Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 10 - The Attic of the Fourth Dimension (The Veil’s Unreal, Brother)
A mind-bending mystic horror-comedy with black TV-cube thinking it’s God. Eysin declares personal bankruptcy. Angechrome's seal unlocks, curtains turn to Fusilli. This was nothing. Nothing at all.
Funeral
Three figures stand at the edge of a fresh hole: Arkion, Atlas, and Bartel wrapped in a blanket that used to be Bubby’s.
GUNSHOT.
Atlas took the shot.
Arkion throws in the collar—leather, worn soft from years of a good dog doing good dog things.
Bartel throws in the blanket, dirt already clinging to the wool.
A few more fists of earth.
“Bye, Bubby,” Atlas says, voice flat with grief that doesn’t have time to perform.
Silence.
Just wind moving through frost-stiff reeds.
Bartel shifts—posture straight, voice quiet and formal. “You’re a member short now.”
Atlas stiffens. Doesn’t look up.
Bartel continues, steady: “I’d like to fill it. If you’ll have me.”
Atlas turns, “not here.”
Bartel meets his gaze, nods once.
No push.
Arkion raises his left hand.
Kaestus flares—silver-white spigots blooming across the back of his glove.
He smudges thumb and forefinger together.
A white pearl bead rolls out—Martin’s Condenser technique ring, compressed.
He holds it up between them, letting pale dawn light catch it.
“You’ve got this afternoon to think it over.” Arkion’s gaze moves between the brothers. “Someone else in the squad could step up if needed. But if you decide yes—you’ll find us at the Orb back on Osel. Parting ritual starts at six. There will be a supplies market in case you still need to get your things ready.”
He rolls the pearl bead back between his fingers. The Kaestus absorbs it with a soft, liquid flick—spigots retracting, glove smoothing over as if nothing happened.
No one speaks after that. They stand a little longer, letting the earth settle.
Then they turn and walk back toward the house—boots squelching in frost-wet grass—
Stories
Sylrissa drives fast through the Tunnel of Pine, cigarette glowing like a tiny middle finger to the universe.
Eysin watches trees blur past, still half-dreaming of space, and then the thought of soon having to part to Sampo, help EESO staff emigrate back to Osel…
They pass the machine graveyard—wind-turbine skeletons reaching for a sky that ghosted them. Hundreds, frozen mid-prayer, blades rusted into permanent surrender.
Far away, the gigantic glass tube named the Ominous Green Vein pulses as a reminder of bad, irreversible top-down decisions.
Eysin hands her pemmican like it’s communion.
They chew in silence until the salt wind forgives them.
“You’ll go to Sampo?” Eysin asks.
“Legally speaking—no.”
“Still grounded?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’ll be coming anyway.”
“I’ll take every bit of Bartel I can before I lose him to another long mission. He’s planning to ask to join the Baltikons, and he’ll probably be accepted.”
Eysin glances over. “You finally agreed to the arrangement?”
Sylrissa’s hands tighten on the wheel, just a flicker. She doesn’t answer straight.
“We’ve been having a good time these past two months. I think I’m finally in love with him.”
“Yeah?”
Sylrissa reaches for another cigarette she swore she’d quit, lights it, inhales like it hurts a little. “Have you heard the saying—That to hate one, is to hate everyone?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Turns out the same applies to love.”
Eysin listens, eyes on the road that keeps unrolling like forgiveness.
“As soon as I decided to try looking at everyone with the same non-judgment—accepting them, loving them anyway—something shifted. And I fell in love with Bartel. In a way I’ve never been in love before.”
Silence settles, gentle.
“I hated that arrangement so much,” Sylrissa says quieter. “Political match. Father’s idea. Bartel never pushed—gave me space for years. And I… looked at the guy and felt… nothing. No spark, no want, no desire—nothing you’re told love is supposed to feel like. Daddy didn’t care; it was politics. I didn’t want politics—I wanted to be alive.”
“And you moved to Reval,” Eysin supplies.
“The thrills sure made me feel something,” Sylrissa says, ashing out the window. “Violence, dangerous people with dangerous ideas about humanity.” A wry half-laugh.
“You got stabbed in the back?”
Sylrissa chuckles. “You could say I stabbed them in the back. One spark of moral clarity at exactly the wrong second and I went from apprentice to merchandise. The cost of letting them down.”
She takes a long drag, exhales the longest punctuation mark yet.
“And then the joke: Bartel leading the squad that kicked the door in. Wrapping his coat around me like I already belonged. Carried me out. No fuss.” Her voice softens to wonder. “He brushed a strand of hair from my face before setting me down—like I was already someone worth caring for properly.”
