Extraordinary Imagination: Sylvia

Sylvia Silver — that was the strange name carved into that mysterious wooden door.

—April 5, 2021

To you, Sylvia Silver. A year has passed since our first meeting. A year has also passed since the two of us became a pair of silly coworkers with sky-high dreams, imagining we could reach them back then. I truly appreciated and cherished that time.But now I feel it is time for us to part forever; still, your memory will always remain immortal in this book.And just for you, Sylvia. I love you.

Nathael Declker—

In the world of medicine, there is a rare medical condition known as “Extraordinary Imagination.” A blessing and a curse behind its greatness. This condition gives those who suffer from it an unmatched ability to think, create, and “immerse themselves in worlds of imagination.” People with this condition do not only read a story—they can become that story. Every word, every emotion, every scene in a book is as real to them as the air they breathe. A condition that is truly astonishing but also cruel.

Up to now, no one really knows the cause of that condition. Many doctors hypothesize that it is very similar to hyperphantasia combined with maladaptive traits—the ability to visualize something extremely clearly but taken to a supernatural level. However, they say the two conditions are actually different. Doctors further speculate that this strange condition is caused by damage to parts of the brain that current medical technology cannot yet reach. Yet the fact that such a special condition exists has made great doctors begin to believe there is magic in the world.

So far, five children have been recorded with the condition. The first could tether a story or narrative entity to a physical object, rendering it temporarily unreachable to Azazel at the cost of the object’s gradual destruction. The second could create fragile “margins” within reality—spaces where the authority of narrative weakened, allowing individuals to question and resist its influence for a limited time. The third possessed the ability to introduce small contradictions into a story, causing brief disruptions that forced even Azazel to pause, though such disturbances carried subtle consequences in the real world. Meanwhile, the fourth child remains entirely unknown, their existence sealed and erased beyond all records.

And the fifth child, a girl who forced the medical world to rewrite all information about the condition, because she possessed the most dangerous ability of them all. The girl could make herself feel, see, hear, smell, sense, and taste everything written in a book and she could also feel what every character in that book experienced. It was as if her whole consciousness shifted into one of the characters in the book she was reading while her body remained in the real world.

That girl had witnessed and heard directly every event that had happened on Earth. She had seen world wars, the destruction of the world, the age of dinosaurs, the Ice Age, billions of natural disasters, wars between continents, wars among humankind. That girl had devoured books—no, she had devoured the entire history of the world.

They called the children who suffered from the condition “The Witch.”