She blinks. They’re gone. The wall looks younger, fresh moss sucks and spills humidity around her leaning hand. There’s no trace of the story she just heard. No trace of those signatures.
A ray of sunlight coming from the entrance of the cave on the left makes its way until her feet.
She turns her head rightward, the cave looks slightly different.
Against the pitch black background that leads deeper inside, two yellow eyes stare gently at her. The being breathes slowly through its bleeding nose.
“I will kill them and they killed me” it says.
It continues: “They’ll come again, over and over, their story will repeat, each time very different, each time a little more colourful. Each time more and more detached. Those four addicts were, are and will always feel no empathy for one another, their eyes are projected towards the inside. The drugs make them feel wholesome even though the real distance between their worlds is getting greater and greater. Damn junkies. Stuck between two opposite environments: the instinctual outside and the newly found reflective inside. Victims of their own ruminations. Hallucinated, torn. Who could blame them? Their parents didn’t know what they were doing when they met. Bad parenting. Terrible childhood. Their children had to tell each other new forms of stories to exorcise the lack of safety that their lives were based upon. (Patching this, spilling that). Suddenly their environment became more. More familiar and more hostile. None of them seems to have forgiven their parents for their lack of explanation. Junkies”.

The beast goes on: “Behind their parents’ pupils laid a hole deeper than their memory. It made them look distracted, confused, incapable of properly taking care of anything or anyone besides their skin.”
She repeats: “two beings with a hole deeper than their memory”.
“Those four siblings were really born into this world out of necessity”, concludes the beast.
She stares at it. Clueless. Her notebook in one hand, she leaves a hand shaped mark of dust on one page with the other and scribbles something like a Venn diagram, drawing four circles in two rows of two. Each circle touches the other two in one point, leaving a big blank space in the middle of the drawing.
Then the beast drags itself past her and disappears.
A second ray of sunlight reaches her from another entrance on her right where the wounded being was standing. Both sunrays almost reach her feet even though they originate from two opposite directions.
She finds it awkward and decides to follow the second.
She’s outside.
She blinks in pure blinding daylight and a vast dry grassland reaches all the horizons around her.
There are no clouds, no trees, no wind.
“This is where their parents are going to meet at any moment”, she thinks.
Everything they both wished for is here now.