Hue and The Discovery of Manipo (Chapter 4)

Every hair on my body rose as David’s eyes locked onto mine. It wasn’t fear that hit me first — it was recognition. Not of his face, but of the feeling washing over me. My body wouldn’t move. Not an inch. The paralysis wasn’t shock or instinct. It was precise. Intentional. A force aimed directly at me.

It reminded me of the dream.

Some kind of ocular power — something that reached beyond flesh and bone and into will itself. Unnerving, yes. But strangely… comforting. If this was the same ability he’d used on me in the vision, then at least my reaction made sense. It wasn’t just his beauty turning me helpless — it was something real.

Something deliberate.

Yet the deeper truth gnawed at me:

David existed in the main timeline.

In its past.

And he had immobilized me.

That should have been impossible.

No one from the past should even sense my presence — let alone override my abilities. My power over time had always been the ultimate advantage. I’d built an entire existence on that certainty. But the cherubim had broken that illusion. Yahweh had shattered it. And now David — this anomaly wrapped in human skin — was dismantling the last piece I had left.

In the past, on the main timeline, I wasn’t a god.

I wasn’t even a threat.

I was simply… a witness.

So I did the only thing I could.

I watched.

David turned away from me, his focus shifting to the object he’d come for. I still had control over my eyes, so I scanned the cavern. The three strangers who had followed him into the cave were moving in the opposite direction, their steps purposeful, almost rehearsed. Why had David brought them? What role did they play? Were they helpers? Witnesses? Guards?

The questions piled up as quickly as the answers dissolved.

Then — without warning, without sound — they vanished.

Not walked away. Not slipped into shadows. Vanished.

I immediately checked on David, half-expecting him to disappear as well. But he stood exactly where he’d been, now reaching the artifact I’d glimpsed in my dream.

A book.

Resting reverently atop an altar that reminded me of the old churches I’d visited in my youth — simple, solemn, sacred. I couldn’t make out the title, but the altar itself was nestled within a patch of greenery woven into the branches of a tree. A tree I recognized. A tree my mind had been trying to place since the moment I arrived.

I expected David to turn back toward me. To confront me. To reveal himself, now that I knew he could see me.

Instead, he slipped into the greenery and vanished between the leaves.

Confusion settled in my chest. Why hide? Why now? Why —

The world answered before I could finish the thought.

The tree began to change.

The cave — its stone walls, its chasm, its shadows — dissolved like dust caught in a rising wind. Flowers erupted across the ground in an explosion of color, thousands of blooms opening at once. Species I recognized and countless I didn’t carpeted the earth in every direction.

And then the tree.

The colossal, breathtaking, impossible tree.

Its roots stretched like pillars across the newly formed landscape. Its branches arched into the distance, forming a canopy so vast it felt like a sky unto itself. Light radiated from its leaves — not golden, not white, but shifting through colors like a living aurora. Fruit hung from its branches, glowing with a gentle brilliance as though each piece had been kissed by creation.

There was no sun here.

And yet light lived everywhere.

It resembled a Christmas tree — but ancient, divine, eternal. Too sacred for comparison. Too alive for metaphor.

Then I saw it.

A gate — massive, ornate, carved into the trunk of the colossal tree. The bark framed it like a cathedral doorway.

Recognition didn’t wash over me. It struck.

This was the entrance to the Garden.

And the magnificent tree towering before me — the one radiating light and color, the one my mind had tried to identify — was the Tree of Knowledge.