July 18 Codex I: The Phantom Limb of Meaning

Here it is. The very first door into my new novel, July 18. Between now and its release in mid-November, I will share seven such glimpses into the world I've built. This is where the Oliver Battolo journey continues

Ante colorum extasis transcendentale, est primum renaisus vernatum, sed ante id, necessi il abyssum inferna demitter.

The meaning was a phantom limb of the mind. The sense of it lingered – a perfect, crystalline shape that had existed for a single, lucid second before shattering into the meaningless dust of its syllables. It was gibberish now, but it hadn't been. For a moment, it had been Truth.

Who had spoken? Was it a voice, or a thought that wasn’t his own? An intruder in the quiet corridors of his skull. The memory of the meaning was already gone, leaving behind only the cold, unnerving proof that some other consciousness had just passed through him.

Oliver Battolo opened his eyes to the familiar gray of his bedroom ceiling. The corrosive loop. It had been happening for a week, ever since the neat boundary of his twenty-fourth birthday, the same time his guide, the Noncemeister, had vanished for good. The old world had receded like a forgotten tide, leaving behind only this cold, new territory of the mind.

These weren’t just dreams anymore; they were fractures. Fissures in the foundation of himself, through which these voiceless words now seeped. And below it all, the familiar ballast. Not just a feeling, but a physical weight in his soul, a cold anchor pulling him down into a private and suffocating dark.