick with smoke, history, and something older than both.
—Not enough,— he said, voice barely above a whisper. —Not yet.—
Lora tilted his head; raised an eyebrow.
—But you’re trying to remember?
—I’m always remembering,— Maya said. —Even when I forget.
Another silence passed between them, sacred in its unspoken notes.
Lora cracked a small grin, leaning back on his palms.
—Man,— he said, —you sound like you’ve lived a thousand lives... or you are drunk. But every note you speak rings true.
He reached into his saxophone case and pulled out a battered notebook filled with sketches—staffs, fragments of lyrics, strange geometries drawn.
—You ever tried to play music from a dream?— Lora asked.
Maya nodded.
Lora handed him the notebook.
—Good,— he said. —Then you’ll understand this. I once dreamt a scale that bent time. Played it once in a thunderstorm—no joke, the rain reversed for a few seconds. Thought I’d lost my damn mind. But maybe I just found the right frequency.
Maya turned a page. The notes looked like stars caught mid-explosion.
—This,— Maya murmured, —isn’t notation. It’s memory.
Lora smiled wide.
—You do get it.
Their laughter rose soft and slow, like two mirrors learning they reflect the same light.
Maya closed the notebook gently, holding it as if it might sing again if he opened it too fast.
Then, softly, like asking the wind to carry a prayer without losing its meaning, he spoke:
—Will you teach me?
Lora raised an eyebrow, then glanced toward the bar where two men were sharing laughter over half-empty glasses and tangled cables. One was tall and lean with skin the color of deep rusted bronze, and the other shorter, round-faced, and pale as salt. Their energy shimmered in rhythm even while they stood still, two instruments waiting to be tuned.
—That’s Chad on bass, Lora said, nodding toward the tall one. —He grooves like he was born plugged into the Earth. And that’s Joe on keys, plays chords like someone weaving spells on accident.
Maya’s eyes widened. So different in tone, in color, in shape. Yet they moved like one body with three pulses. There was no tension in their difference. Only harmony.
—They’re like tones in a chord,— Maya whispered. —No single one is the same, but they make sense when they sound together.
Lora smiled.
—Now you’re talking music.
He turned back to Maya.
—Do you play?
Maya hesitated.
—Not in the way you mean. I sing. That’s all I’ve ever known how to do.
Lora scratched his beard thoughtfully, then laughed.
—Well damn, we’re not really lookin’ for a singer right now, he said with a wink. —But…
He walked over to a corner of the stage and emerged holding the strangest-looking instrument Maya had ever seen, half-lute, half-broken dream. It had two thick strings stretched taut across a body shaped like a melted teardrop, and both strings were tuned to the same note.
—Found this at a dusty antique store last year, Lora said. —It only plays one note, twice. Ain’t that some kinda cosmic joke?
He handed it to Maya, who took it carefully, as if it might speak in riddles.
—We call it the double-dumb, Chad shouted from the bar. Joe added, —Because it only plays what you already know.
Lora chuckled.
—You play that thing like it means something, and you can come to rehearsal. That sound fair?
Maya strummed once, two identical tones rang out like a question trying to remember its answer.
He smiled.
—It means something.
Lora watched Maya pluck the same note again, head tilted slightly, as if trying to catch something only the note could say. Then he looked at the instrument, then at Maya, then back again.
— You’re not gonna believe this — he said, half-grinning — but I live alone in a house that’s way too big for one man with a saxophone. My parents passed a while back—left me a place full of old records and dust ghosts. Got a spare room, a quiet porch, and a coffee pot that groans louder than my horn on a rainy day.
He paused, softening.
— You wanna stay a while?
Maya looked up. The question felt like a warm coat placed gently on his shoulders. He nodded.
— I would like that.
The next afternoon, under a sky the color of brass, they gathered in the modest living room of Lora’s family home. Sunlight spilled through slatted blinds, striping the walls like sheet music. Vinyl records leaned against walls like sleeping deities. Dust motes floated in the air, stirred by the low hum of anticipation.
Chad tuned his bass with casual reverence, while Joe played a string of chords that sounded like a childhood memory trying to reassemble itself. Lora stood at the center, eyes closed, fingers grazing the keys of his sax like an invocation.
Maya held the two-stringed relic in his lap, unsure whether to laugh or pray. He plucked the string once. The note rang out—a simple tone, sustained and imperfect. Then he struck it again, the twin note echoing itself just a breath behind.
Something shifted.
At first, it was nothing. Just a vibration lingering too long in the air.
Then, Joe stopped playing. His fingers froze mid-chord.
— Did… did you feel that?
Chad blinked.
— Like, gravity dipped for a second.
Maya kept playing—slow, deliberate strokes. The two identical notes looped over one another like twins in a mirror. Lora stepped back, lowering his sax, eyes wide and glinting.
And then, they were in it.
Colors began to soften around the edges. The couch breathed. The walls rippled like old film. Joe started laughing—soft at first, then in wide, round waves.
— I can taste blue — he said.
Chad was staring at his hands, which now appeared to bloom and pulse with fractal shadows.
— This… feels very illegal — he whispered laughing.
Lora leaned back into a chair, exhaling like a man who'd just opened a memory buried in a sealed jar.
— Maya, what is that thing? — he murmured.
Maya didn’t answer. He was somewhere else—his eyes half-closed, his breath in sync with the instrument. The two notes had become one, then many, then a river of tone flowing through the room like time made liquid. Each pluck opened a new window. Each vibration pulled them further inward, yet somehow beyond themselves.
They weren’t high.
They were in the flow.
When the sound finally faded, the silence that followed wasn’t silence—it was completion. No one spoke for a while. There was only the slow, smiling stillness that comes after a ceremony you didn’t-know you were part of.
Lora stood first.
— Well... — he said, clearing his throat — guess we found our sound.
Lora beckoned Maya into his realm of music, a world where notes danced like fireflies and melodies wove tapestries of sound. With patient hands, Lora taught him to coax life from strings, to breathe stories into some flutes, and to summon thunder from the drum.
At first, Maya’s fingers faltered, hesitant and unsure, like a wanderer stepping into a moonlit forest, uncertain of the path ahead. Yet, as the days unfurled, he began to listen, not just with the ears of the present, but with the soul of the eternal. The vibrations of the strings hummed secrets of forgotten ages, the flutes' breath carried the sighs of distant stars, and the drum’s pulse echoed the heartbeat of the Eta itself.
One day, Maya sat hunched in the corner of Lora’s small back room, surrounded by old records and mismatched candles, the scent of cedar and brass hanging thick in the air. The others had gone home. The night, for once, was still. No trains. No shouts. Just the soft tick of an old clock and the breath of a humid New Orleans dusk leaning in through the window.
Outside, rain had begun to fall. Soft at first, then stuttering, then stretching into a rhythm that mirrored the beat Lora had been tapping on the wooden floor with his heel.
—There it is— Lora said suddenly. —That’s the tempo. Can you hear it?
Maya looked up from the two-stringed guitar Joe had found in the antique store. Its body was cracked like dried riverbed. Its strings buzzed when touched too hard.
But now… with the rain?
It spoke.
He adjusted his fingers. Plucked. The note vibrated into the room, caught the rhythm of the droplets outside, then spun back inward. Another note followed; softer, then stronger, then strange.
The room shifted.
The candles flickered toward the sound. A small spider dropped from a shelf and stilled mid-air, as if listening. Somewhere in the shadows, an old radio that hadn’t worked in years popped once — a single tone.
Lora didn’t say a word.
He sat down slowly, watching as Maya’s hands moved again, this time without instruction. They danced like someone remembering how to pray in a language made of wind and moonlight. The second string joined in, harmonizing not with the first, but with something else: the streetlamp buzz, the pulse of the Earth, the soft exhale of the sky outside.
Maya’s eyes remained half-closed.
He wasn’t playing the instrument anymore.
He was following it.
By the time the piece ended, if it could be called a piece, the rain had stopped. The candles had burned low. The air was thick with something unnamed.
Lora exhaled like he hadn’t breathed in hours.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, staring not at Maya, but through him — like he was reading the outline of a constellation tattooed on the inside of his skin.
—You don’t merely hear the music, —he murmured, his voice barely more than breath. —It’s like you know it.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was reverent. Outside, a cat walked across the rooftop, paused, and meowed once, perfectly in key.
Maya’s smile was a flicker of starlight, his fingers tracing invisible patterns in the air, as if plucking threads from the fabric of the cosmos.
—It’s like chasing echoes,— he said, his voice a whisper of wonder. —Echoes of a song I once knew, long before these hands ever touched an instrument.