She laughs once, sharp, at herself.
“But I’ve still been ashamed. Ashamed I was stupid enough to think thrills were life. Ashamed I needed rescuing. I couldn’t stand showing up near him for years.”
Eysin is quiet a beat, then: “You’re leaving yourself last.”
Sylrissa glances over, brow creasing.
“If you’re forgiving everyone, loving everyone,” Eysin says gently, “shouldn’t forgiving yourself be part of the deal?”
She looks down at the cigarette burning between her fingers, half-gone, suddenly foreign.
Then she flicks it out the window without ceremony, without looking back.
Eysin watches her profile lighten, the way sky does when a cloud finally decides to move on.
The cigarette and the story—both gone together.
After a moment Eysin says, voice low and warm: “Thank you.”
Sylrissa glances over. “For what?”
“For saying all that.” Eysin’s smile is small, luminous. “I think I just witnessed a miracle. Thank you.”
Perona & The Attic of the Fourth Dimension
The apartment building smells of old tobacco, cheap vodka, and the exact flavor of sadness that comes from people who stopped believing doors are worth locking.
Eysin smiles at the recklessness.
Down to the basement.
Concrete box, splintery wood padding, one bare bulb. Boxes of her mother’s things nobody could bear to keep or to throw away.
Third box: the notebook.
Impeccable calligraphy, tiny constellations throwing punches, lottery numbers, wars among angels.
She slips on the specs, hoping they still magnetize truth from chaos.
Pages turn.
Born anaemic and underweight.
A large black ball came into the room. The dog was barking. Baby sound asleep. It came to extract a code from me—
Eysin skips ahead, throat tight. “Looks like the Soi-Disànt Shamàn suffered from postpartum psychosis, undiagnosed.”
More pages:
Blindside. One of a kind. Arsenal type dual arm-ring: a morphing hilt and a morphing blade. Scale bounds: unknown. Upon touch I had visions of tides—Might have something to do with the Moon. All the visions included fog. A real MISTery for the ages to come.
Revelation 16:8-9 And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun, and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.
Page 67.
Alephira. One of a kind. Technique type arm-ring, induced Psychenomia: hallucinations, emotional control. Seems to have more to it, but I can’t see, as this requires ascended consciousness to function properly.
Tucked inside like a bookmark—a braided slip of silver thread.
Eysin mumbles to herself: “A flux ledger. A shifting key. How does this work?”
She places the fabric patch on the third ring and waits.
“Well, that might take a while…”
She feels something change in her suit, but can’t tell what it is.
She walks over to the archaic TV box in the corner. Dusty. Ancient. The kind that remembers when it was a god.
She flicks the switch—nothing happens.
The ring and fabric stitch themselves together.
The knots in the fabric light up. Her rich score of Malachite & Chrysocolla flows out from her suit.
“There goes my financial independence.”
Every ounce of scored Green-Blue is gobbled up.
The strip lights all up, then melts into the ring.
Still and quiet.
“Let’s see what’s up, twenty-billion-double-buck—what—”
The lightbulb darkens.
A big black ball blooms in the center like a hole, a bubble, a television that remembers when it was a god.
It takes up most of the tiny basement, pressing against the walls.
Eysin calls her staff. Pokes it.
The building shudders, dust raining from the ceiling.
*
Boom.
Ink everywhere.
Then it isn’t ink.
Reality folds, wet paper.
Galaxies smear sideways. Her body becomes impossible angles.
Up turns into yesterday.
Left is her heartbeat played backwards on a broken kantele.
She falls through corridors of liquid starlight, past screaming geometries apologizing in dead tongues, past a dragon made of tax forms trying to invoice her for existing.
“Everything is here… This is everything?”
The black ball swallows her whole and spits her out inside—
THE ATTIC OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION
She is boxed inside a perfect cube of black glass.
No edges, no corners, only six identical walls that reflect nothing and everything at once.
The walls are moving, slowly rotating, grinding.
Each face is a millstone.
Each millstone is the Little Mad Dream.
And these boxes go on forever—back and forth in time, taking up all the space there is.
The Song of Separation traps light.
Billions of sparks of pure Monad—stolen, compressed—powering the wheels that turn the dream of being separate.
The sparks have no names, no stories, no faces. Their only definition the box.
They are simply aware, and they are screaming in a frequency the cube has learned to harvest.
The screaming is the electricity that keeps the walls turning.
The turning is the tax the world pays to remain “real.”
What you see out there, you see in here. Separation is projection. The world outside is just the dream turned inside-out.
