The walls of the asylum were a pale, sickly yellow, the color of old teeth. They told me I was schizophrenic. They told me the "City of Dreams" was a fabrication of my fractured mind, a coping mechanism for a childhood spent in the shadow of a father's rage.

I let them believe it. Because in the City of Dreams, I was not a patient in a gown; I was the Architect.

The City was a kaleidoscope of consciousness, a place where thought became architecture. I could conjure palaces of sapphire and gardens of singing glass. More importantly, I could rewrite the laws of existence. If I wished for the sun to be blue, it became blue. If I wished for a dead bird to sing, it sang.

But the City demanded a tithe.

The first time I changed a detail in the City—turning a rain of ash into a rain of petals—I woke up in the asylum and realized I could no longer remember the smell of my mother's perfume. It was gone. Not forgotten, but erased. A hole had opened in my history.

I didn't stop. The addiction to power is a hungry thing.

I spent years refining the City. I built a sanctuary of absolute peace, a utopia where pain was a forgotten language. Every time I smoothed a rough edge of the dream, a piece of my reality vanished. I lost the memory of my first kiss. I lost the image of my father's face. I lost the sound of my own name.

I became a god of a perfect world, and a stranger to myself.

The climax came when I decided to "fix" the asylum. I spent a month of dream-time constructing a bridge of light that would transport every patient in the ward to the City of Dreams. I wanted to save them all. I wanted to be the savior of the broken.

As I activated the bridge, I felt the final tithe being claimed. A massive, sweeping erasure.

I woke up in the City of Dreams. It was perfect. The air was a symphony, the light was a caress, and every soul I had saved was smiling at me. I looked around at the paradise I had created, and I felt a sudden, piercing terror.

I looked at the people around me, and I didn't know who they were. I looked at the sapphire palaces, and I didn't know why I had built them. I searched my mind for a single shred of "Arthur"—for a memory of the yellow walls, the smell of antiseptic, or the feeling of a cold floor.

There was nothing.

I had created a perfect world, but I had erased the person who wanted it. I was a king without a kingdom, a creator who had forgotten the act of creation. I stood in the center of my utopia, a hollow shell of a man, screaming a name that no longer existed in any universe.

*** **Objective Tensor Code:** [M1:7.0, M4:6.0, M6:8.0, N1:0.6, N2:0.4, K1:0.8, K2:0.2, TI:42.8, theta:33°, E_total:12.5]