Chapter Eight: The Forgotten Civilization of the Senses

After the silence settled, the old man moved slowly and looked at me with a long, deliberate gaze.

Then, without saying a word, he extended his staff toward me –

as if he were still waiting for confirmation of something he sensed,

or perhaps simply wishing to see whether I could do what he already knew, deep down, I was meant to do.

It was the same staff I had seen in the cave, adorned with the very carvings etched into my memory…

Yet now, they seemed to shift beneath my skin.

I hesitated for a moment, then reached out my hand.

The instant my fingers touched the carvings, something within me shifted from its place.

It wasn’t a feeling, nor a thought,

but a deep tremor that surged through my spine –

as though something ancient had suddenly risen all at once.

A light dizziness swept over me.

Something in my sense of balance slipped out of alignment,

as if the earth had moved beneath me – without moving.

My head tilted slightly – neither backward nor forward, but inward.

And something in my eyes began to withdraw from the visible image,

as though they were reaching for something else… beyond the light.

My eyelids closed. Or perhaps they closed on their own,

as if something inside me had chosen to seal me off from the outside world

in order to finish what had begun.

And then… something opened within me to a scene I had never known,

as if I had left myself – without leaving my body.

My feet were moving across a soft terrain,

unlike the dirt of the cave or the tiles of the city.

The ground here wasn’t firm, nor was it loose.

It pulsed gently beneath me.

Each step stirred a sound that couldn’t be heard –

yet could be felt through the skin.

Not like a vibration,

but like a whispering tattoo that etched the path beneath me in silence.

The air was denser… but purer.

No smells I could name –

and yet my nose filled with a sensation I could not explain:

a raw kind of presence, scentless,

yet forming something tangible in my chest.

I turned my eyes around me,

but my sight was no longer what it used to be.

Things no longer began at their edges.

I saw them from their center –

from within.

I could no longer tell if I was seeing them…

or remembering them as I looked.

A girl passed slowly in front of me.

She paused beside the trunk of an unfamiliar tree,

placed her hand upon it,

closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them gently.

She didn’t speak.

But a sentence crept quietly into my chest:

“It is asleep… but the roots are dreaming.”

I didn’t look around for the source of the voice. I didn’t need to.

It wasn’t something I had heard…

It had happened inside me.

And then – I moved.

I saw a man sitting inside a series of curved, cell-like structures,

building with a strange, peaceful focus.

His hands moved with a quiet confidence,

as though executing instructions older than his mind.

They weren’t stones.

The materials were light, soft – unknown to me.

And yet, I understood them.

It felt as if I knew the purpose of each piece,

as though I had seen them before in a dream,

or in a place my memory couldn’t reach.

I didn’t understand how –

but I knew.

The structures repeated in perfect patterns,

with gaps between them that felt intentional –

not to be filled,

but to breathe.

He worked in silence. He didn’t look around –

as if his senses knew the place before his body did.

He didn’t measure. He didn’t plan.

He simply extended his hand –

and the piece knew, on its own, exactly where it belonged.

In a nearby open courtyard, I saw a group of people moving in astonishing harmony –

as though each one knew what the others were about to do before they did it.

They exchanged no words, no signals.

They held strange tools, placing them in precise locations, then stepped away as others continued the construction,

the rhythm unbroken for even a moment.

It looked like a silent dance –

with no leader, no clear beginning.

Only motion, woven from a shared intuition,

as if their bodies were connected to a single system, guiding them without revealing itself.

Then I saw a man walking without looking where he was going,

his steps perfectly aligned, unerring.

His eyes were closed – or perhaps entirely removed from their function –

yet he would suddenly shift direction,

as if sensing his path without needing to see it,

responding to a call that could not be heard,

could not be seen – only felt deep within.

To my right sat a still woman, her eyes wide open –

but fixed on nothing.

The light around her flickered, as if being shaped.

It glowed and faded, like it was speaking to her

in a language no eye of mine could comprehend.

A boy sat on a rock, unmoving,

yet fully aware of who was approaching.

He didn’t turn, didn’t tense –

only sat more firmly as another presence neared,

as if he could sense the warmth of intentions

before they were born.

Another stood by a small lake, her palms pressed to her ears.

She wasn’t listening to the water,

but to the tremors in the air above its surface –

as though she could hear frequencies not yet sounded,

voices whose time hadn’t come.

I tried to approach one of them,

but something in my body stepped back before I did –

as if the decision wasn’t mine.

Something inside whispered:

Do not disturb the sense with sound.

I stopped where I was.

And for the first time,

I realized that silence wasn’t the absence of speech –

but a deeper language,

spoken when sound fails to carry truth,

or explain the world it inhabits.

I kept walking.

Everyone I passed looked human…

but they were not like us.

No one whispered.

No one pointed.

No one rushed or shouted or explained.

Yet everything was understood.

As though a hidden resonance whispered from body to body –

not spoken, not seen… only felt.

Then a knowing poured into me,

not as a thought,

but like a memory rising suddenly from beneath my awareness.

I felt – without anyone telling me –

that I wasn’t a stranger among them.

As though I hadn’t entered this world –

but returned to it.

And I didn’t understand its rules because I learned them,

but because I was remembering them, piece by piece,

as a body remembers a dance

it once performed

before it was forgotten.

Here, a human is not measured by what they own,

nor by what they can do.

Not by wealth, not by skill, not even by knowledge –

but by what has awakened inside them.

By what cannot be taught, or transferred, or rehearsed.

