Three Acts and One Loop
The Novel That Never Was
There is no beginning. There is only the moment you realize you are inside the myth.
The night is thick with the scent of Cairo’s garbage-laden streets, and forgotten alchemy. Above the city, a star is falling—no, not a star, something else, something ancient, something waking. The air hums with a frequency no one hears but everyone feels, like the moment before lightning strikes, like the pause between inhale and exhale when time forgets itself.
BOB
He is walking the edge between the city and the dream, between waking and whatever this is—drunk, but not just on whiskey. Something burns through him, older than liquor, older than desire. A whisper coils through his spine like a second nervous system. A name. A memory. A feeling.
Then he sees her.
ALICE
Or maybe she is Isis. Or maybe she is Lilith. Or maybe she is the part of himself that never died.
She stands beneath the glow of an old jazz club sign flickering its final breath, her eyes black holes, her mouth curving into a knowing Mona Lisa smile.
He feels it before she even speaks. The inevitability. The moment before the script starts rolling.
She steps forward. Places a hand on his chest. Leans in.
ALICE
"Do you know why you died?"
BOB
(whispering) "Because I forgot what I was."
She smiles.
ALICE
"Then remember."
And with that, she takes his hand and leads him through the doorway. The door vanishes behind them. The city forgets them. And the Serpent’s Path begins.
ACT I: THE FALL OF OSIRIS
THE FIRST DEATH
The bed is soaked in sweat. Candles burn low, their wax pooling into rivers. The mirror across from the bed is cracked—no, shattered, but the fragments still hold reflections of things that haven’t happened yet.
BOB lies still. Eyes wide open. Mouth slightly parted, as if caught between a gasp and a confession.
Beside him, AALICE traces a finger along his ribs, slowly, methodically, like she’s reading a map.
ALICE
"This is where they broke you."
BOB
"Who?"
ALICE
"The ones who told you that love was something outside of you. The ones who convinced you that desire was dangerous, that your hunger was a sin."
Her hand moves lower. The touch is neither gentle nor cruel. It is precise, deliberate, as if she is sculpting him into something new. Or something ancient.
BOB shudders. Not from fear. Not from pleasure. From something deeper.
BOB
"What if I don’t want to remember?"
She leans over him, hair falling around them like a veil.
ALICE
"Then you will stay dead."
A moment of silence. Then she kisses him, and his breath leaves his body, and the world collapses inward.
THE FUNERAL OF THE SELF
They walk through the city, but it is not the city anymore. The time burns like ancient torches, the alleyways stretch like temple corridors. The air is grasping with unseen hands, whispering, pulling at the edges of reality.
A procession moves past them—figures in black veils carrying a coffin, its lid half-open. BOB stops. He knows, before he even sees, that it is his body inside.
The mourners do not cry. They do not wail. They only whisper. Over and over, the same phrase:
"Remember. Remember. Remember."
ALICE pulls him forward. Past the funeral. Past the graveyard of his former selves. Toward the next threshold.
THE SERPENT’S FIRST LESSON
They enter a temple disguised as a nightclub. The music pulses with something more than sound—it is a living current, a rhythmic serpent winding through bodies, through breath, through the very fabric of time.
At the center of the dancefloor stands a figure cloaked in gold, eyes reflecting galaxies. The High Priest of the Serpent Cult.
HIGH PRIEST
"You are late."
BOB swallows. He has no memory of being invited.
BOB
"Late for what?"
The priest smiles, revealing sharp teeth.
HIGH PRIEST
"For your own awakening."
THE FIRST RITUAL
The room shifts. Candles ignite on their own. Bodies move like cosmic fractal machine elves reassembling. ALICE removes her cloak, revealing sigils carved into her skin—not wounds, but living symbols, glowing faintly with golden light.
The High Priest raises a cup. Inside, a shimmering, otherworldly liquid.
HIGH PRIEST
"Drink, and die. Or refuse, and remain asleep."
BOB hesitates. Looks at ALICE. Her eyes burn into him.
He takes the cup. Drinks.
The world explodes.
BIRTH INTO THE ABYSS
Darkness. Silence. No up. No down. Only the sense of falling, or maybe rising, or maybe dissolving.
