I took a step forward, and so did the monolith. The distance I travelled did not match the distance between me and it.
It was unnerving.
Then, all of the sudden, something about amalgamation of sand changed, or maybe it's better to say it shifted.
The world grew completely silent. Complete silence sounds tranquil, but I assure you it's not. It enabled me to hear the worst sound I've ever heard in my life, the sound of my own heart.
It wasn't mine. I panicked, I logically knew this body was different from my original, but hearing the sound of an alien heart beating in your ears is not something one can mentally prepare for.
I couldn't breathe, I wasn't even gasping for breath, I couldn't breathe, period. It wasn't that my lungs were panicking, they weren't responding.
My panic intensified.
I looked down at the shaking hands. What were they. Where did my actual hands go? Wait, no! What are they doing!
The hands reached for the throat, but I, didn't control them.
They squeezed. I tried to scream but I wouldn't breathe, since these lungs weren't mine.
Staring at the monolith, my facial muscles curled, but I was not smiling.
Only john was.
Before John's eyes the monolith grew, and grew, until it eclipsed the sun. Or, maybe we had gotten smaller, either way, it blocked all the natural light from our world.
Did it really matter though? Did anything really matter before the monolith of shifting sand? At that moment, I believed it capable of doing anything, and at that moment, it pretty much could.
It became so large that it was no different than a wall and on that wall lay words. I tried to read them but John closed his eyes.
I continued to struggle in blackness. John doesn't want me to see those words, they must be the key to my situation.
I can still see light, dull, white light, in the shape of a dot. It seemed that the light from the ivory monolith shined through.
John can't block it, after all, it can block the sun and john cant block the sun!
Nothing can stop it!
And at that moment, nothing could.
My world was mostly dark and devoid of light, except for that white dot. Or, at least, that was how it was until the sand trickled in.
It started with a crack. One white grain at a time, the sand filled the cracks. It was a meticulous, gradual, but unstoppable process.
The cracks spread across my world of no sensation. They formed invisible letters, but even they, were revealed by the monolith.
They ascribed: The Guilty
The origin of hate
The embodiment of all fears
Murphy's law
I see now, the monolith's power is one of fear.
That means I might have a body, But that body outside ISN'T MINE! IT CAN'T BE MINE! I can't accept it, but it's my only vessel out of here. I have to control it. No matter how disgusting it feels. No matter how alien it is.
I steeled myself, and reflected: the way to break the monolith's power is simple, but not exactly easy. I just have to believe it can't make John real.
It's easier said than done. It's against human nature to say a rock you saw moments earlier didn't exist, even if you knew it wouldn't exist if you believed it so.
Denying what one sees and knows as true, with no evidence to speak of is an atrocious affair.
It requires one to give up on logic. I can't do that. There is another, more dangerous way to break the power, it is to disconnect myself from this world, therefore bypassing the condition of being free from the monolith.
To do this I need to reverse the action I entered with. John's eyes are currently closed and so are mine. Which completes the first step. The second step is to flip the monocle and re-invert the lens. Getting john to look down quickly in order so shake the monocle off and have it spin midair. Then getting him to drop to the floor and open his left eye to look through the inverted monocle on the ground should accomplish this.
The monolith shifted again, the cracks receded from my black world and the white dust followed suit. Cracks re-appeared where my feet should have been, if I had a body. John looked down in a frenzy. A red and white eyewear fell to the grass. The cracks shrunk, it was to the point of only being able to read them with a magnification tool.
An instant later, the miniscule cracks vanished and re-appeared everywhere else.
The scene changed, I was back in the rickety-old shack, laying on the floor with my sister hovering over me.
"God, that was hard. Being able to manipulate an outside person with no ability in influence them does indeed require some contemplation. Do you want to know how I did it sister?" I asked her.
"What are you talking about?" She asked, unamused yet worried.
"Glad you asked!" I responded eagerly. "The first step is to realize the conditions tying the outside individual, or in other words, what has the individual done without reprieve, for the entirety of the time you realized him?
Stared at the monolith with closed eyes of course, but I also realized he only started to close his eyes, even when he was in control of them, only when he looked at the monolith. As in his eyes were open when he wasn't looking at the monolith!
So I inwardly praised the monolith, saying it was the world itself and truly believed it too, so it became the ground and john looked down quickly to stare at it, causing the monocle to spin and fall to the floor, I knew I succeeded when I saw the cracks recede and spread across the ground!
The next step was the most complicated, to get him to use the inverted monocle and keep its position. For this I used the fact that this was a world of symbols, and that the monolith represented my authority and the monocle also represented my authority. Plus the fact that while the monolith's size and the existence of john was a consequence of my belief in it, john himself, while being created by the monolith, might not fear it.
So I bet on that, it made sense for a monolith built on fears to have a different size depending on who is viewing it.
I believed the sentiment, so it became true. John's personality that I knew of, which was what the this john was most likely based off of, was that it was similar to mine. Which might mean he thinks in symbols like I do.
So if I whole-heartedly believe the monolith built on fears and views to have a different size depending on who's viewing it, john will view it as a size that fits in the glass of the monocle on the ground and because he always looks at the monolith, but more importantly the words on the monolith, he will drop to the ground and look at the words through the monocle with closed eyes.
This was confirmed when the cracks shrank to a miniscule size. Although, I sadly couldn't confirm that he was actually looking through the monocle, I had to continue with my plan.
For the final step, I needed for john to open his eyes when looking through the monocle. The way to do that was to instantly recall the monolith's position away from the monocle, causing john to open his eyes instantly. Which would cause the reverse entering ritual to be complete and take me out.
In order to do this I had to establish another 'belief'. Yet I already established that the monolith can have its own sizes and locations depending on the viewer and I couldn't overwrite what I already believed. So to solve this problem, I realized that I was came here because I have an authority, John is only along for the ride.
John is a part of my mind after learning history on him. Therefore, john is not apart from my conscious, and my conscious belief on where the monolith is located is different than john's. Yet john is my part of my conscious, so the majority of my conscious belief will overrule john's.
This way, both beliefs of me overruling john's belief and the belief that the monolith's size and location are different for different people, don't contradict each other. John isn't a different person, so he is not subject to the latter.
The final part of this step was constructing a belief that pointed the monolith's position away from the floor, that didn't contradict any belief before. So I 'realized' that the monocle itself wasn't a part of this world, if I did not come it would not be here.
Which would mean that any space under the monocle also does not classify as the 'world'. In accordance to this belief, the position of the monolith instantly shifted from the space inside the monocle to everywhere on the ground that was not the monocle.
Prompting john to open his eye that's over the monocle since he was no longer viewing the monolith's words there, and that action completed the reverse entrance ritual and sent me back to reality.
That's what I was talking about sister."