In a forgotten era, on the edge of indistinct worlds, lived a passionate scholar named Zephyros. His unquenchable thirst for knowledge drove him to explore the limits of reality, in search of secrets hidden in the mysterious folds of the universe. Guided by ancient tales, he ardently sought the legendary city of Celestoria and the ships that sailed to uncharted realms in the skies, towards the enigmatic Astralon.
The tales of old spoke of a city erected by divine hands, where wisdom and magic merged to create an unparalleled harmony. However, the road to Celestoria was fraught with elusive obstacles, and only a few rare explorers had glimpsed its splendor. Zephyros, eager to unravel the mysteries of this legendary city, embarked on a daring journey.
The annals mentioned an enigmatic priest, dressed in purple and adorned with a golden mask, residing in a prehistoric monastery atop the icy desert of Numinar. This priest held occult knowledge, guarding gates to unsuspected dimensions. Determined to unveil these secrets, Zephyros traversed wild lands, circumventing dark chasms and scaling peaks that pierced the skies.
During his journey, Zephyros's thirst for discoveries led him to experiment with dreamlike substances and delve into altered states of consciousness. These chimeric voyages transported him to realms where reality dissolved, and luminous gases whispered the mysteries of existence.
However, dreamlike journeys come at a cost, and Zephyros, exhausted from his incessant quests, found himself without resources. Summer arrived, and he was compelled to leave his humble refuge. Wandering aimlessly through forgotten alleys, he crossed a bridge to districts where houses dwindled, blending into the very essence of the unknown.
It was there that destiny, capricious and unfathomable, extended its hand to Zephyros. A fortuitous encounter with a procession of knights from Celestoria presented itself. Their armors gleamed with a celestial light, and their presence evoked an unspeakable enchantment. The procession, destined to seek a worthy scholar, welcomed Zephyros among them, ready to lead him to the ethereal heights of Celestoria, where knowledge transcended the boundaries of reality.
In his newfound desire to return to the domed Celestoria, Zephyros increased his doses but eventually ran out of funds. One summer, expelled from his attic, he wandered aimlessly, crossing a bridge to a place where houses dwindled. There, fulfillment awaited, and he encountered the procession of knights from Celestoria, ready to take him there eternally.
I mentioned that there were things in certain letters from Zeraphon, especially the second and most voluminous, that I wouldn't dare quote or even formulate on paper. This hesitation applied even more strongly to the things I heard whispered that night in the dark room among haunted and solitary hills. The extent of the cosmic horrors revealed by that raspy voice is indescribable. He had known horrors before, but what he had learned since his pact with the Outer Beings was almost too much for mental well-being.
He categorically refused to believe what he heard about the nature of the ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the terrifying position of our known cosmos in the infinite chain of linked atoms-cosmos. "There are four categories of instruments here, Xander," the voice whispered. "Four categories, three faculties each, twelve pieces in total. You see, there are four different types of beings depicted in those cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungal beings unable to navigate space corporeally, two beings from Pluto (My God! if you could see the form of that one on his own planet!), and the rest entities from the central caverns of a particularly interesting dark star beyond the galaxy."
Perhaps Xenon shouldn't have studied so intensely. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to strain any brain. Mixing that with folklore, tracking a strange undercurrent of multidimensional reality behind the gloomy hints of gothic tales, creates inevitable mental tension. Xenon, hailing from Havenshire, intertwining his mathematics with the fantastical legends of ancient magic after joining the University of Arkadia, was influenced by the mystical air of the old town.
Towards the end of March, he excelled in mathematics, although other studies increasingly disturbed him. He developed an intuition for solving Riemannian equations, impressing Professor Eldritch with his understanding of fourth-dimensional problems and other puzzles that had perplexed the entire class. One afternoon, during a discussion on possible strange curvatures in space and theoretical points of contact between our part of the cosmos and regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic abysses themselves, Xenon astonished everyone with his adept handling of the complex subject, even if some of his hypothetical illustrations fueled gossip about his eccentricity. What bewildered students was his sober theory that a man could, with improbable mathematical knowledge, deliberately move from one celestial body to another, to a specific point in the cosmic infinity.
According to him, this would only require two steps; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and then a return to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps at an infinite distance. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of the three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; their survival of the second step would depend on the foreign part of the three-dimensional space chosen for re-entry. Inhabitants of certain planets might be able to live on others, even planets belonging to other galaxies, or in dimensionally similar phases of other space-time continuums. Of course, there must be vast numbers of bodies or spaces mutually uninhabitable, though mathematically juxtaposed.
It was also possible that inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry into many unknown and incomprehensible realms of other additional or infinitely multiplied dimensions—whether inside or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the reverse might also be true. This was a matter of speculation, although one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from one given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Xenon couldn't be very clear about his reasons for this last hypothesis, but his ambiguity here was more than compensated by his clarity on other complex points. Professor Eldritch particularly appreciated his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics with certain phases of magic transmitted through the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws surpassed ours.
Waves of incomprehension and doubt assailed him once more, and Xenon knew that the BEING had heard him. Now, a flow of knowledge and explanations surged from that infinite SPIRIT, opening new horizons for the researcher and preparing him for an understanding of the cosmos he had never hoped to possess. It was revealed to him how the concept of a three-dimensional world is childish and limited, and how there are directions other than the known ones of up-down, front-back, right-left. He was shown the smallness and shining nothingness of the petty gods of the earth, with their petty human interests and connections—their hatreds, rages, loves, and human vanities; their thirst for praise and sacrifices, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature.
Then the waves intensified, seeking to enhance his understanding, reconciling him with the multiform entity of which his current fragment was an infinitely small part. It was explained to him that each spatial figure was only the result of the intersection by a plane of a corresponding figure in an additional dimension—just as a square is cut from a cube or a circle from a sphere. The cube and the sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions that humans only know through conjectures and dreams; and these, in turn, are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on to the dizzying heights of archetypal infinity.
The world of humans and the gods of humans is but an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing—the three-dimensional phase of this tiny totality reached through the First Gate, where 'Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancients. Although humans hail it as reality and label the thoughts of its multiple-dimensional original as dreams, it is actually the opposite. What we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and what we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.