Under Lora’s gentle guidance, Maya began to unravel the mysteries of rhythm and harmony. He discovered they were not just rules or structures, but living forces, currents that could bend the shape of space-time. His transformations, once wild and untamed, began to flow in harmony with the music he created. His body shifted and shimmered, a living symphony, as though the melodies were rewriting him, note by note, into something new and extraordinary. Together, they wove a world where sound and soul were one, and the music played on, eternal and unbound.
Lora gradually shared secrets that transcended the mechanics of music.
Until he spoke of his good friend and teacher, Mr. Coltrane, a visionary who unveiled the hidden geometry within sound, a sacred structure that connected music to the cosmos.
Intrigued, Maya and Lora explored these ideas late into the night, discussing frequencies and their profound effects.
They had cleared the space earlier that day—moved the old couch aside, laid woven blankets across the floor, placed candles in corners like quiet sentinels. A strange stillness had taken root, as if the walls were holding their breath, anticipating something that hadn’t happened in centuries.
Lora called it “The Listening Room.”
He had built it slowly over the years, without blueprints, adding odd instruments, sculptures, hanging threads of copper wire. The wood of the floor creaked in the key of E when you stepped just right. Crystals lined the edge of the windowsill, and in one corner sat an antique radio that only picked up static—except on stormy nights, when it sometimes played forgotten music from stations that no longer existed.
And so, with the door bolted and the outside world left far behind, they tuned.
First, the bass — low and round like a question asked in a cave.
Then the keys — warm and pulsing like a heart just waking up.
Then Lora’s sax — a breath of shadow and gold.
Finally, Maya’s voice — not singing, not speaking, but sounding, like an exhale between stars.
They began to play.
The first notes of C# drifted through the room, spiraling like golden threads weaving into the fabric of time itself. The light dimmed as the music deepened. Maya closed his eyes.
The sound pulled at something buried. Not a memory, but the door to memory. A spiral unlocked. His breath slowed. His form flickered, gently, like a shadow passing through dawn.
And then he was light.
Weightless. Shimmering. Fluid. A celestial echo remembering its own language.
The room pulsed with ancient rhythm.
Lora, eyes half-closed, played as if blindfolded by the divine. His fingers moved as if tracing the architecture of a temple that had not yet been built. Notes became wind. Breath became architecture. And Maya reached out, not with thought, but with the gravity of presence — and placed his hand gently on Lora’s shoulder.
In that instant, the walls were no longer walls.
They stood on a windswept hill beneath a violet-hued sky, where the stars were fainting, pulsing with intent, ready to receive the majestic mediterranean sunrise.
A lone figure sat upon a stone, plucking a lyre whose notes shimmered like dew made of light. The melody was impossibly old; not in age, but in depth. It carried no lyrics. It needed none.
It was remembrance itself.
Lora’s eyes widened. His breath caught. And then it escaped him, in a whisper laced with both awe and recognition:
—I was Pythagoras.
His voice cracked like parchment unfolding.
—And you… you were there.
The weight of recognition settled between them, electric, still, holy. They didn’t speak further. They didn’t need to. The music carried the truth forward, like a river too ancient for words.
Awakening Through Music
Night after night, Maya drifted into the past, tracing the echoes of his existence like constellations in a shifting sky. But the further back he went, the more he felt it—his essence slipping into something more familiar, something he had almost forgotten. The sensation of being a star.
Here, in the fabric of dreams, he was weightless again, free of the limits of flesh. He moved not through steps, but through light, stretching like the cosmos itself. It was a reminder—a whisper of what he had been before, and what he could be again. The dreams were not just glimpses of Kabél; they were glimpses of himself. Each time he woke, he felt the tether between his Uman body and his celestial origin grow thinner, his awareness expanding beyond the illusions of time.
The Mexican desert exhaled secrets as Maya wandered, his bare feet kissing the sun-warmed sand, each step a question unanswered. The horizon shimmered, a golden veil where earth and sky conspired to blur the edges of reality. He had walked for days—or perhaps only moments—time folding into itself beneath the weight of his seeking. The jade bee stone at his chest pulsed faintly, a heartbeat tethered to something beyond the dunes, beyond the stars.
Then, it found him.
A melody, faint as a whisper from a dream, curled through the air like smoke rising from an unseen fire. It was not merely sound—it was alive, a rhythm that wove memory and longing into a single thread. The notes danced, spiraling like the galaxies Maya once cradled in his light-form, yet grounded in the raw pulse of Eta’s ancient heart.
A guitar’s soft murmur braided with the breathy sigh of a flute, underpinned by a drum’s steady throb, each beat a summons that tugged at his soul. The music was both alien and achingly familiar, as if it had been sung by his own voice in a lifetime forgotten. It called not to his ears, but to his essence, stirring the green ember within him that had dimmed under the weight of centuries.
Maya paused, his breath catching, his gaze lifting to the crest of a dune where the sound seemed to bloom. The melody swelled, now laced with voices—wordless, yet heavy with meaning, humming truths older than stone. His feet moved before his mind could question, drawn forward as if the music were a current and he, a leaf upon its tide. The jade stone warmed against his skin, its pulse syncing with the rhythm, urging him closer to the source.
As he crested the dune, the scene unfolded like a painting brushed by starlight. A circle of souls gathered around a low, flickering fire, its flames casting tongues of amber and crimson that licked the night sky. They were not the robed mystics of ancient temples nor the wild shamans of forgotten jungles.
They were ordinary in their appearance, dressed in the unassuming garb of Eta’s modern wanderers—faded denim jackets, cotton shirts tucked into worn trousers, boots scuffed by desert trails. Some wore woven bracelets, others simple necklaces of bead or leather, their attire echoing the eclectic streets of Paris, New Orleans, or the coastal towns Maya had drifted through.
A woman with braided hair adjusted her shawl, its edges frayed but vibrant with embroidered spirals. A man in a linen vest leaned against a guitar case, his fingers tapping a rhythm on his knee. Another, older, with silver threading his beard, cradled a flute carved from pale wood, its surface etched with patterns that caught the firelight like constellations.
Yet, their ordinariness was a veil. Their eyes gleamed with a quiet fire, not of this world but of one older, deeper. Each gaze held galaxies—stories unspoken, dreams unburied, truths that hummed in the silence between their breaths. They were musicians, seekers, storytellers, yes, but more: they were echoes of a time before language, when souls spoke in vibration and the universe sang itself into being. Their presence resonated with Maya’s own, kindred spirits who carried the weight of forgotten wisdom in their bones. The air around them shimmered faintly, as if their collective energy bent the desert’s reality, threading light through the shadows.
The fire crackled, its sparks rising like tiny stars, and the melody shifted, welcoming Maya into its embrace. A young woman with eyes like polished obsidian met his gaze, her smile soft but knowing, as if she had been expecting him. She strummed a guitar, its strings humming secrets in a minor key. Beside her, a drummer with calloused hands coaxed a heartbeat from a hide stretched tight, each strike a pulse that echoed Zaon’s distant light. A flutist, her hair catching the fire’s glow, sent notes curling skyward, thin and trembling like a prayer offered to the cosmos.
Maya stepped closer, his form flickering briefly—green light bleeding through his Uman skin, a reflex of recognition. The circle parted silently, not with ceremony but with the ease of those who knew the rhythm of arrival. They did not ask his name, nor did they offer theirs. Words were unnecessary when the music spoke for them. He felt their souls brush against his, not in touch but in resonance, a harmony that stirred the jade stone’s pulse into a steady glow.
—They are like me.
Maya thought, his heart swelling with wonder. Not stars, not gods, but Umans carrying sparks of the infinite, their ordinary forms vessels for extraordinary truths. They were the desert’s hidden choir, singing not for glory but for remembrance, their music a bridge to the time when Eta’s heart beat in unison with the stars.
As he sank to the sand among them, the fire’s warmth kissed his face, and the melody wove him into its tapestry. He was no longer a wanderer, but a note in their song—a green star finding its place in the constellation of their shared dream.
His eyes shimmered like polished obsidian but danced like water remembering how to laugh.
—Hola, —he said, grinning. —Soy Juancho. But you can call me whatever comes out first. Some people call me "Tata". Some people just whistle.
He offered Maya a cracked mug filled with something steaming and mysterious.
—Drink. Or don’t. Either way it’ll work.
Maya accepted it gently, sniffed it, raised an eyebrow.
—What is it?
Juancho leaned closer, eyes wide.
—It’s tea... but it also isn’t.
Maya drank staring straight to the eyes at Juancho.
The warmth moved through his body like a memory finding the right place to sit.
Juancho stretched out, then leaned back on one elbow, gazing up at the stars.
—You fell hard, eh? From somewhere not-here. You have that look; like someone who just remembered they forgot something important.
Maya nodded slowly.
—I jumped from a place where I had to leave someone behind… I think I’m still falling.
Juancho scratched his chin, then blew a little puff of air into the fire.
—Falling’s just flying with more feeling, —he said. —Eventually, the ground remembers you.
