The world spun before the dead boy's perception like a parading tornado. Time flowed through him relentlessly fast and stormy, yet he saw and knew everything.
Toren was there all along.
Through the industrialization age, the innovations are rising up one by one. Factories and radios and rallies. The rise of new leaders, of new government systems, and of new problems. The cries and revolutions.
He witnessed all of those together with Coen's perpetual, silent, and loyal life throughout the changing hours and decades.
Each year was a bit of a step forward to progression and process.
The invention of new moralities and diverse ideologies.
Everything passed through them as if they were some invincible specters, defying nature and ordinaries over and over again.
As if deities would not matter, as if spirits are such readable aspects, as if cycle was an overboard routine for them. They have gone past the world's order since long ago.
Despite the century-long war and the brutal colonialism that forever scarred their flesh, no one seemed to even remember a single detail of it.
The books have narrated them, the information had told them, and the residues had hinted them, but no one was suffering the stigma anymore.
The hidden insignias were long forgotten and unused.
Some of Toren's paintings and artworks had survived at the most insignificant models and at the scaffoldings of the past.
No one was even treating loyalty as a big deal much like before.
Emotions and beauty such as love, sipping moon magic, tracing icy trails of shooting stars, betrayal, and tragedies were reduced into chemicals and stoic ashes.
Through the golden age, the technologies, the information age until modernization had entered the stage. Toren was there all along. He had always been watching.
The flip of curtains into a contemporary truth hailed science.
Toren realized that even until then, conflicts would not cease. The war had ended and time flowed faster to him than for anyone else, yet nothing seemed to get resolved altogether.
The bloodbaths were over, biological warfare rose. Physical abuse had been dismissed, mental battle emerged.
Digital and virtual battles had prevailed and somehow, the culture from centuries ago did not inflict much discipline to people. It must be because everyone else followed the cycle – the mundane and the ordinary parts of nature.
They have all complied, which became the reason why conflict still rages like a fluctuating fire. And when Toren finally felt a hypnagogic state, he knew what was about to come.
It felt like things had only happened yesterday, when it had actually been ages after ages.
He drifted back and forth from his consciousness and finally slipped through the nothingness.
He entered the otherworld and there, he saw all the flowerbeds he could not have seen in the world he watched progress.
The glowing petals still sent magical chills and comfort to his senses.
Toren softly caressed the flowers swaying gracefully like ballerinas above a golden, elegant stage.
The fresh air was wintry and cozy too.