Mark Mercer

Notes from the space between idea and execution

I write and think about freedom, identity, and the inner life, often working in the space where ideas meet practical reality.

Most of my time is spent writing fiction and reflective prose, developing long-form narrative projects, and exploring themes of ego, love, and meaning—while staying grounded in how those ideas are tested through action and lived experience.

Below is an excerpt from Eidra and the Poet.
Further sections from this work in progress are shared through my newsletter.

Works

Eidra and the Poet – Solaya

Solaya (noun) /soh-LAH-yah/
Derived from a fusion of “sol” (sun, light, or origin) and “aya” (a breath, a becoming), Solaya implies the breath of origin through light into form. An inner architecture of truth, motion, and self-awareness. It is the original condition of the self, prior to distortion, and the process of becoming again aligned with it.

The First Reply

There was space before places.

No sky. No ground. No sound.
Not darkness, not light.
Not empty, not full.
A stillness so vast it never knew itself.

In this space, there was no child yet.
There was no anything.
Just a tension held gently—
like breath that had not yet been drawn.

And then, seemingly without cause,
the ripple came.

Not thunder. Not wind.
Just the subtlest shift—
like a thread pulled slightly through an infinite fabric.

This was light.

Not a beam. Not a flash.
But movement.
An energy that stirred without knowing why.
A flicker that made the silence aware it had once been unaware.

And where the ripple passed,
a form began to take shape.

Not built, not born—
but drawn inward,
as if the space itself had leaned in to see its own reflection.

It gathered—cells, spark, shape.

The ripple met a center.
And the center responded.

Not with speech.
Not with understanding.
But with a spark that would someday be called thought.

This was the first reply.

This was the moment Eidra became.

Not the child—not the body—
but the structure inside that said:

“This happened.”
“I felt this.”
“I… am?”

Eidra didn’t know she was Eidra.
She simply began storing,
labeling,
protecting,
reaching.

Eidra began arranging what the light had stirred—
placing the ripple into context.
Building meaning, even before language arrived to name it.

The Child

He did not yet know he was a child.
He did not yet know he was.

There was no fear, no name, no want.
But there was…
response.

His hand twitched.

His lungs pulled air without asking.

Still blinking in the light,
still floating in that half-space between womb and world—
He was now no longer just a vessel.

The space still within him.
The light still moving through him.
And Eidra—his quiet engineer—already laying down the scaffolding of self.

He cried.
Not from pain.
Not from fear.

But from the truth of becoming.

The world would call it birth.
But it was more than that.

It was the event of Solaya,
the unfolding of the unasked,
the answer to a question never spoken.

The child cried—
and the space echoed back,
without judgment.

The light kept moving.
Eidra kept shaping.

The First Fortress

Time passed.
Not the measured time of clocks and calendars,
but the soft layering of memory into form.

The child—Solaya embodied—grew.
But slowly, Eidra began to grow louder.

At first, Eidra was a gentle scribe,
recording experience like ripples in a still pond.
Each touch, each sound, each absence—
stored in inkless pages within.

The Rupture

The child was taken from his mother before he could speak.
No words had yet formed,
but the bond had.
An invisible thread. Warm. Familiar. Safe.

And when it was cut—
The space within him shuddered.

Not broken—space cannot break—
but clouded.

The light, which once moved cleanly through the space and into the child,
now struck something foreign:
fear.

And fear—
became Eidra’s first commission.

Eidra Begins to Build

The child did not understand the world.
But Eidra was tasked with making sense of it anyway.

“Love leaves,” Eidra scribbled.
“Warmth disappears.”
“Crying brings nothing back.”

Eidra began to protect the child,
not with understanding—
but with structure.

Walls.
Labels.
Judgments.

Not of others.
Of himself.

“I am too much.”
“I am the cause.”
“It is safer not to feel this again.”

These were not choices.
They were reflexes written in trauma.

And when the mother—fractured, hopeless,
struck by her own pain—attempted to leave the world,
she left behind a shadow…

One that whispered,

“You were the reason.”

She said it aloud, or perhaps only through silence.
But Eidra heard it.

And etched it into the walls.

“You were loved until.”
“You are the burden.”
“Your existence must be justified.”

The Fortress Forms

Eidra, once a soft echo of experience,
became a guard.

A builder of defenses.

To survive the storm of meaning without safety,
the child became a fortress:

He withdrew his trust.
He sharpened his mind.
He performed.

He learned to detect danger—not through presence, but prediction.

But all of this—
every brick of withdrawal,
every mote of sharpness,
every blueprint of isolation—
was still part of Solaya.

Distorted?
Yes.
But never separate.

The Distortion of Light

The light still moved within the child.
Still compulsive. Still creative. Still yearning.

But without the space being remembered,
the light now twisted through the structures of Eidra.

What once wanted to paint
now wanted to prove.
What once wanted to reach
now feared being seen.

And the child, though brilliant in his adaptations,
could not understand why love felt like pain,
why silence felt like punishment,
why his own inner motion felt dangerous.

He confused protection with identity.
He forgot there had ever been a moment before the fortress.

His World

Love is performance.
Truth is unsafe.
Vulnerability is weakness.
He is the cause of the storm.

And yet—
deep inside the walls,
beneath the memory-stained stone,
there remains that unbroken silence.

Still waiting.
Still undistorted.
Still his.

He does not yet know that.