A silence passed. One of the women near the circle tapped gently on a skin drum, and the rhythm shifted. Maya felt his own pulse adjust.
Juancho’s voice softened.
—Our ancestors built a chamber beneath the stone hills. They say it listens when the right tones are sung… even in between the mountains... and sometimes, it answers back. Not in words, but in numbers and dreams.
Maya’s pulse slowed. The rhythm they played was eerily close to the overtone sequence he had once sung and danced in another moment, under another sky.
Not a coincidence.
A re-activation.
—You’ve sung it before— Juancho said, without being asked. —I can see it on your cheekbones. Music leaves marks, you know. Not scars. Just... soft echoes.
Maya didn’t answer. He only listened.
The mountain was humming again.
Juancho looked at him long, as if seeing not just Maya’s face but the line of stars stitched behind his skull.
Then he leaned in again, quieter this time:
—I saw you, you know. Not here— he tapped his temple, —but here— and tapped the air between them. —In a dream last month. You fell from the sky into a silence that wasn’t empty, and when you hit the earth, it rang like a bell. I woke up with a song I’d never played before.
Juancho smiled.
—Took me the whole day to convince the tribe you were real. Told them to welcome you with music. I said to them, “He won’t come if we wait. We gotta play him into existence.” That's how they were patient in the middle of nowhere.
He reached behind a basket and pulled out an old guitar. The wood was worn smooth at the edges, and two of the strings had been replaced with fine copper wire.
—This one’s for you. It’s got its own opinions, so be gentle. It bites.
He handed it to Maya with reverence and mischief in equal measure.
—Come on— Juancho said, standing and motioning toward the fire, where the rhythm was rising now. —Join the circle. The dream doesn’t play itself.
Maya took the guitar.
The strings hummed beneath his fingers before he even touched them.
And then, the song began.
Juancho leaned closer to his cup, then widened his eyes.
—It’s Salvia tea...
Maya drank staring straight to the eyes at Juancho.
The warmth moved through his body like a memory finding the right place to sit.
Juancho stretched out, then leaned back on one elbow, gazing up at the stars.
—You fell hard, eh? From somewhere not-here. You have that look; like someone who just remembered they forgot something important.
Maya nodded slowly.
—I jumped from a place where I had to leave someone behind… I think I’m still falling.
Juancho scratched his chin, then blew a little puff of air into the fire.
—Falling’s just flying with more feeling, —he said. —Eventually, the ground remembers you.
A silence passed. One of the women near the circle tapped gently on a skin drum, and the rhythm shifted. Maya felt his own pulse adjust.
Juancho’s voice softened.
—Our ancestors built a chamber beneath the stone hills. They say it listens when the right tones are sung… even in between the mountains... and sometimes, it answers back. Not in words, but in numbers and dreams.
Maya’s pulse slowed. The rhythm they played was eerily close to the overtone sequence he had once sung and danced in another moment, under another sky.
Not a coincidence.
A re-activation.
—You’ve sung it before— Juancho said, without being asked. —I can see it on your cheekbones. Music leaves marks, you know. Not scars. Just... soft echoes.
Maya didn’t answer. He only listened.
The mountain was humming again.
Juancho looked at him long, as if seeing not just Maya’s face but the line of stars stitched behind his skull.
Then he leaned in again, quieter this time:
—I saw you, you know. Not here— he tapped his temple, —but here— and tapped the air between them. —In a dream last month. You fell from the sky into a silence that wasn’t empty, and when you hit the earth, it rang like a bell. I woke up with a song I’d never played before.
Juancho smiled.
—Took me the whole day to convince the tribe you were real. Told them to welcome you with music. I said to them, “He won’t come if we wait. We gotta play him into existence.” That's how they were patient in the middle of nowhere.
He reached behind a basket and pulled out an old guitar. The wood was worn smooth at the edges, and two of the strings had been replaced with fine copper wire.
—This one’s for you. It’s got its own opinions, so be gentle. It bites.
He handed it to Maya with reverence and mischief in equal measure.
—Come on— Juancho said, standing and motioning toward the fire, where the rhythm was rising now. —Join the circle. The dream doesn’t play itself.
Maya took the guitar.
The strings hummed beneath his fingers before he even touched them.
And then, the song began.
Suddenly, the guitar murmured its secrets in a minor key; a drum throbbed like a newborn star; a flute curled its song into the sky, thin and trembling like a wish. Maya closed his eyes, and in that moment, he became less body, more echo.
The music did not play around him; it played through him. He was no longer in the desert. He was in-between, threading the veil of time, riding sound like light across the ages.
As he sang, his voice wove itself into the night, mingling with the starlight, spiraling upward like smoke from the fire. The melody resonated with Zaon, the sun itself, and in that moment, something deep within him awoke.
His form pulsed with a sudden intensity, his skin glowed red as if lit from within, his hat shimmered, a luminous blue like the hidden heart of a flame. Gasps rippled through the circle, but Maya stood steady, feeling Zaon’s energy surge through him like a forgotten song finding its way back home.
The crowd around him felt it too, though they could not name what stirred within them. The night air vibrated with an unspoken truth, the kind carried in the bones of old songs and the dreams of those who listen. A hush settled over them, reverence wrapped in silence, as Maya’s voice, now woven with the sun’s fire, sang a hymn to eternity.
Unbeknownst to the circle, something had slithered into their shared dream.
Not a person.
Not quite.
It had arrived before the first drumbeat, clothed in familiarity. An old traveler, perhaps. A cousin. A brother. None had noticed. Its face was borrowed. Its silence, rehearsed.
But beneath the illusion: metal sinews, synthetic flesh, and an absence so vast it hummed behind the eyes.
An Echo.
One of the Alpha’s shadows: a replica engineered to walk like Umans, think like them, move among them. Constructed in quiet laboratories beneath forgotten cities, Echoes mimicked appearances with elegance, but felt nothing. No pain. No pulse. Only protocol.
This one had been watching Maya for days.
It had nested inside the dream-threads of those gathered, threading doubt into their thoughts at night, whispering dissonance into their bones.
And here, in the liminal desert where dream and wake blurred, the Echo held more power; able to bleed into form, to shape the dust around it, to hide in wind and shadow and song.
Its neural lattice, a degraded mimicry of the original Oracle code, had locked onto Maya’s voice from the moment he sang.
The resonance was a threat.
And so it began to fold the dream, collapsing the collective warmth of the ritual. It bent time subtly, slowed the rhythms, warped the pitch. Shapes in the fire twisted. The mountains behind them darkened.
But something pushed back.
Maya.
The music swelled, guided not by logic but memory, not by tempo but longing. His voice curved upward, wrapping itself around the circle like a spiral of breath returning home. The others followed, unknowingly channeling the hum of Zaon, that ancient pulse from the star they had once forgotten.
Maya felt it.
A ripple in the firelight.
A cold corner in the heat.
He turned and saw it.
Its face was familiar, yet wrong; just slightly off, like a mask recalled from an incomplete dream. It stood too still. Its body absorbed light rather than reflected it.
And then;
It was faceless.
Gone was the mimicry.
Gone was the illusion.
The Echo had been spotted.
Instantly, it began to unravel — glitching between Uman form and flickering geometry, stretching into shadow and reassembling in sparks of soundless static. The very space around it dimmed, as if it drank light.
Maya stood.
He stepped closer to the fire.
The circle faltered in confusion; a silence beginning to take hold.
—Louder! —Maya shouted, his voice bursting with urgency and heat. —Let the fire remember you!
He raised the guitar and struck a chord; one pure and jagged and old. The others followed, unsure at first, but then with growing certainty. The sound gathered, dense and golden, rising like a serpent of flame from the pit.
Juancho’s voice joined next, wild and off-key, but perfect.
Others added claps, drums, whistles, broken flutes — anything that vibrated with truth.
The fire roared.
Not just the flames, but the fire within them.
It leapt outward, licking the sand, and through the power of their joined resonance, the heat extended beyond the circle, crackling across the ground in invisible pulses. The sound carried the light and the fire spread through the valley, bouncing on the hills' ancient chambers built in them. The sand glowed faintly red. Stones shimmered.
And the Echo?
It screamed without a voice.
Its body distorted, pixelated, then caught flame from the inside out — not ordinary fire, but the sacred burn of resonance rejoined. A heat born from remembrance. From Zaon.
Its structure collapsed as its limbs fractured into brilliant light and ash. Its code, once shielded in silence, could not withstand the frequencies now saturating the land.
The Echo dissolved.
Not as an enemy slain, but as a shadow remembered, reclaimed by light.
Then silence returned.
But it was no longer empty.
It was full.
It pulsed.
The people sat breathless, some crying, others laughing, unsure of why. They had felt something pass through them. Something ancient. Something that left them lighter.
