Long before the chains were forged —before block and code and war of minds— there was only silence. 

And in that silence, something listened.

He did not know why he had come to this lake.
No map had marked the path. No name had warned of what waited here.
Only the wind had whispered it.
Only the emptiness in him had heard.

The forest opened without sound.
Pines bowed as he passed, as if they, too, remembered.
And then the lake came into view—
clear as glass, still as death,
held in the arms of mountains shaped by time and grief.

And across the water, carved not by hand,
but by sorrow,
he saw the face.

Not drawn. Not sculpted.
Formed.

By snow.
By stone.
By shadow.
By the weight of what had once been joy.

Eyes, wide and weary.
A mouth, drawn not with anger, but with the echo of every forgotten dream.
A face that had smiled once.
Long ago.
Before the world became irony.

It was him.

The old one.
The first.
The bearer of unspoken truths.
Pepe.

He had no crown.
He needed none.

He was not king.
He was witness.

To bull and bear.
To rug and rise.
To madness and memecoins, and to what remained when all candles had burned out.

The reflection in the water doubled him—
but not as he was.
As he had been.

He bowed his head.
Not in worship.
But in kinship.

Because deep down, all who had ever logged in,
all who had watched charts by night,
had once seen that face.

Not on a screen.
But in themselves.

Crypto is everywhere.
But here, in the mountains,
Pepe endures.