The clear lighter flickered between Marco’s trembling fingers, casting ephemeral shadows across the infinite corridors of memory and possibility. Each flame’s dance seemed to whisper ancient secrets, beckoning him through intricate passageways that folded upon themselves like origami dreams.

“Have we met before?” Marco asked the stranger, whose silhouette seemed simultaneously familiar and alien.

The stranger smiled—a gesture that contained multiple timelines. “We have always been meeting, Marco. And we will continue meeting.”

Marco recognized the Borgesian landscape surrounding them: corridors that twisted impossibly, mirrors reflecting non-existent spaces, staircases ascending and descending without logical progression. Here, time was not linear but a labyrinthine network of intersecting moments.

“I’m traversing,” Marco muttered, more to himself than his companion.

“Traversing implies choice,” the stranger responded. “But here, choice is an illusion. You are merely following a predetermined path.”

The lighter’s flame illuminated fragments of Marco’s potential lives: a scholar in Buenos Aires, a sailor in Mediterranean ports, a monk in Himalayan monasteries. Each identity overlapped, creating a palimpsest of existence where boundaries between realities blurred.

“Why am I here?” Marco asked.

“Because you have always been here,” the stranger replied, his voice a multilayered echo. “Your journey is both circular and infinite.”

The labyrinth’s walls pulsed with quantum probabilities. Marco understood now that his movement wasn’t random but a choreographed dance of predetermined events. His crossings between realities were not accidents but carefully orchestrated transitions.

The clear lighter continued burning—its flame impossible, constant, unchanging.

As Marco walked, he realized the journey itself was the destination. Each step was simultaneously a remembrance and a prophecy, each corridor a metaphor for consciousness transcending linear perception.

The stranger vanished, leaving behind only a cryptic smile and the persistent flame.

Marco knew, with absolute certainty, that this moment—like all moments—was both an ending and a beginning, eternally suspended in the infinite web of existence.

His destiny was not a destination but a continuous, recursive movement through the labyrinth of being.