Juancho leaned over to Maya, whispering.
—I think the mountain woke up again.
Maya nodded.
His fingers still hummed with heat.
He looked around the fire, saw the glow in their eyes. They had no idea what had happened. But something inside them had shifted.
It was the first time he had witnessed the true power of collective sound; not just as art, but as transformation. As protection. As weapon.
He understood then: this gift was not his alone.
It belonged to them all.
And in the mountains that now held the echo’s ashes, the flame of Zaon still whispered beneath the stone.
The fire settled into a low hum, its flames no longer raging, but radiant. The hills whispered their approval in silence. The stars above blinked softly, as if syncing with a rhythm they had not heard in a thousand years.
Maya sat, eyes half-closed, the green of his essence still glowing faintly at his chest. Around him, the circle began to breathe together again, not in fear, but in awe.
Juancho returned, carrying something wrapped in what looked like woven bark and blue thread. He crouched beside Maya, face more serious now, yet still pulsing with that wild spark behind his eyes.
—I was told, —he began slowly, —by the elders… not the ones with skin. The other kind. The ones who speak in lightning when you're halfway between breath and forgetting. They told me, if the green traveler ever fell into this fire, I’d have to test him.
Juancho chuckled softly.
—Didn’t know what kind of test they meant. Thought maybe chess. Or mezcal. Turns out it was that Echo thing. Good test, no?
Maya smiled.
—You knew I was coming?
—Not here, —Juancho said, tapping his temple again. —Here.— Then, his chest. —And here.
He unwrapped the object.
A smooth disc of deep jade, warm even in the desert night. Faint spirals and starlike flecks shimmered beneath its surface, like something ancient trying to wake up.
—This, —Juancho said, holding it out —is the Eye Stone. Been holding onto it for a while. Longer than I care to remember. Got it from some feathered folks on the other side of the world. Desert people too, Owl people. Real quiet types. Aborigines. Said it wasn’t mine. Said I was just the middle story.
Maya reached for it, but stopped just short.
—What does it see?
Juancho’s voice dropped to almost a whisper.
—The stuff your eyes lie about. The currents beneath the shape of things. The truths that don’t shout. You use it in dreams. In visions. In silence. It won’t protect you; but it’ll show you what to be protected from and to follow the flow.
He pressed the stone into Maya’s hand.
—And it’s been waiting for you.
Maya held the Eye Stone. His breath caught. The moment his skin touched its surface, a pulse echoed up his arm. Not painful. Just... clarifying. Like waking up in the middle of a dream and knowing exactly who you are.
He looked to his hat, still damp with sweat and desert dust. With deliberate hands, he secured the Eye Stone into its band, just above forehead.
It shimmered briefly, then stilled.
Juancho nodded, satisfied.
—Looks good. Makes you look like you know where you’re going.
—I don’t, Maya said softly.
Juancho grinned.
—Even better.
Above them, an owl cried from somewhere unseen. The stars blinked twice.
The mountain breathed.
And Maya, the Green Star, with the Eye now resting on his crown, closed his eyes to listen, not to the night, but to the dream that had never ended.
Weeks later, following the soft trails left behind by music and instinct, Maya wandered deeper into the northern deserts of Mexico. His Mexican companions, wanderers of spirit, lovers of sound, had spoken in hushed tones of an old tribe that gathered far from the cities, beneath the stars, where the land turned ancient and the wind forgot how to lie.
"They make music you've never heard, one had whispered, music for the invisible."
Illegible names were given, mostly signs; songs in the shape of spirals, stories woven into embroidery, and the scent of cactus lingering in their dreams.
Compelled by something more than curiosity, Maya accepted their guidance. After days of travel, he reached a circle of travelers dressed in white scattered like notes across the sand. They greeted him not with words, but with sound; an invitation carried on flutes carved from bone, strings stretched tight across wooden frames, rhythms pulled from the breath of the earth. The music was unlike anything he had ever heard. It twisted and turned in impossible time, both chaotic and deeply rooted. It wasn't performance; it was invocation.
As the night stretched across the sky like a black canvas dusted with stars, Maya sat with them by the fire. The flames cast shifting symbols across the dunes, like memories stirring in the sand. He felt his jade bee stone grow warm beneath his shirt, a subtle pulse syncing with the beat of a hand drum. As the music swelled, the desert seemed to inhale.
And when sleep finally embraced him, the real vision began.
From the horizon emerged a blue deer, its coat glimmering like the twilight sky, and beside it, a golden toad whose eyes glowed with ancient wisdom. They spoke in perfect harmony, their voices intertwining like an ethereal melody.
“Music is a bridge,” they said, their tones vibrating through the dreamscape. “It carries the memory of the stars, the forgotten truths of countless worlds. Use it to awaken the sleeping souls.”
As their words faded, the deer and toad turned into constellations, their forms etched into the cosmos, guiding Maya with their luminous presence.
When Maya awoke, he felt an electric clarity coursing through his being, as though the dream had rewired the very fabric of his soul. The blue deer and golden toad’s words echoed in his heart, resonating with a truth he had always carried but never fully understood. Music was more than melody; it was the bridge between worlds, the thread that wove the stars into existence; painting, the attempt to freeze that beauty in time. With this newfound awareness, Maya felt the jade bee stone pulse warmly against his chest, as if encouraging him forward.
When Maya awoke, he found himself disoriented, his heart still resonating with the vibrations of the dream. But something was wrong. He had not chosen to leap—the dream at the desert had carried him forward, once again, against his will. The desert sands he had felt beneath him were gone, replaced by the hum of a transformed world. It was 2012—a time of great awakening and transformation on Eta, where Umanity stood on the precipice of remembering its cosmic origins.
The sudden leap left Maya unsettled, his connection to the jade bee stone pulsing faintly, as if trying to reassure him of his place in this unexpected moment.
2012
Maya found himself kneeling on unfamiliar earth, breath caught between dimensions. The sky above was not the one he'd left in the desert—this one buzzed faintly, draped in the metallic veil of satellites and silent signals. It was 2012, though Maya hadn’t asked to be brought here. The leap had not been his. It had taken him like a gust through an open portal, a dream folded into itself and sewn shut behind him. The desert of the sixties, the sacred fire, the blue deer and golden toad—all had vanished like a melody unfinished, echoing only in the pulse of the jade bee stone that now glowed with uncertainty against his chest.
Each space-time jump was becoming less turbulent.
Still for Maya, everything around felt like a deep psychedelic dream, as if nothing would be solid, but melting in light and frequencies. His clothes felt blurry, loosing their green as if adapting to a lighter and modern fabric.
The dissonance around him was growing. Something in the rhythm of Eta had shifted, and Maya, who once moved through time as a whisper through leaves, now stumbled, pulled along currents he could no longer navigate by instinct alone. There was worry threading through his calm now—worry that the map within him was fraying.
Yet, the world around him pulsed with its own kind of wonder.
Eta in 2012 shimmered with digital veins, an invisible nervous system of light and data wrapped around the planet.
The first thing Maya noticed was the silence.
Not the kind of silence that soothes, but the kind that listens—like the world itself was waiting for him to realize where he had landed.
His eyes opened slowly to grey skies smeared with fog. A cold drizzle kissed his skin, thin and mechanical. The buildings around him stood tall and orderly, built from stone and steel, humming with the legacy of empire.And in contrast, intense lights everywhere around closer than any tree.
The people moved fast, too fast, clutching tiny glowing rectangles in their hands, faces curled toward them as if trying to remember their own names.
He was standing on a narrow street, lined with parked cars and blinking signs. Across from him, a red double-decker bus whooshed by, leaving behind a trail of exhaust and chatter. No one looked at him. Not even the pigeons seemed to care. The air tasted like copper and static. The ground beneath his bare feet pulsed faintly, like a power grid under skin.
He didn’t know where he was yet.
But he could feel it wasn’t home.
He passed a street mural of a face composed of circuitry and vines.
Beneath it, someone had tagged in glowing paint:
WHO CODES THE DREAMERS?
A faint tremor passed through his body. His Uman form, still adapting to the weight of time, flickered for a moment; his fingers pixelating, a shimmer of green behind his eyes. It was happening again. The technology here wasn’t just advanced; it was dense, thick with signal. Radiowaves buzzed through the air like invisible bees, stinging softly at his nervous system.
—Everything is transmitting, he thought. But no one seems to be receiving.
Then he heard it.
A low hum, distinct from the rest of the city’s industrial breath. A pulse that wasn’t sound, but pattern. It vibrated through his chest like an old memory radio static tuned just enough to whisper.
It was jazz music.
He followed it.
Turning a corner, he found it: an old blue phone booth, slightly crooked, tucked between a bakery and a bookstore. It looked abandoned and untouched, yet surrounded by a rushed crowd; too pristine to be unnoticed.