A thin white cord drops from the exact center of the ceiling that isn’t there.
It hangs, patient, luminous.
She pulls it.
A single, ridiculous toilet-flush sound echoes through the Pleroma—cosmic, obscene, perfect—and with it, her vision zooms out.
The freaky, shifting Song of Separation floats in absolute white.
The white is not a color.
It is the Monad before it ever dreamed of separation.
The white does not notice the cube.
Outside time, outside space—it does not even register.
That cube is meager… And impossible.
And in the eyes of the Monad it is already forgiven because it never happened.
“The Little Mad Dream, The Song of Separation.”
The six black walls flash blinding white.
The trapped sparks stop screaming.
For one impossible instant the cube is transparent and empty.
And for one possible instant she becomes only it—the white, the Monad, the voice before separation—Then crashes back into the relentless impossibility.
Then the cube implodes—ashamed—sucked back into the black ball like a bad idea remembering it was never real.
*
The basement is ordinary again.
Cold linoleum, dusty boxes, gentle daylight through a high window.
Eysin lies on the floor, staring at the ceiling, holding a breath she forgot she took.
The cube was so… small.
Meager.
A black speck in boundless white that didn’t even notice it.
And the white never needed protecting.
Then the aftertaste hits: if none of this is real, every scream, every bruise, every night she cried herself hollow—was nothing.
A joke told to no audience.
Suffering for a dream that never happened.
Her stomach lurches—nihilism’s first cold finger down the throat.
Stop!
Sharp exhale.
Long inhale.
Pause.
She closes her eyes.
“Alright,” she whispers to the ordinary ceiling, to the dust, to the boundless white she can still taste behind her eyelids. “Let’s do this. I’m willing. Here we go…
I’m ready to let go of all the bullshit. None of what happened to me will define and defile me any longer.
Monad, I commit myself to You—only You.
Attune me to Your Voice, to Your boundless Love.
What am I here for? What do I do?”
Silence.
Then—an unmistakable knowing rears, a sunrise inside her bones:
I’m in the Song of Separation, in the Little Mad Dream.
Love never asked for the sacrifice. It just extends.
I am here to do the same, to bring love, and joy—to support the Gentle Awakening.
She exhales so sharp it’s almost a chuckle.
The spark never needed her protection.
It was protecting her all along.
Body unmoving on the floor, legs still in the booth, head resting on the bottom step like she’s been dropped there by a cosmic furniture mover with a strange sense of humour.
“That was nothing,” she says to no one in particular, voice soft with wonder.
Footsteps on the stairs.
An old babushka descends—squat, sturdy, laundry basket balanced like the most important thing in the universe.
She stops, sees a woman’s head where a step should be, body twisted through a doorway like accidental art.
Looks.
Makes nothing of it.
Continues down, humming.
Eysin grins up at the ceiling.
*
Across the Baltic Sea, the fax machine turns on again.
Whir. Click. Feed.
Another message from Hel.
The chart appears, line by thermal line.
The black peak—still there, monstrous, breaking the margin.
The red peak after it—present, accounted for.
And now: something new.
A smaller peak. Discoloured. Pale, wavering, like the ink couldn’t quite decide what colour it should be. Grey-green? Sickly yellow? The thermal printer does its best, but the result is unsettling—a spike that looks wrong, like it’s printed over an error, a glitch made manifest.
And at the end of the chart, where the timeline should fade into uncertainty:
A block.
Not a spike. Not a wave.
A perfect cube of blushing white—pale pink bleeding into pearl, the colour of dawn on snow, or a cheek catching unexpected warmth.
It sits there at the edge of the known world, solid and impossible, breaking every rule about how anomaly charts are supposed to work.
The fax machine stops.
*
From the small basement windows, the curtains—now permanently twisted into limp, overcooked fusilli from the Orb’s earlier tantrum—wheeze in theatrical, pasta-flavoured unison:
inhale… exhale… dramatic gasp
Next stop, darlings: ritual circles that smell like frankincense and bad decisions, upside-down swings that defy gravity and common sense, and a marriage sealed by an old man with antlers who definitely knows more than he’s letting on… plus noises loud enough to wake the dead (and probably offend them).
Act 2 just hit the gas—full Baltic wedding chaos ahead!
Don’t touch that dial. The lace is still recovering, and the moon’s already RSVP’d.
Continue reading:
Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 11 - Ritual, Swing-Flip, a Wedding, and the Loudest Sound in the World
The Orb Hall rises like a cathedral carved by hands that remembered mountains.
E-pub/book: Aiming for 2026 February.