He sat on the edge of a crumbling cliff, a place untouched by the world’s noise. The sky stretched above him in a lazy arc, shifting from day to night as effortlessly as the breath in his lungs. But he was tired, tired in a way that went beyond weariness of this life. It was deeper, older, like the fatigue of a soul that had carried the weight of countless existences.
This was not the first life he had lived. He remembered fragments of them all, scattered across time like brittle autumn leaves, each carrying the same patterns, the same struggles. He had been a king and a beggar, a saint and a sinner. He had wielded power, suffered loss, loved, and hated. Each life different, yet bound by the same unspoken rules. The ceaseless cycles of birth and death, of striving and surrender. There was no meaning in any of it, no grand revelation hidden beneath the layers of experience. Just motion. Just existence.
In the beginning, when he first realized he had been through this before, he had sought answers. There was a time when he had turned to gods, pleading for insight, for purpose. He had knelt before angels, begged for divine wisdom, believing in some higher reason behind his endless journey. But the gods were silent, their promises of salvation hollow. Even the forces of the underworld, which beckoned to him with their dark temptations, offered nothing more than distraction, a temporary escape, not an end.
He had become a wanderer in the universe, moving through its intricacies with the understanding of a sage. He knew the mechanics of creation, the hidden threads that connected all things. The mysteries of life and death, the fabric of time and space, they were no longer unknowns to him. He could feel the pulse of the cosmos, a rhythm that never changed, never truly progressed. It was a grand machine, an intricate dance of energy and matter, but ultimately, it was just that: a machine. Cold, unfeeling, and relentless.
The deeper his knowledge grew, the less it mattered. He saw no purpose in following the gods who ruled the heavens, their games of power and control meaningless to him now. He no longer feared the forces of the underworld, for what was there to fear in a cycle that only repeated? Even the affairs of men, their wars, their passions, their endless striving, seemed like echoes of a story he had heard too many times before. Everything was futile.
So, he made his final decision. He would follow nothing, not god, not angel, nor demon, nor man. There would be no more chasing, no more seeking. He was done with all of it. There was no higher truth to be found, no final answer at the end of the path. The universe, in all its complexity, was nothing more than a repetitive cycle of creation and destruction. And if that was all there was, why should he continue to play his part?
He sat down, and simply watched.
The world moved around him, people lived and died, seasons changed, empires rose and fell. He observed it all with the detached gaze of someone who had already seen everything worth seeing. The sun would rise, and he would watch it set. The stars would appear in their ancient constellations, and he would greet them as old friends, though they too meant nothing now.
There was no sadness in him, nor joy, nor anger. Those emotions belonged to the part of him that had once cared, once believed that there was something to be found in the ceaseless movement of existence. What was left was only a quiet acceptance. Not of a higher plan, but of the absence of one. There was nothing to fight against, nothing to seek.
He had stepped outside the cycles, not by ascending to some higher state, but by refusing to participate in them any longer. There was peace in that, peace in knowing that he owed nothing to anyone, not even to himself.
The world would continue on, as it always had. But for him, it had already ended. And that, he realized, was the only true freedom he had ever known.