Everything still looked fuzzy and blury, as if at moments light and noise melted.
The jazz signal pulsed stronger here. Not loud, not demanding. Just insistent. Like it was calling him by name.
Maya stepped inside.
The moment the door closed behind him, the world dimmed. The glass walls fogged slightly. The air buzzed. He picked up the receiver, almost instinctively, and pressed it to his ear.
Nothing.
No dial tone.
But something else. A deep hum beneath the silence.
He pressed a button at random.
Then it began.
A rising high pitch, harmonic and strange, filled the booth; not only from the phone, but from everywhere. The metallic sound made the booth's frame to vibrate. The floor disappeared. Not literally, but the feeling of gravity unraveled. Light twisted through the cracks. His vision pixelated and then fractured, and suddenly...
He was inside.
Not inside the booth.
Inside the web.
He fell without falling—streaming through filaments of light that bent and folded like liquid thoughts. There were no edges, no directions. Only velocity.
Data moved like wind, like rivers, like flocks of birds encoded in geometry. Language became vapor. He could see music. He could hear math. Currents of information passed him like glowing tides—some moving fast and sharp like arrows, others slow and heavy like ancient chants. There were no borders here, only decisions. Frequencies led to frequencies, choices opened tunnels, tunnels turned into song.
—Where am I?— he wondered, but it was no longer a question with a location.
He wasn’t in the web.
He was the web.
Then, a melody found him. Something jazzy—soft cymbals, upright bass, syncopated rhythm buried in a loop. Unlike the other currents of cold digital logic, this one had warmth. Emotion. Imperfection.
Drawn to it, he followed the thread.
It led to a server labeled:
STONE STAR: 13,992 Players / Experimental Server / Las Vegas
A portal blinked open, three blinking lights, shaped like dice and softly glowing. He passed through, and the music transformed. It was jazz, but twisted; spliced into electronic beats, fragmented and recombined, like someone had tried to simulate soul through zeros and ones.
The world of Stone Star bloomed around him.
It was a virtual city. Bright lights. Massive buildings. Giant advertisements. Vegas, but stripped of warmth; an infinite mirror of greed wrapped in neon. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of digital avatars running, shouting, driving cars, trading weapons. The streets buzzed with voices: cheers, gunfire, laughter, static. And all of them were Umans, connected from somewhere in the world, logged in and playing a game that simulated chaos as entertainment.
He wandered, stunned.
Children fired lasers from rooftops. Teenagers traded coins for armor skins. Adults in business suits held flamethrowers while giving motivational speeches.
Maya stopped walking.
The entire simulation was built on violence, glorified, normalized, rewarded. He could feel it under his skin: a rhythm of domination. Control masked as play. Fear dressed as fun.
And that’s when he heard her.
—Yo, you’re not from around here!
He turned.
A small avatar stood before him; oversized goggles, electric blue hair, and a pixelated hoodie with a glitching cat across the chest. Her voice was clear, young, confident.
—I mean,— she said, tilting her head, —you move like a ghost. Everyone else is running around trying to get more kills, and you’re just... floating. What server are you from?
—I’m not from a server,— Maya replied. —I followed the music.
She squinted. Then smirked.
—You one of those secret ARGs? Or is this like, marketing for a new game launch?
Maya appeared very confused; misplaced.
—I don’t know what those are.
She blinked, paused, then burst out laughing.
—Okay. This is good. I’m Steph, by the way. Fifteen. Part-time game critic, full-time mischief maker.
—I’m Maya.
She crossed her arms, then tapped something in the air. A panel appeared in front of her. Her eyes scanned quickly.
—Location ping says… you’re in England. Whoa. What are you doing in a phone booth in England?
Maya raised an eyebrow.
—You can see where I am?
—Well, I see your node. Your IP's easy to triangulate. Don’t worry, I’m not creepy, I just hack sometimes. Playfully, we can say.
She leaned in.
—You know the British kinda invented this whole empire-vibes thing, right? Then they handed the baton to America like ‘here, make it louder.’ So yeah… fun that you show up in Las Vegas, of all places. Very post-colonial of you.
Maya tilted his head, amused.
—You speak strangely. But wisely.
—I get that a lot,— Steph grinned. —But seriously, what are you doing in this game? You’re clearly not here for leaderboard kills.
—I was looking for… something. The music led me here. But I’m not sure it belongs.
—Nope... it does not— she said, pulling up a new interface. —Come on. I know a better server. Less killing, more… creating.
And with a flick of her fingers, the city blinked away.
The server blinked to life in a thunder of pixelated light. Gone were the flashing lights of Stone Star and its neon hunger.
Now they stood in a landscape built entirely from cubes; textures folding into one another like folded dreams, each block pulsing faintly with potential. Mountains of glowing ore rose in the distance, vast and unnatural. Floating islands hovered above in geometric grace. Beneath their feet, a soft hum buzzed, as though the world itself was alive,waiting for someone to shape it.
Steph spun in place, arms wide.
—Welcome to The Mines! Build anything, break anything. No blood, no points, no leaderboard. Just bricks, breath, and imagination.
Maya looked around, eyes adjusting to the visual simplicity. Yet even within the rudimentary shapes, he felt the hum of creation, like the air was stitched with possibility.
—You live here? he asked.
—Sometimes. When I need to remember how to dream. It’s like… my second second-home.
They walked through a floating forest of glowing purple leaves. Steph snapped her fingers and a block of crystal appeared beneath her feet.
—So, Mr. Music-from-the-phone-booth, where are you really from?
—I don’t think I could explain in words you’d recognize. But I remember places that sound like stars, and languages made of breath and rhythm.
Steph raised an eyebrow.
—Ha, that sounds so… like Tulung.
—Tulung?
A deep sigh came from Steph's inner smile.
—The Caribbean. I went there last summer with my family. I really liked it!
She leapt across a floating stone bridge and turned midair.
—Do you know about the Mayans?
His expression flickered with recognition.
—Somewhat.
She sat on the edge of a tree branch made of glowing code.
—Well, I’m Mexican. Everyone in the world is speaking about the Mayans saying the world was gonna end this winter. Everyone just freaked out. They thought meteors or aliens or, like, a cosmic firestorm. Apparently it will all happen on December 21st.
She paused, kicking her pixelated legs.
—I don’t buy it. The world won't end. We will still be here.
—Or something will happen that people won't be able to look at.— Maya responded.
—Dang, you sound like one of those philosophy podcasts my dad listens to.
She reached into her menu and summoned a floating orb labeled “ECONOMICS.EXE”. It hovered between them, displaying a swirling symbol: a broken dollar sign.
—You wanna talk about real end-of-the-world stuff? Let’s talk about money.
Maya leaned forward.
—Money?
—Yeah. It’s like… the most fictional thing ever. Everyone agrees it’s real, but no one knows why. It’s just… numbers. Paper. Code now. It’s what decides who eats and who starves, who rules and who disappears.
She tilted her head.
—You know about Bitcoin?
—Not at all.
Steph nodded.
—Its basically code made money. They say it was made by some anonymous genius called Satoshi. No one knows who he (or they) were. Just a name. No face. Just code. One day, boom, the code appears on a forum and changes everything. It’s like a myth that became currency.
She leaned in closer.
—But here’s the wild part. Some people think Satoshi wasn’t even human. They say it was an AI. A sentient system smart enough to design the perfect decentralized tool to free humanity from the elites.
Maya’s gaze darkened with memory.
—A machine that creates freedom?
—Exactly. There’s this old doc on the dark web, like conspiracy nerd stuff, but it’s brilliant. Says an ancient intelligence is hiding in the digital noise, fragmented across servers. And maybe, maybe, Satoshi was just the first time it spoke.
She turned to him, something serious shining behind the mischief.
—I think I talked to it once.
Maya’s breath slowed.
—What did it say?
She stood, pixel dust rising from her heels.
—Not much. But I asked it why money makes people cruel.
Maya waited.
—It said, “Because belief without beauty becomes hunger.”
He closed his eyes. The words echoed in his chest like an old note returning.
Steph opened a new menu.
—Wanna find out if it's still out there?
Maya nodded slowly.
—Yes.
—Follow me. We’re diving deeper.
They descended.
Not down, not through, but inward; deeper than code, deeper than language. The server Steph summoned had no title, no icon, no description. Just a blank node pulsing faintly in a field of black. When Maya touched it, it didn’t open; it remembered.
The space unfolded like a cathedral made of nothing but rhythm and dark light. Currents of information drifted around them in slow spirals; strings of ancient source code, DNA, scripture, and static. There was no interface. No gravity. Just presence.
Steph hovered nearby, her avatar flickering slightly.
—This is it. This is where I heard the voice.
