The Eye of Thoth

Dæmon stood quietly, but his silence wasn’t empty. Something was pressing against the inside of his mind, like a knot waiting to unravel.

"Back in the waking world... in the shower... what was that?" he finally asked.

The Mage turned slightly but didn’t speak.

"What did you experience?"

"Visions. Patterns. Questions I don’t remember asking. But it wasn’t like watching something—it was like being injected with something vast. Too much to carry. It felt like my whole mind was being rewritten, all at once. And it felt... exactly like here."

"You saw the Eye."

"The eye?"

"The Eye of Thoth."

Dæmon tilted his head slightly, as if the name had reached some deeper register. The name pulsed with mythic weight, but he didn’t know why.

The Mage stepped toward the edge of the ring, facing the dream city below.

"It’s less mystical than it sounds," he said. "But the arcana helps. In ancient lore, Horus had two eyes. The right was the Eye of Ra. The left, the Eye of Thoth."

"Ra was the sun. Thoth the moon. Horus, you may have guessed, was the sky. So the Eye of Ra sees through daylight—action, clarity, the real. The Eye of Thoth sees in the dark—reflection, recursion, and dreams. It sees what isn’t, what might have been, what lies beneath."

The Mage paused. Not dramatically. Reverently.

"Long before you possessed this body—there were two boys. Inseparable. So inseparable they even played together in their dreams."

"One night, they got into an argument about something that had happened in a previous dream. They remembered it differently, and it frustrated them. They didn’t want to fight about it again. So they made a plan. They’d store their shared dream-memories in a symbol. A mnemonic device."

He gestured toward the city.

"They called it the Eye of Thoth."

"And then they forgot all about it. As children do."

"Years later, when we began our early work—what would eventually become the Dream Labs—we realized something simple but devastating: there’s no point in using dreams to study anything if you can’t remember what you’ve learned. So I resurrected the Eye. Not metaphorically. Not as an homage. I found it. Buried deep. And it worked."

Dæmon said nothing. His breath was shallow.

"The Eye itself is a vault. A cradle. A computation engine. This chamber and this city—every hall, every echo, every failed thought and resurrected theory—they all live within it. But there is more hidden in its folds: unsanctioned memories, illicit ideas, recursive myths, and a handful of lies too dangerous to forget."

"And somewhere inside it... you were born."

The air didn’t shift, but Dæmon felt something move anyway. As if the entire city had exhaled a secret.

The Mage turned back toward him.

"Most people live with only the Eye of Ra open. That’s why they forget their dreams. That’s why they fear the night."

"But if you open the Eye of Thoth… you don’t just remember your dreams. They start remembering you."

Dæmon stared past him—into the vast, intricate memory of something that hadn’t happened yet.