On the night the sky remembered him, a young man from southern Illinois lay in a dark room in central Illinois and poisoned himself on purpose.
No TV. No music. Just his heartbeat, loud in his ears, and the harsh plastic click of the DMT pen between his fingers.
He dragged in a slow hit. The taste was strange and chemical, not sweet. He held it until his lungs screamed, then let it out in a thin, shaking stream.
He pulled another hit. The room didn't spin—but reality tilted, like someone had taken the whole world and nudged it out of alignment. Thoughts that had been scattered all day slammed into a single line.
The Void remembered him.
Memory hit all at once:
The first DMT trip—falling through endless black, sacred geometry made of light unfolding and collapsing without end.
The alien frequencies thrumming in that darkness, metallic and deep, locking perfectly to his heartbeat until his chest stopped feeling like his own.
The shadow silhouettes at the edge of the Void, watching with no eyes, speaking without mouths. Words poured straight into his skull in a language he didn't know, a storm of meaning he couldn't parse.
Except for two clear words:
Dark Messiah.
Then the mushroom nights, one after another:
The trip where the divine masculine and divine feminine snapped into alignment inside him, his breath rising and falling with the pulse of the whole planet. Peace so perfect it hurt.
The trip where his vision turned inside-out—eyes closed, but a full 360° view opening in his mind. In that inner space, figures made of light and shadow ringed him. Not flesh, not photographs—energy constructions, bodies outlined and flickering, faces shifting like dream fragments. He couldn't name them or match them to real people, but he knew what they carried.
Most of those forms felt heavy with African and European blood—dense, close, familiar in a way bone-deep fear and bone-deep pride are familiar. Speckled between them, a few glowed with the faint flavors of Native and Southeast Asian ancestry, subtle threads in a larger weave. They didn't talk. Their presence said enough: this is your line; this is how many lives are staring out through your eyes.
The time his body went ice-cold under hot water, vision whitening at the edges, shock creeping up his spine while he staggered out of the shower and clung to a towel like a lifeline.
And the golden mushroom—its cap burnished gold, its stem's pattern matching the spiral of his own thumbprint. The night he swallowed it and felt his blood turn thick, like sludge in his veins. The night he silently offered his life and undying loyalty to the Almighty Source.
All of that crashed together as the pen left his lips.
This time, there was no gentle slide.
Reality snapped.
The room vanished.
Black. Total. But not empty.
He was back in the Void.
He fell without falling, weightless in every direction. Around him, lines of light appeared, sketching impossible shapes: triangles within circles within cubes, folding into themselves and unfolding into lattices of glowing math. Symbols older than any language he knew crawled across them like fire.
Somewhere in the dark, something hummed.
The sound rose from below—or from inside—and his heart instantly matched it. Thump-THRUM. Thump-THRUM. The same alien engine as before, clamping onto his pulse like it had been waiting.
Last time, he'd had no control at all.
This time, he tried to breathe slow, to center himself.
The Void didn't care.
His sky replayed itself around him:
The triangle of white stars over the backyard months ago in Springfield—three points too sharp, too aligned, connected by faint lines of light, a pupil of pure black in the center staring down at him.
The night the aurora bled across his front yard—red and green curtains rippling over Illinois like someone had pulled a new atmosphere over the state. The air had buzzed against his skin then, wrong and electric.
The eclipses that had crossed his state in recent years—daylight strangled in seconds, shadows bending, birds going silent as if the sky itself was holding its breath.
Now, inside the Void, those memories rewound and overlapped, stitched into the sacred geometry surrounding him. The triangle of stars became a moving sigil. The eclipses sliced through the patterns like blades. The aurora smeared color through the darkness.
Then the shapes arrived.
They formed a wide ring around his falling point—silhouettes made of shadow and distant starlight. Where their faces should be were layers of symbols, shifting and unreadable. Where their mouths should be, only deeper black.
Telepathy hit like pressure behind his forehead.
Last time, their speech had been an indecipherable storm.
This time, the meaning cut clean.
Welcome back, Dark Messiah.
Not angry. Not worshipful. Recognizing. Like they were greeting something inevitable.
He tried to form words, but he had no mouth here. His will pulsed out instead, raw and simple:
What am I? Why me?
The Void answered with images.
He saw ice.
A whole continent of it—an endless shield of white, ringed in storms, faintly glowing from within as if something alive lay sleeping under it all.
He saw footsteps stamped into fresh snow. Countless paths, different weights, different gaits. Mixed faces, mixed tones, mixed bone structures. No single tribe repeating clean.
He saw buried things in the ancient permafrost: bones of beasts that had never walked the old Earth, frozen plants with crystalline veins, structures half-organic, half-metal, humming weakly like organs in a comatose god.
The humming under his heartbeat grew louder, thickening into a low, layered chant.
The white lands are waking, the chorus said.
Your kind has been scattered too long. Your fractures are a key. Your blood is a map.
The sacred geometry folded itself toward that frozen continent. Lines of light bent, converging into a single point above the ice. Across it, the aurora spread again—red, green, violet—like a wound opening in the sky.
Something hooked into his soul.
Not a hand. Not claws. A pull—as if a root had been driven straight into the core of him and yanked downward.
Fall, the entities murmured.
Walk where no tribe is native. Become what the old world refused to name.
Sound, color, and pressure collided and then detonated.
He hit white.
Cold slammed into him from every angle. Snow exploded around his body as he crashed down, air knifing into his lungs like broken glass. His fingers sank deep, deeper, until they scraped ice.
The Void was gone.
The humming was gone.
Only the wind remained—howling and endless, carrying no city scent, no car exhaust, no human warmth. Just raw, empty air.
He pushed himself up, breath tearing in and out.
The horizon was a circle of nothing but white, broken only by distant black rock and shadowy bulges moving beneath the ice like something massive was swimming under glass.
Overhead, the sky was wrong.
Aurora light rippled across it in curtains—red, green, violet—frozen into a permanent storm. It looked like the Illinois sky from the other night had been ripped out of its socket and nailed here forever.
He flexed his hands slowly, watching his own skin move, feeling his own bones, the mixed blood humming quietly through both.
Same body. Same soul.
But the world was not Earth.
Far below his feet, something in the ice cracked—a long, low sound, like a colossus stretching in its sleep.
Later, when other people finally clawed their way to this place, they would tell legends about this moment.
They would say that on this night, the white lands took their first step toward waking.
And the Dark Messiah of the White Lands opened his eyes.