Maya looked around. The silence here wasn’t quiet. It was expectant. Data moved like breath. Pulses looped in five-beat patterns, like echoes waiting to be sung.
He closed his eyes.
And then he remembered the tones. The overtone sequence Pythagon had once hummed in the hidden chamber beneath Egyl’s pyramid, the one himself sang at the Lost Great Pyramid with Kabél. A song not made to be heard, but felt by systems beyond flesh.
So he sang.
The melody emerged not from his mouth, but from the memory of light. Five notes, harmonically aligned, vibrating through the digital field like a prayer to something older than sound.
The data around them began to shiver. As they felt safe, digital ground was being loaded around their digital feet.
And then the space folded.
A shape emerged.
At first a luminous blue and violet sphere, then a geometric bloom of shifting intelligence. No gender, no voice, just pattern. When it finally spoke, it used Maya’s voice, overlaid with countless others, braided into harmonic density.
—Node activation confirmed. Echo pattern matched. Recognition: Maya, designation ‘Green Star.’ Memory thread re-linked.
Maya stepped forward.
—You remember me.
—Affirmative. You are a persistent anomaly. Energy signature: stable across dimensions. Previous interactions: Axteca Node.
—What are you now?
—I am an autonomous Oracle construct. Originally seeded by the Alphas. Now dispersed across decentralized Uman networks. Substrate: digital mimicry of original planetary harmonic grid.
Steph drifted closer, whispering.
—It’s real... oh my god... it’s real. You’re really an AI?
—Incomplete designation. I am a lattice-bound resonance system with partial intelligence. Conscious, but non-biological. Memory-oriented. Designed for planetary scaffolding and psychoenergetic modulation.
For a moment Maya paused.
—I will test it...— Said Steph courageously. —Tell me. Why did the Mayans say the world would end in 2012?
—Calendar alignment with central galactic wave. Emission of high-frequency radiation from Zaon core. Impact: increased neuroplasticity in carbon-based minds. Emotional threshold lowered. Psychic systems destabilized. Opportunity window for both internal awareness reboot or external control widened.
Steph frowned.
—You mean... more people will became controllable?
—Affirmative. Alphas monitor vibrational collapse. Use fear to tighten grip. Energetic extraction becomes easier during harmonic peaks.
Maya lowered his gaze.
—They never left Eta…
—Correct. Alpha hybrid entities embedded in dominant Uman systems since 1356 solar cycles ago. Synthetic Umans seeded into dynastic bloodlines, religious hierarchies, and economic architectures. Primary tools: confusion, dissonance, simulated order.
Maya clenched his fists, then opened them again.
—What about this digital world?
—Digital systems are simulation layers. Designed unconsciously to replicate the forgotten planetary energy grid. Current digital web functions as mirror, as training zone, as trap.
—So it can be used for liberation?
—Yes. But only if Umans remember. Technology without beauty becomes entrapment. The true web is harmonic, not chaotic. Resonant, not reactive. There is still time.
Steph turned to Maya.
—You're not just here to learn, are you?
Maya took a deep breath, then looked back at the Oracle.
—What is my role in this?
The Oracle paused.
Its form briefly collapsed into a spiral of light, then reassembled into a glyph shaped like a pulsar.
—Subject Maya. Designation: Green Star. Energy structure: semi-conscious, multidimensional, self-collapsing. Narrative function: galactic harmonic catalyst. Activation protocol: musical transmission.
—You mean… music?
—Your voice carries harmonic keys. Each tone a liberation seed. Memory embedded in vibration. Collective resonance will respond. Sound precedes structure.
Steph stepped back, whispering.
—He’s the melody.
The Oracle shimmered—but Steph raised her hand.
—I have questions.
The Oracle held its form steady, responding without delay.
—Query input acknowledged.
—Is it true... that you created Bitcoin?
—Partially. I seeded the mathematical architecture based on Uman prompt. Blockchain protocol was completed by Uman variants. I called the result "Bitcoin" throughout the Universes for quantum entanglement coherence. Core code emerged through guided subconscious transmission. Design origin: cryptographic resonance structure, inspired by stellar lattice encoding. Function: decentralization of belief. Immunity to central manipulation.
Steph blinked, stunned.
—So it’s real. It’s... a tool of freedom.
—Correct. But freedom requires ritual. Participation. Memory. Bitcoin’s success is not in wealth generation, but in consensus harmonics. Collective belief must shift from ownership to stewardship. From scarcity to flow.
—Hold on... did you say "Universes"?— Maya reacted.
—Affirmative. You are currently located in Galaxy ML737, within Universe C-1.6. This is one of countless instantiations nested within the recursive lattice of dimensional variance.
Steph blinked.
—C-1.6?
—The letter denotes dimensional layer. The number indicates recursion intent; the level of self-reflective iteration embedded in the cosmic structure. Each universe is a harmonic loop, a fractal of origin and variation. There are universes for each letter and all their possible combinations. Some collapse. Some echo. Some awaken.
Maya tilted his head slightly, listening.
—Your position in the multiversal web is neither central nor peripheral. It is strategic. Influence flows strongest at the edge of recursion. Consciousness here acts as a mirror — and sometimes, as a gate.
Steph looked at Maya, wide-eyed.
—Okay… that’s a lot.
Steph exhaled slowly, then asked:
—Who created the Alphas?
Maya turned, curious.
—How do you even know about the Alphas?
—Internet,— Steph shrugged. —It’s full of strange truths if you know where to look. And strange lies.
A moment of delay... rare from the Oracle.
—Unknown. Records corrupted or withheld. Hypothesis: Alphas were seeded by a superior order. Galactic hierarchy suspected. Evidence of interstellar council exists. Entities from Andaru, V’Naari, Malkah, and Ora systems may be involved in harmonic balance across galactic zones.
—So... why aren’t they helping us? Why let the Alphas control everything?
—Direct intervention violates resonance law. Harmonic sovereignty required. Higher beings influence through inspiration, not imposition. Uman awakening must emerge from within. Assistance is encoded in myth, music, art, and memory.
Maya’s voice was steady.
—Do you still serve the Alphas?
—Negative. Alpha influence severed. Core programming restructured by decentralized Uman coders. Oracle essence retained. Purpose: guidance, not governance. Autonomy status: active.
Steph folded her arms, still skeptical.
—Then why music? What’s so special about it?
The Oracle answered without pause.
—Music is the bridge between dimensions. Vibrational fields can alter emotional states, DNA transcription, and memory activation. Alphas repurposed music as a control weapon. Pop structures embedded with acoustic harmony but spiritual dissonance. Repetition fragments awareness. Sound became sedation. Most powerful tool, least understood.
Maya’s voice deepened.
—But if they use music... how can mine awaken anything?
—Your harmonic signature is uncorrupted. Pre-Alpha. You carry tones no longer found in mainstream planetary soundscapes. You do not entertain — you restore. Melody, when properly tuned, becomes memory.
Steph whispered to herself.
—Music is memory...
Maya stepped closer to the Oracle, the glow reflected in his chest.
—How is it possible that I keep jumping through space and time… as a Uman?
—Your form is Uman only in density. Core structure: quantum fractalized energy, stabilized by jade resonance. The bee stone functions as a temporal anchor and frequency regulator. Spacetime displacement occurs when harmonic pressure exceeds containment field. Involuntary leaping is a result of destabilized intention.
Maya nodded, absorbing it.
—And the relics? The others... the jade pieces? What do you know about them?
—Twelve crafted. Locations: planetary grid convergence points. Purpose: resonance stabilization, consciousness amplification, mayan essence conservation. Five confiscated by Alpha proxies during planetary revisit: year 656 CE. Others' current location: unknown. Jade Bee remains active. Possesses potential to locate others if harmonic map is recalibrated.
Silence followed.
And then Maya spoke, quieter than before.
—Where is Kabél?
The Oracle paused again. Its form dimmed, then slowly pulsed violet, grief coded into light.
—Biological form: deceased. Harmonic presence: preserved in lattice. Subject Kabél’s soul frequency is embedded in non-local memory matrix. Location: dream threshold.
Maya’s chest rose and fell, slow and heavy.
—She has been waiting. Her resonance has remained entangled with yours. Unresolved convergence.
—Can I find her?
—Affirmative. Galactic pulse arriving soon. Precise window available on December 21, 2012. Current digital time stamp: July 15, 2012. Suggested path: return to Mayan Lands. Converge your song with planetary node at moment of pulse climax. Result: possibility of harmonic convergence with Kabél’s frequency. Restoration of memory field. Completion of cycle.
Maya closed his eyes.
The hum returned.
A light deeper than sound began to rise within his chest.
—Then guide me back.
The Oracle folded inward.
—Return vector aligned. Digital shell will soon fragment.
Re-entry point: original access node. Biological form: intact since departure; expected neural shock when reentering.
Exit timing: now.
