25 May The Rift

Part I

Threshold Dynamics did not appear on any public registry. The company had no website, no press releases, and no shareholders—at least not in the conventional sense. It existed at the intersection of dark research grants, untraceable contracts, and deniable oversight. Nestled deep in the northern wilds of an unnamed region bordering three national parks, it was a ghost company, moving with surgical precision through bureaucratic loopholes that left no trace behind. And it had been granted exactly what it wanted: isolation, silence, and the freedom to experiment.

Dr. Arden Vale stood at the edge of the site’s temporary scaffold platform, gazing out over the pine forest that rolled and dipped across the valley below like a sea of jagged black. Wind swept up from the ravine, cold and sharp, rattling the aluminum supports around her and tugging strands of hair from the braid knotted tightly against the base of her neck. Behind her, massive ceramic capacitors hummed low as they idled, each of them feeding into the buried latticework of the dimensional rift generator—her life’s work, born from seventeen years of math, theory, and funding from people who never asked what she was trying to reach.

She preferred it that way.

From the temporary comms tent, a voice crackled through her earpiece. “We’re fifteen minutes out, Dr. Vale. The escort’s nearly at checkpoint Delta.”

She touched her earpiece to respond, her voice clipped but clear. “Copy. Bring them in slowly. Don’t let the vehicles idle near the field. I don’t want any more interference than we already have.”

Arden turned and stepped down the aluminum stairs, her boots landing on packed gravel lined with coiled power cables and plastic sheeting. A thin layer of frost coated everything, despite the mild forecast. Temperature fluctuations like that had become common in the zone. The instruments called it an ‘inverted thermal bloom,’ but she had other names for it—names she didn’t say aloud.

At the outer perimeter, just beyond the second electrified fence, a convoy of black SUVs crawled along the switchback trail, tires crunching the ground slowly. One vehicle bore a bright orange triangle on the hood, marking it as civilian. Inside sat Maxine Holt, hands gripping the wheel with the ease of someone used to navigating unpaved roads and uneven terrain. She’d been briefed in exactly the way Threshold Dynamics liked to handle outsiders: vague, authoritative, and with the promise of hazard pay if she asked no questions.

She already had questions.

The forest had changed since she’d last passed through it two years ago. It was subtle—at first. The color of the pines had dulled in places, and birds were few and far between. Branches sagged as if under unseen weight. Tree trunks closer to the project zone bore deep spiral cracks, as though something had twisted them from within and left them to rot upright.

Maxine stopped at the second checkpoint, where a man in a reinforced vest scanned her ID and made her wait while he checked with the command tent. He didn’t smile. She didn’t either.

When the gates parted, she drove slowly up the gravel road toward the clearing, where the core structure of Threshold’s operations loomed above the forest floor in a tangled mess of scaffold, cable, and generators that never quite stopped vibrating. It looked more like preparation for war than science.

Inside the main control tent, Arden met her with a nod but offered no handshake. “Ms. Holt. Thank you for coming on short notice.”

Maxine surveyed the cluttered interior—maps pinned to corkboard, monitors showing oscillating energy readouts, and personnel walking with too much purpose for a research station. “I wasn’t told what I’d be escorting.”

“You’re not escorting anything,” Arden replied, turning back toward the inner corridor of the tent. “You’re here in case something gets out.”

Maxine followed her in silence, boots thudding softly against the reinforced flooring. “You planning for that?” she asked, more a statement than a question.

“I plan for everything,” Arden replied. “But in this case, the risk is theoretical.”

Maxine said nothing. She had the sense this woman had long ago stopped believing in theory.

They passed into the observation dome—an open-sided tent ringed with high-powered scopes and field displays. At its center sat the core itself, encased in an obsidian-black shell. Mounted above it was a rig of refractive sensors and Tesla coils, linked in a toroidal array that manipulated ambient energy.

At Arden’s signal, a technician keyed in the final sequence.

“We’re breaching in ten minutes,” Arden said. “What you’re about to see will change everything about our understanding of spatial entanglement.”