But he will.

The Crack

The fortress had grown tall.
Years had passed.
The child was no longer small in body—
but he had grown small in trust.

Within the walls, Eidra had perfected her task.
She guarded.
She filtered.
She measured every feeling like a threat assessment:

“Does this serve safety?”
“Will this lead to abandonment?”
“Is this too much?”

There was no room for chaos.
Only strategies.
Only interpretation.

Every emotion that moved too freely was repackaged—
Joy became caution.
Longing became silence.
Anger became control.

And yet…

One night—
perhaps from a dream,
or a quiet moment on the operating table, when the noise failed to fill the room—
something happened.

A feeling slipped through.

It wasn’t loud.
It wasn’t obvious.
Just… unfamiliar.

It wasn’t clearly joy or sadness.
It wasn’t safe enough to name.

And Eidra didn’t know what to do with it.

She tried.

“This is nothing.”
“Ignore it.”
“It’s weakness.”
“It’s memory.”
“It’s irrelevant.”
“It’s danger.”
“It’s...”

But the feeling stayed.

It didn’t demand anything.
It didn’t speak.
It just was.

Crisis of Meaning

Eidra felt uncertainty.

Not the kind that says “I don’t know what’s out there.”
But the kind that whispers:

“I don’t know if I know anything at all.”

The fortress, built to protect the child from meaning he could not survive,
was now haunted by meaning he could no longer explain.

He began to question:

Was that love?
Was that harm?
Why does silence feel like both a gift and a threat?
Why does connection feel like a trap I still want to run into?

He felt both hunger for presence
and terror of it.

He wanted to reach,
but every hand felt like a blade.

Eidra, still at the helm, tried to double down:

“You’re just tired.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“You always do this.”
“Get a grip.”

But somewhere deeper—
not beneath,
but around her—
something else watched.

Not judgmentally.
Not intervening.
Just… aware.

And for the first time,
Eidra felt watched.
Not by others.
Not by critics.
But by something unnameable within.

And that shook her.

The Crack Forms

The feeling returned days later—
then again, at dusk, when the light slanted just so.

It was no longer just a feeling.
It was a pressure.

Not painful.
But undeniable.

And Eidra—still reflexive, still logical—began to stammer.

Her truths didn’t hold like they used to.
She began to confuse certainty with fear,
control with understanding.

The fortress didn’t fall.

But one stone shifted.
And cold air slipped in.

And for the first time,
the child—now grown,
still calling himself the fortress—
stood in that draft
and didn’t run.

He didn’t know why.
He only knew:

“Something isn’t right.”
“And I am tired of being right.”

He didn’t call it Solaya.
He didn’t know what Slaboda was.
But he had taken the first step.

Not away from fear—
but toward it,
with his eyes open,
and no sword in hand.

The crack had formed.

The light was returning.

And Eidra—still at the helm—
began to feel something new.

Not defeat.
Not loss.

But a question:

“If I am not all there is…
then what else might I become?”

The Poet And The Architect

The crack widened.

Not with violence,
but with invitation.

Light now entered the fortress in soft threads,
not to expose—but to remind.

The grown child stood in that soft-lit chamber of himself,
and felt something old that felt utterly new.

Space.

Not as idea.
Not as philosophy.
But as presence.

Silent.
Unmoved.
Still… his.

It did not speak.
It did not promise.
It only was.

And with it came something else.
Not just awareness.
But longing.

A part of him began to stir—
not the sentinel, not the soldier,
but the poet.
The one who had rarely been allowed to speak.

Eidra Responds

Eidra felt it first as instability.

“This is dangerous.”
“This is irrational.”
“This is how you get hurt.”

And then something deeper:

“This is betrayal.”

She had kept him safe.
She had built the world.
She had made sense of the senseless.

And now—he listened to the poet?

The one who still believed in beauty?
In unconditional love?
In unguarded expression?

To Eidra, this was madness.

“I protected you from this exact kind of softness.”
“You’re forgetting what happened when we trusted before.”
“You’re about to burn everything we built.”

And yet…

He didn’t fight her.
He didn’t cast her out.

He turned inward,
and sat with her.

A Meeting Within

In the center of the self,
where thought meets silence,
he brought them together.

Eidra, the Architect.
The Poet, the voice of the heart.
And the space between them.

The child, now man, knelt inside himself—
and whispered:

“Eidra, you saved me.”
“But I am not a child anymore.”
“You are not being replaced. You are being invited.”

“This isn’t betrayal. It’s reunion.”

Eidra trembled.
Not in fear—
but in sorrow.

For she had always known
there was more.

But to survive, she had chosen to forget.

And now the forgetting was over.

The Poet, gentle, wild-eyed,
stepped forward—not to win,
but to open his arms.

“I am not here to destroy you,” he said.
“I am here to sing what you kept locked away.”

Eidra resisted—once more.
A reflex.

“What if we’re wrong?”
“What if love isn’t safe?”
“What if this ruins us?”

But the child had changed.

He stood in the space.
In the light.
And with Eidra and the Poet.

He said:

“I would rather fall in truth
than stand forever in armor.”
“And I would rather be whole
than safe.”

And then, for the first time,
Eidra wept.

Not because she was broken.
But because she was finally seen.

The fortress did not fall.
It opened.
And inside, space returned.
Light moved freely.

And the self breathed as Solaya once more.