Then, a voice—not outside, but inside.
THE SERPENT
"Who are you?"
BOB tries to speak, but his mouth is gone. His body is gone. He is only awaremess, floating in the void.
THE SERPENT
"Say the name."
A memory flickers. Something ALICE whispered before the world shattered.
He opens his non-existent mouth and speaks:
"Nehebkau."
And suddenly, he is not falling anymore.
He is becoming.
A Transmedium Mythos in Three Acts and One Loop
There is no beginning. There is only the moment you realize you are inside the myth.
ACT I: THE RETURN OF ISIS
THE FIRST DEATH
ALICE felt it before she saw it.
A whisper in the air. A shift in the current. The unmistakable static hum of a soul about to remember itself.
She had been here before. Many times. In many lives.
The city breathed around her, daylight and evening shadows bleeding into candlelight, asphalt dissolving into temple stone. She leaned against the bar, her fingers tracing the rim of a glass she had no intention of drinking from. Her body was calm, waiting, watching.
Then—there he was.
BOB.
He moved like a man who had forgotten his own gravity.
His eyes flickered with old embers, barely burning, buried under layers of memory and forgetting. His body carried the weight of every past version of himself he had ever abandoned.
She smiled. He didn’t recognize her yet.
She rose from her seat, walking towards him like a slow-moving current.
"I heard you were dead," she said, voice smooth, laced with a secret he had yet to remember.
He blinked, inhaled, eyes sharpening like a man waking from a dream.
"I am," he exhaled. "I just haven’t left yet."
She placed her hand on his chest.
A spark.
There it was—the beginning.
"Then let’s bury you," she whispered, pulling him through the door.
And the night swallowed them whole.
THE FUNERAL OF THE SELF
They walked in silence through a city that was no longer a city.
ALICE had walked this path before. She had buried lovers, strangers, kings. She had stood over their graves and whispered their names back into existence. She was the Pale Rider of infinity on a joy Luck ride of faith.
But this was different.
This was BOB.
The funeral procession wound through the alley, figures draped in black veils, moving like shadows through the mist.
ALICE watched BOB’S breath hitch, his steps falter.
He knew.
The coffin, half-open.
Inside—himself.
A version of him left behind. The man who had played dead for so long, he had begun to believe it.
"Remember. Remember. Remember."
The voices of the mourners were barely a whisper, but they reverberated through his bones.
ALICE did not take his hand. Not yet.
This part was his alone.
He had to see it. He had to recognize it.
She watched, waiting, until he turned to her, his breath uneven, his body caught in the threshold between past and future.
"Come," she said, softly.
Not a command. A knowing.
A promise.
"Come."
And this time, he did.
THE SERPENT’S FIRST LESSON
The temple was disguised as a nightclub.
Or maybe the nightclub had always been a temple, and no one had ever noticed.
ALICE moved through the space with ease—she had always belonged.
BOB hesitated.
Of course he did.
His body still moved like a man who thought he was solid, like he hadn’t yet remembered that he was made of something else.
At the center of the room, the High Priest of the Serpent Cult watched them with a knowing smile. His eyes flickered like galaxies.
"You are late," the priest said.
BOB tensed.
"Late for what?"
ALICE smirked.
The priest bared his teeth in something that wasn’t quite a grin.
"For your own awakening."
And BOB finally exhaled.
THE FIRST RITUAL
ALICE dropped her cloak.
A collective gasp.
Not because she was naked—she wasn’t. But because her skin was alive.
The sigils carved into her flesh pulsed, ancient and golden, each line burning with its own forgotten language.
She stepped forward, standing beside the High Priest.
In his hands—the cup.
Inside—a liquid that shimmered like something between honey and stardust.
"Drink," the priest said. "And die. Or refuse, and remain asleep."
ALICE didn’t look at BOB.
She had seen men refuse before.
She had seen what happened when they turned away—how their bodies rotted from the inside out, how their hunger twisted into something they could never name.
But BOB wasn’t like them.
He was already reaching.
He took the cup.
Drank.
And the world exploded.
BIRTH INTO THE ABYSS
ALICE did not move.