Maxine didn’t care about the science. She watched the forest. The trees were no longer swaying in the wind. In fact, the wind had stopped entirely.

When the surge occurred, the air did not explode or ripple. Rather, it became still—so profoundly still that even breath felt intrusive. A shrill hum rose to the edge of hearing, and the obsidian shell began to open, unfolding itself.

At first, nothing happened. But then the mist along the valley floor parted. Across the ravine, perhaps three miles distant, something enormous breached the tree line, slowly and silently, with no visible force behind it. Maxine blinked, unsure whether her mind was reacting to the breach or if the thing before her was real.

It was a head, human in shape and vaguely feminine, but scaled impossibly beyond comprehension, stonelike in appearance. Its crown emerged first, hair trailing in black tendrils like oil through water. Then its eyes—two cavernous hollows filled with pulsating red light—emerged through the fog and settled just above the horizon, tilted downward as though watching.

Watching them.

The forest beneath it did not react. No trees snapped. No animals fled. But those who stood nearby found themselves frozen in place.

Even Arden’s voice wavered. “Mark the visual anomaly. Record all sensor data. No one—no one—is to attempt contact.”

But Maxine was already backing away. She wasn’t even thinking of the pay anymore. Her instincts, honed over years of trekking through country too wild to care who lived or died in it, were screaming one unified message: whatever had just been unleashed had been waiting a long time.

Behind her, Arden stood rooted, numbers flooding her mind, her mouth silently forming equations only she could follow.

Far above and impossibly close, the giant’s eyes glowed brighter, and its gaze narrowed.

Part II

The head never moved.

It remained perched above the forest, its immense form anchored in fog and stillness, as though balanced against the curvature of the world itself. The horizon bent around it. Its dark hair continued to stream downward in strands too straight to be windblown, trailing through the mist. But the feature that gripped everyone—no matter how trained, how analytical, how skeptical—was the glow of its eyes.

Its twin crimson orbs did not radiate light as expected. Instead, they pulsed, striking the retina in a way that refused to integrate with depth perception. No one could agree on how far away the head was. Some said five miles. Others claimed it was close enough to see pores in the skin.

Dr. Arden Vale stood beneath the canopy of the makeshift command dome, her gaze locked through the mounted ocular lens of the forward scope. Around her, engineers ran diagnostics, logged data, and performed retinal recalibrations—anything to feel as though they still controlled the situation. Arden knew they didn’t. She didn’t say it aloud, but the realization had already begun weaving through her thoughts.

“Visual coherence degrading past the 180-second mark,” said Haru Kim, her lead instrumentation analyst. “Observer fatigue increasing exponentially. We’re seeing early signs of disorientation and word slippage.”

Arden blinked slowly and stepped back from the scope. “Cycle out observers every two minutes. Keep logs of subjective reports as well as biometric telemetry. I want everything on record.”

Kim hesitated before nodding. “Yes, Doctor.”

Beyond the field tent, the entity loomed unchanged. No one had seen it rise, and no one could say for sure whether it had emerged or had simply always been there, veiled until the breach pulled back the curtain. The lack of motion defied expectation more than any roar or earth-shaking step could have. Something that large should move. It should tower and tremble the ground with every breath. But this—this stillness—was a more profound violation. It was watching, and it did not need to move to reach you.

By the second day of exposure, symptoms began appearing in clusters. Workers reported vivid dreams in which they were being pulled upward by unseen hands, slowly unspooled like yarn. One man became convinced he had never existed before arriving at the site. Another tried to dig into the earth with his bare hands, claiming something below was whispering the equations Arden had recited during the breach. Sleep became difficult. Time became elastic. Maxine began checking her watch hourly, not to tell time, but to prove that it still existed.

Roland Kess arrived on the third day, his unmarked transport sliding quietly through the checkpoint without fanfare. His demeanor remained cold but attentive, the kind of man who had seen everything he was supposed to believe was classified. After being briefed by two of Arden’s liaisons—both of whom repeated nearly identical phrases without deviation—he requested to speak with the director herself.