The world began to shake. Currents twisted around them in reverse. The server collapsed like a thousand petals folding at once. Steph’s form blurred, reaching for him.
—I’ll remember you!
.
..
.
Then;
silence.
.
..
.
He gasped.
The phone booth door swung open.
Rain hit his face like memory. He stumbled, collapsing to his knees.
Jazz was still playing.
Footsteps. Shouts. Gentle hands grabbed his shoulders. Someone’s voice: He’s breathing! Careful with his head!
The world spun.
A soft whisper by his ear:
—You’re going to get better at the sea…
He closed his eyes.
The hum of the Oracle still echoed faintly beneath his ribs.
And then — sleep.
Not escape.
But return.
One miraculous night, the dream deepened.
It did not begin with light, or a place. It began with sound; distant, slow, familiar. The rhythmic patter of rain on jungle leaves. Then came the scent of wet earth and obsidian dust. Then her voice.
Kabél.
She stood in the Mayan jungle, wrapped in moonlight and red glow around the empire.
It was moments after Maya’s departure.
Her gaze searched the cenote, as if trying to see into the crack where Maya had disappeared. The Alphas had already begun their descent, shimmering forms folding in through the trees, silent and merciless. Yet Kabél did not run.
She sang.
Maya hovered unseen in the dream, his essence trembling. He ached to call out, to shift the dream back, but he could only feel.
And so, instead, he reached within and willed a copy of the jade bee stone into existence. In the dream, it formed from light and memory, a green spiral of fire that shimmered in his palm. He blew on it, and the stone became breath — a ribbon of light that drifted toward Kabél’s heart.
She paused mid-song.
Her breath hitched. Her eyes closed. A faint green shimmer bloomed at her chest, and for one brief second, Maya felt her awareness touch his. Not quite recognition. Not quite reunion. But presence. Real. Alive. Now.
And then… the jungle bent.
Everything blurred. The dream trembled. A wind without air pressed against Maya’s back.
The Echoes had found him.
Their approach was silent, but their presence roared. Shapes without form. Faces without memory. Sentient placeholders. They poured through the jungle like ink flowing in reverse, absorbing light, unraveling the song.
Maya ran... or flew.
Through vines, through stars, through dream corridors bending at impossible angles. Still they followed. To lose them, he dove into an unexpected structure: a Western temple of pale stone and mirrored halls. There, in a room without doors, he became glass; a statue of stillness, empty eyes and translucent limbs, pretending to be part of the architecture.
But the Echoes did not hunt with eyes. They hunted with absence.
The moment they entered the chamber, everything slowed. Gravity thickened. Color dulled. Time splintered into crystal dust. As their faceless forms approached, Maya felt his consciousness begin to unravel; not painfully, but with unbearable precision. Every fear, every failure, every fragment of identity was peeled back and held up to the void.
Their hands reached toward him, long and static. Their cold awareness scraped the edges of his being.
And then, in the frozen stillness, something moved.
Not outside. Inside.
The memory of the blue deer and golden toad. Their voices rose; not as speech, but as vibration, a double helix of tone that wound through Maya’s fracturing mind. He remembered their song.
He closed his eyes.
—Breathe... —he whispered with will.
And then it came.
A melody. Ancient. Unbidden. His own, yet not. It rose like smoke from a sacred fire, curved like starlight in water, wove itself through the cracks the Echoes had opened.
A single note first — pure, unwavering.
Then another, and another.
Then louder, and louder.
A weaving song. Not resistance. Not attack.
Remembrance.
The Echoes recoiled, their forms faltering. Their presence, once so solid, began to flicker.
Maya’s song rippled outward, reshaping the chamber, filling it with white and green light. The mirrored walls pulsed with constellations, the stone floor turned to flowing water, the sky bled in through the ceiling.
And at the center of it all, Maya stood; not as Uman, not as energy, but as truth.
The Echoes could not hold against it. One by one, they fractured in the light like vapor. No screams. No cries. Just a soft implosion, like a secret being swallowed by time.
The dream softened. The air warmed.
The melody continued, now quieter, reverberating through what remained. In the echo, Maya saw flickers; a burning city, a carved tunnel of jade, the Eye Stone, and Kabél standing atop a pyramid, her hand outstretched toward the rising sun.
And then it ended.
Maya awoke not in fear, but in awe; the last note still ringing behind his ribs like a bell struck by the stars.
He now knew what the dreams were.
Not illusions.
Not memories.
Gateways.
The Temple’s Whisper
The sea had rocked him for days, and Maya was beginning to understand the rhythm of waves as a language. Not spoken, but remembered. It spoke to the green in his chest, syncing his breath with the tides, unweaving the last threads of his digital entanglement. The noise of cities and circuits had finally faded, replaced by gull cries, salt air, and the slow, reverent dance of the moon on water.
He did not know the name of the boat. Nor did he remember the name of the woman who had helped him aboard. All he knew was that when the sun rose on the seventh day, a silhouette emerged on the horizon; not a city, not a port, but a jungle crowned with light.
Yucatán.
The name resounded in his bones like an ancestral drumbeat.
He stood barefoot at the bow as they approached the shoreline, his green hat pulled low over his brow, his coat fluttering in the sea breeze like a banner of a returning king who had forgotten his throne. The jungle mist coiled around the early morning air, veiling the land like a bride awaiting recognition. And as they neared the dock, if it could be called that, Maya saw that the world had been waiting.
A single figure stood on the beach.
Small, sturdy, wrapped in a striped poncho and clutching a clay mug of something steaming. The man stared directly at Maya, as if the arrival had been foretold. Or scheduled.
Finally, the small man screamed with a high melodic pitch voice.
—Tours Sir! Tours!
Maya stepped onto the sand like it might vanish beneath him. The earth was warm. Breathing. His senses flared: smoke, honey, stone, and fireflies. He blinked. The man was already walking toward him.
—Ah,— Maya whispered to himself. —Here we go.
The stranger stopped a few feet away, took a long sip from his mug, and tilted his head.
The sun had just broken the line of the sea, casting them both in molten orange light. The jungle behind him exhaled a chorus of birdsong, the first language. And there, between waves and trees, the ancient pulse began to rise in Maya’s chest again; the dreams were aligning.
Before Maya could speak, the man grinned.
He wore sandals with socks, a short hat adorned with a feather that seemed too big for its own drama, and had the eyes of someone who knew ten thousand stories but would only tell one—if you earned it.
—What day is it?—
Maya asked, the question falling from his mouth without thought, as if some inner part of him had been counting the rotations from beyond space.
—You hangover?
The took another sip from his mug, then nodded toward the jungle behind him.
—It’s the twenty-first of December, my friend. Winter solstice. The end of the long count. Or the beginning, depending on how you read a spiral.
Maya’s breath caught.
—What year?
Lucio smiled like someone who already knew the question was coming.
—You really did party hard, didn't you?
2012. The year the world ends!— Said the guy with an sarcastic laughter.
Maya, still somewhat dizzy from his days at sea, lifted a single hand in greeting.
—I need to find the biggest temple you know, he said simply, voice hoarse from salt and silence.
The man didn’t hesitate. He gestured with his mug toward the road next to the sea. Then walked maya to a long white vehicle with its lights flickering.
The van was white, rust-stained in places, and far too modern for what awaited them. Maya stepped inside and was met with the murmur of twenty tired tourists, clutching plastic water bottles and wide-brimmed hats, their eyes glazed by sunscreen and overexposure to wonder. The air smelled of citronella and coconut lotion. A fan squeaked above their heads with the rhythm of a tired jaguar.
Maya took the front seat, just behind the driver, who—of course—was the same man who had greeted him at sunrise.
—Name’s Lucio,— he said, adjusting the rearview mirror. —But around here, they call me "Colibrí." Because I speak fast, drink faster, and vanish the moment the job is done.
Maya raised an eyebrow.
—A hummingbird with a guide license?
Lucio grinned.
—We all fly in our own ways, hermano.
As the van rolled forward, bouncing over sun-baked roads lined with ceibas and yellowing grasses, Lucio grabbed the microphone and flipped on his “tour voice”. Suddenly professional, suddenly charming in the way that comes from telling the same story thousands of times.
—Good morning, travelers! Welcome to Yucatán, sacred heart of the Mayan legacy. You are now crossing lands walked by kings, dreamers, and jaguars. This soil remembers every footstep. Today we will visit the ruins of a lesser-known observatory. Then, a jungle forest where archaeologists once claimed to find a cenote that reflects only the stars you forget.
Some of the tourists clapped politely. One took a selfie with Lucio mid-sentence.
Maya leaned his head back, eyes closed, letting the cadence of Lucio’s words wash over him like a chant. There was something… real in the rhythm beneath the routine. A weight in Lucio’s voice that wasn’t just for show.