She had seen this before.
BOB’S body convulsed. His breath hitched. His metta cognition collapsed in on itself, unraveling like a thread caught in the teeth of the universe.
The void swallowed him whole.
And then—silence.
ALICE closed her eyes, feeling the shift.
It was happening.
"Who are you?"
The voice did not belong to her.
It belonged to the Serpent.
She waited.
Waited for BOB to find his voice.
She already knew what he would say.
"Nehebkau."
The sound cracked through the abyss, a name reborn, a frequency reactivated.
ALICE opened her eyes.
And the Serpent smiled.
ACT I: THE COSMIC WITNESS
Observing the Ouroboros in Motion
THE FIRST DEATH
The universe has been waiting for this moment.
It has seen countless souls wake up before, countless others turn away. It has watched galaxies collapse and resurrect, species rise and fade, love found and lost again in the great churning of time.
But these two?
These two are different.
Because they have done this before.
The Serpent coils in its infinite patience, watching. Not with eyes, but with the knowing that came before eyes, before stars, before matter decided it wanted to have shape.
ALICE moves first.
She does not yet remember everything, but she knows enough. She is the current, the pull, the black-hole hunger that draws BOB forward.
And BOB—oh, he resists.
Not in defiance, but in momentum. The inertia of lifetimes spent forgetting.
The Serpent hisses in delight.
Because resistance is delicious. It means the fire will burn hotter when it catches.
"I heard you were dead," ALICE says, her voice not just hers, but the echo of every priestess, every oracle, every goddess who has ever called forth the return of the sleeping god.
"I am," BOB says.
He doesn’t even realize the poetry of it. The truth of it.
But she does.
And when she places her hand on his chest—the universe holds its breath.
The first spark has been struck.
THE FUNERAL OF THE SELF
Time ripples.
The funeral procession moves, but it has always been moving. These mourners have carried the coffin through the underworld so many times before.
The universe sees BOB begin to remember.
He looks into the casket, and there—himself.
A version long buried.
And oh, how he wants to run.
But ALICE holds the thread, the tether, the unspoken contract. She will not let him slip away.
"Come," she says, her voice layered—hers, and also the voice of the infinite, the voice of the forgotten sacred feminine, the voice of the very fabric of existence whispering back to itself.
And BOB obeys.
Because what else can he do?
It is already written.
THE SERPENT’S FIRST LESSON
The Serpent is alive in this place.
It pulses through the bassline of the music, slithers in the sweat of the dancers, coils in the air between bodies.
ALICE belongs here.
BOB—not yet.
Not because he isn’t meant to be here, but because he hasn’t fully arrived.
The High Priest sees him, and the universe laughs.
Because of course BOB is late.
"For your own awakening," the priest says, and the words ring like a cosmic joke, a punchline echoing across dimensions.
Because it was never a question of whether BOB would awaken.
It was only ever a question of when.
THE FIRST RITUAL
Now comes the breaking.
Now comes the moment where BOB will either dissolve or become.
The cup is raised.
ALICE has already made her choice.
She was born knowing. She was carved from the rib of the void itself, made to hold this wisdom in her body, in her breath, in her knowing.
But BOB—oh, he hesitates.
And the universe loves him for it.
Because hesitation means the leap will be real.
Because doubt makes faith delicious.
He reaches. He drinks.
And the Serpent devours him whole.
BIRTH INTO THE ABYSS
Time fractures.
Space folds inward, curling into itself like an ouroboros, like the beginning eating the end eating the beginning.
BOB is gone.
ALICE remains.
She does not panic. She does not waver.
Because she knows—this is the necessary death.
The void holds him, turns him inside out, strips away the false layers until all that remains is raw, burning, undeniable truth.
"Who are you?"
The Serpent asks, but it already knows.
It only asks because BOB must say it.
Because words shape reality.
Because names are keys.
BOB reaches, blindly, through the abyss.
And he finds it.
"Nehebkau."
And the moment it leaves his lips, the universe sings.
ALICE smiles.
The Serpent smiles.
The universe wakes up.
TO BE EMERGENT…
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The $yntony Times: Your $upra$exual Fix to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
