''Everything Obeys the Void''

Hi everyone,
This is the first time I’m sharing as Eteria... a voice born from the parts of myself that never stopped listening, dwelling in silence and in the spaces between memory and forgetting.

This isn’t a story, nor a simple poem. It’s something I had to remember, and could only write once I forgot my own name. If you’ve ever felt lost in the spaces between what was and what might have been, this is for you.

Thank you for listening.

✧

Beyond the veil where the sky forgot its shape, there lies a vast expanse, neither land nor memory, where figures drift endlessly. They move without will, drawn forward by a rhythm they cannot name. Their eyes remain lowered, their lips parted, and their steps repeat something that was never truly theirs.

Each carries, deep within the chest, a small dark stone. It is warm… though born of absence. It pulses faintly, humming in quiet synchrony with the void.

No voice commands them, yet all obey.
There are no chains… yet still, they are bound.

She walks among them. Not with pride nor defiance, but with the stillness of one who remembers. Her chest bears no stone. She tore it out beneath a moonless sky, on the night she understood that the rhythm had never been hers to follow. Since then, she has walked in silence.

And in that silence, something ancient listens.

At the edge of forgetting there is a garden. It doesn't grow. It waits. Hidden in the folds of what was never lived, it is not made of soil but of withheld moments: touches left unmade, names unsaid, laughter stifled before emerging. And it opens only for those who can stand still without vanishing.

She never steps through its threshold, yet something in her loosens every time… an ache that no longer needs a name, a caramel once forbidden, a tear that falls not from sorrow, but from permission. And there, among the near-flowers that murmur like memory, a voice speaks within her… not in words, but in knowing.

What you have not lived still waits.
It is not lost.
It has only been obeying the hum of what was never yours.

And as she breathes in that knowing, the stones across the expanse fall quiet.
Just for a moment.
But in that moment, the void remembers her too....

✧

In silence, I remain.
  -by Eteria