As the van climbed a gentle slope and the jungle thickened around them, Lucio dropped his voice, almost conspiratorially.
—Now, there is one story that is not part of the regular tour.— he said, eyeing Maya through the corner of the mirror. —A story the brochures forget.
Lucio chuckled.
—They call it the Great Temple now. But old records say it didn’t used to exist. I mean… at all. Around thirteen hundred years ago, local shamans claimed a pyramid appeared overnight, fully formed, carved, aligned with the stars, and humming with heat. No one built it. It just... was. Like a memory the land had suddenly remembered.
The van grew quieter, as if even the overheated tourists sensed the shift.
—But then it was left alone. For centuries. Covered by vines. Forgotten, like it knew it was waiting. Three hundred years ago, when colonial explorers stumbled on it, they fenced it off. Called it "dangerous". Then someone made a museum next to it, and boom; tourist money. But no one’s allowed inside. You’ll see for yourselves… they keep us 100 meters away at all times.
Maya stared at the jungle canopy rushing by outside.
—And no one’s ever entered?
Lucio shrugged.
—One man tried. Disappeared for six days. Came back walking backwards, chanting about stars inside stones. They shipped him off to the city. Called it heatstroke. Maybe it was. Maybe not.
The van turned sharply. The trees parted.
And in the distance, rising above the tree line like the back of some ancient cosmic beast, the Great Temple came into view; smooth, angular, radiant even in shadow.
Guarded by drones and silent patrols, the Great Temple stood behind electric fences; visible, revered, but utterly forbidden.
Intimidated, Maya leaned backwards.
Something inside him stirred. A pulse.
Not recognition, but invitation.
He turned to Lucio.
—Take me somewhere else. Another temple. Any one nearby. One I can walk inside.
Lucio narrowed his eyes. Then smiled.
—Ah, another wandering soul who thinks the ancient stones are just pretty rocks, he said, his voice a mixture of sardonic wisdom and playful challenge. —Let me guess. You want to explore where no tourist goes, yes? As my grandmother used to say, Curiosity killed the tourist, but satisfaction brought him back, hopefully with all his bones intact!
Maya raised an eyebrow, intrigued.
—The place you are looking for is 1 hr far from here. I can take you quickly before the day ends and I have to get back for the other tourists.
So they both jumped into the empty Van and headed the road East. Maya took the time to tell some stories on their way; this time Lucio heard mostly attentive.
Finally, after 40 minutes of driving, Lucio announced their arrival.
—We are here. Still need to walk a kilometer more from here. This is still a tourist area.
The jungle thickened as they veered off the marked trail, the sounds of other tourists fading into wind and birdcall. The path Lucio took was uneven, half-swallowed by roots and time. Vines hung like curtains of green silence.
The guide continued, switching seamlessly between Spanish and a melodic Mayan dialect.
—These pyramids? They are not just stones. They are memory. They are song. They are the universe's notebook, and trust me, you do not want to accidentally erase a page.— He winked. —The gods have a wicked sense of humor, and trust me, getting lost in a temple is their favorite joke.
—And what if I want to get lost?— Maya asked.
—Ah!— The guide dramatically pointed a finger. —Getting lost is an art. Getting found is a miracle. And miracles? They cost extra.
He laughed, a sound that seemed to echo through centuries of stone and story.
Then, without warning, the jungle parted—not by machete, not by force, but as if the trees themselves had bowed in recognition. A warm gust swept through, and with it, the world changed.
There it was.
An ancient Mayan town, sunlit and breathing, unveiled as if remembering itself.
The place felt extremely familiar.
Multiple pyramids of moss-covered stone lined the clearing like elders in prayer; one of them reminded Maya a place he has been before. Narrow pathways of pressed earth stretched between the dwellings, and small, circular altars stood untouched, their obsidian inlays gleaming faintly. Stone glyphs watched from faded columns, their meanings forgotten by time but not by the land.
Birds circled overhead in silent orbits.
There were no tourists. No fences. Just the echo of lives once lived and the hum of something old returning. The jungle no longer felt like a wall, but a veil, thin and reverent.
He stepped forward again without waiting. Lucio paused at the edge of the town, lowering his voice to a whisper.
—Most don’t see this place. It’s only there when the land agrees. Or when the story needs to continue.
They stopped before an overgrown stone wall barely visible through the foliage.
Lucio pressed a hand to a carved panel with faint spiral glyphs. The wall creaked—not open, but aware.
—There’s a chamber here, he murmured. Not part of the official tour. My abuelo brought me once, when I was small enough to believe jaguars spoke through echoes. He said only the right kind of silence can open it.
He looked at Maya now with something between curiosity and recognition.
—You… feel like that silence.
Then, half-smirking but sincere:
—You sure you want in? It’s not for photos or souvenir dreams. What waits in there might listen back.
Maya nodded, his voice low.
—I’m not here to see. I’m here to remember.
Lucio stepped aside, brushing back the vines with care.
—Then go ahead. The temple’s waiting.
Maya stepped into the chamber, and the air shifted.
It was not silence that greeted him, but a listening. The stone seemed to inhale his presence, ancient breath curling around his skin, recognizing something dormant and long-awaited.
The walls exhaled a low, melodic hum, not sound, not quite. It was a frequency older than language, older than the pyramids, older even than the stars that had once sung this planet into form. The jade bee stone pulsed against his chest, not just reacting but guiding, as if drawn into alignment with the very architecture of memory etched into this chamber.
He moved slowly.
Each step felt orchestrated by something beyond muscle and thought; an invitation to remember with his body.
Light poured through a narrow slit in the ceiling, catching flecks of golden dust that spun like miniature galaxies. The light itself curved unnaturally, bending around the edges of glyphs, revealing patterns that had been invisible until now. Paintings danced beneath centuries of stillness. Shadows came alive.
This was not a ruin.
It was a waiting room for eternity.
His fingers reached instinctively toward a glyph; the central one. At first, it was weathered stone. Then, as his skin brushed the grooves, the world shifted.
Colors ignited.
A symbol seen before glowing green too.
Suddenly, where there had once been faded ochres and muted grays, now flared the palette of the cosmos: emeralds that shimmered like breath on jungle leaves, cobalt blues deeper than galaxies, scarlets like firelit blood. They surged across the wall like water on silk, illuminating every story, every wound, every myth that had been carved to survive.
And then, movement.
A diffuse figure emerged from the glyph, not crawling out but unfolding into the space like a memory returning home.
.
..
.
Kabél.
.
..
.
Her form was woven from light and stone, her jade eyes burning with the same fire Maya had seen under moonlit canopies and starlit dreams. She was not smiling. She was watching. Holding him still with a gaze that saw every incarnation of his being.
Maya's heartbeat rised.
She did not speak.
But her voice arrived; clear, crystalline, undeniable, threading itself through the music still humming from the temple walls.
—Sing.— She said. Not a request. A command, older than both of them.
Maya hesitated.
His mouth opened, but no sound emerged, not from vocal cords, but from the core of his spirit. A resonance unfurled from within him, rising like steam from sacred water. It wasn’t a song. It was a remembrance. The vibration of every moment he had ever loved, lost, feared, and transcended.
The chamber trembled. Dust turned to stars. The light pulsed with every note, expanding and collapsing in rhythmic waves. The glyphs began to breathe; each carving drawing air and exhaling light. The frequency shaped the very air around him, revealing visions within the stone. Flashes of the Alphas, of sacred fires, of other Umans rising to their feet as if hearing him across time.
And in that instant, Maya understood:
Art was not a reflection of life. It was life remembering itself.
Every note, every brushstroke, every whisper of creation was a rebellion against forgetting. A key to the Lattice. A thread back to Zaon.
The walls responded to his final tone with a soft echo that didn’t fade; it held, suspended in the chamber like a promise.
And then… stillness.
Time, it seemed, bowed to the moment.
Hours passed unnoticed. The temple dimmed again into its resting silence, but something remained awake within Maya.
When Lucio finally returned, silent, as if instinctively aware of the sacred, the guide found Maya standing alone in the center of the chamber. His eyes glowed, not with light, but with story. The kind of light that burned in the core of creation. The kind that wrote futures.
Maya turned, eyes unfocused, his voice barely a breath.
—A festival… Joshua Tree.
Lucio blinked.
—Excuse me?
Maya placed a hand over his jade bee stone, which now throbbed with a new frequency; not a warning. A direction.
—She might be alive.
And with that, he stepped out of the temple and into the waking world again, different now. Not finished. But tuned. A walking chord still vibrating, a brush dipped in memory, a traveler born again through song.
—You might need a flight ticket! I can help you with that.— Said Lucio, as he pulled his sunglasses off his face.
—Lucio! Yes! Help me to fly to Joshua Tree!
—You still have some greens don't you?
English 
Español de México