Here, rank is not granted as an honor, nor declared as a title, nor earned through effort or inheritance –

It is an inner vibration, invisible and immeasurable,

that reaches you when a new sense matures inside.

A call that no one else can hear,

and only those who have tasted it from within can ever believe.

When a sense awakens within you, your place in the world does not change –

you change within it.

As though you are not moving across the earth,

but through unseen layers of perception.

As though light does not exit the eyes to understand the world,

but enters through them to reveal you to yourself.

Each awakened sense opens a new door into truth –

not to show it to you,

but to reshape your place within it.

Some stop at a handful of familiar senses.

Others reach deeper states of awareness that defy explanation.

And then there are those whose senses stretch beyond naming –

until the very senses fail to perceive them.

Not because they disappeared,

but because they are no longer detectable by the tools we understand.

They do not vanish.

They become a presence too fluid to grasp.

As if the body had only ever been a phase –

and once every sense inside it has awakened,

it no longer needs a body to exist.

I saw among them a boy standing alone, unmoving –

as if waiting for a pulse that had not yet arrived.

When he stretched his hand into the air, something around him shifted.

The glow softened, and a pale light seeped into his skin –

as though it remembered him.

And I felt I knew him.

Not him, perhaps, but the feeling that swept through him.

As if I had been him… or might one day become him…

or that he was the sense I had not yet found in myself.

I took a step forward, and reached for a low stone beside me.

Its surface was cold at first –

but then I felt a pulse from it echo into me,

as though it were calling my name.

For the first time, I realized that the purpose of my eyes was not to see –

but to remember.

As though they were not gazing at the world,

but digging through it for memory.

Here, there is no time.

No language.

No definitions.

Only senses awakening.

This is not another time.

It is the memory that came before time itself.

The longer I stayed, the quieter something in me became.

I was no longer afraid.

No longer overwhelmed.

Each passing minute opened a new window inside me.

No one explained anything.

But I understood.

As if knowledge was not transmitted, nor taught, nor spoken –

but summoned

from a hidden chamber of awareness.

I began to realize –

what I was witnessing wasn’t magic.

It wasn’t fantasy.

It was a different system of perception.

A world built upon senses we never named –

yet here, they formed the very shape of language,

of thought,

of being.

That man building the structures – he wasn’t designing.

He was remembering.

His movements were a hereditary rhythm,

as if his cells knew the exact place for every piece.

Just as honeybees construct their hives

with no plans –

only the precision of an infallible inner pulse.

And that group moving in perfect harmony?

They weren’t coordinating roles –

they behaved like ants,

part of a single awareness pulsing through them all,

wordless and unified.

And the man who couldn’t see his path, yet never strayed?

He seemed to carry an invisible map,

just like migratory birds who know their destination

without ever needing to see it.

The girl who touched the tree wasn’t imagining.

She was translating the voice of the roots,

just as elephants do –

listening to the earth with their feet,

catching the hidden call deep beneath the soil,

the kind that isn’t spoken or heard,

but felt –

a truth uttered in a language without sound.

And the woman gazing into the light –

she saw the frequencies that hid behind the spectrum,

just as insects do when they communicate in silence.

And the one who covered her ears?

She wasn’t fleeing from noise…

but listening to what hadn’t yet arrived –

the tremors of time.

Like certain sea creatures that detect shifts in pressure

before the quake ever reaches,

leaving the danger zone before the disaster is born –

not out of instinct,

but with a sense we no longer possess.

I didn’t understand any of this.

I remembered it.

As if I had once held these senses –

then lost them.

And I wondered:

What would humanity have become… if it had not forgotten?

If we could feel another person’s presence without speech?

If we could read sincerity in their pulse

before hearing their words?

What would life look like…

if there were no language between us –

only resonance?

And in that moment, something stirred on the horizon.

No sound. No shadow.

Just a feeling, condensing inside me,

as if I were being gripped from within.

My head turned slowly –

not because I chose to look,

but because something stronger than my will whispered,

Look.

The air shifted –

as if the world’s silence had exhaled a new tone.

It wasn’t heard.

But I felt it resonate in my chest.

There, between the scattered trees, stood a boy.

Still in body. Alive in gaze.

His face held no trace of age –

as though time had passed over him

without leaving a mark.

He did not speak.

He did not smile.

But he looked at me

as if he had known me long before I was born.

That gaze?

It wasn’t curiosity.

Nor suspicion.

But something like recognition –

as if he had finally seen the echo

that had remained incomplete within him.

As though his presence had been waiting

to be finished by mine.

I knew – without words – that his name was Orion.

Not spoken.

Not etched.

Just something that trembled within me,

like an ancient memory stirring awake.

His eyes asked no questions.

Offered no answers.

They were a mirror –

reflecting parts of me

I hadn’t realized I was hiding.

And in that moment,

I felt that everything I had seen in this world

had merely been waves preparing for his arrival.

Every sense that awakened in me

was only a rehearsal

for seeing him.

Meeting him wasn’t an event.

It was the culmination of everything before it.

He did not step forward.

And neither did I.

But the space between us collapsed –

as if it had never been.

And within me,

a voice unlike any voice said:

Here you are… You’ve arrived.

And for the first time,

I no longer felt like a visitor to this world.

The senses had melted me into it,

until I could no longer separate myself from it.

As if I hadn’t entered this world…

but returned to its awareness.

I wasn’t born into it anew.

I remembered –

I had always belonged to it.