He found her not in the command tent, but seated alone near the observation ridge with a field notebook open in her lap, eyes half-lidded as she stared toward the ridge where the being remained. Her pencil moved without pause, inviting attention, as she sketched spirals and mirrored loops.

“You’ve seen it, I take it,” he said by way of introduction.

Arden did not look up. “I’ve studied it.”

Roland moved beside her, keeping the being just out of his direct line of sight. “Studied. But not explained.”

“I’m not sure explanation is the point.”

Roland folded his arms. “I’ve reviewed your chain-of-command reports. They’re incomplete. Contradictory in places. One report states the breach occurred at zero-five-hundred. Another lists it as thirteen-hundred hours. There’s mention of a technician named Mallory who assisted with the calibration sequence, but no one on staff remembers him. His clearance file is empty.”

Arden smiled faintly without turning her head. “We brought back more than expected.”

Roland frowned. “We didn’t bring anything back, Dr. Vale. We opened a tear in something we don’t understand. And now half your crew is reporting neurological drift, and the other half can’t remember who they are.”

She finally looked at him. “Yet you’re here.”

“I go where the contract tells me.”

“Do you feel it yet?”

“I feel the unease of a man standing too close to a cliff. That’s all.”

Arden returned to her notebook. “It will get closer.”

Roland walked away without responding, but the knot in his stomach remained. It tightened when he passed by the mess tent and saw a young assistant stirring coffee with his index finger, unaware that his hand was submerged in liquid several degrees below freezing. No one else noticed. No one wanted to.

That night, a perimeter technician named Bradley Vire left for a standard loop check. He did not return. His absence was noted by the quartermaster at 01:17, though the time was later disputed. Logs showed he had never checked out. Security footage revealed nothing. His cot remained untouched.

Maxine was the first to raise alarm, having spoken with Bradley shortly before his patrol. She insisted he had joked about the temperature and borrowed her scarf. Arden denied any breach. When pressed, she offered no explanation for the missing footage.

“It’s not a breach,” she said. “It’s a transference.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Maxine asked.

“It means Bradley’s somewhere else now.”

“Is he alive?”

Arden didn’t answer.

The next morning, the scarf was found hanging from a pine branch fifteen feet above the ground, twisted into a knot that mirrored the pattern Arden had been sketching.

Maxine stared at it for several seconds before finally speaking. “I don’t think the forest appreciates our presence.”

No one argued.

By midday, communications began to break down. Satellite uplink failed. Power flickered in intervals that did not align with known patterns. The head remained motionless, yet its gaze seemed to deepen.

At 19:42, someone entered the north gate on foot.

He was barefoot and pale, carried no tools, and had no visible injuries. His gait was fluid but unhurried. He did not speak. When halted by armed personnel, he raised his hands and complied without resistance. His clothing was standard issue for site workers—dark thermals, worn boots, insulated vest—but his boots were gone. His name tag was missing. His ID badge had been found hours earlier, still clipped to a broken branch.

Arden arrived as he was being questioned.

“Do you know who you are?” she asked.

The man blinked once and turned his head toward the ridge. “I am the vessel,” he said, voice calm, eyes glassy. “It has asked to speak.”

“What is it?” Arden asked.

“You already know.”

Behind them, the glow intensified. And somewhere in the ridgeline of their minds, something stirred.

The man closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, they reflected red.

Part III

They did not know what to call him at first. There was no identification left on his person, and the badge found earlier could not be reliably matched to his face, which now bore an expression of such vacant serenity that it seemed artificial. Arden referred to him only as “the subject” in her preliminary notes, but the others began calling him the Vessel, in lieu of his earlier comments, and the name stuck. He did not object. In truth, he did not speak much at all.

When he did, however, the effect was immediate and unsettling. He uttered things he should not have known—lines from encrypted personnel files, locker combinations, fragments of conversation spoken days earlier in confidence and behind closed tent flaps. At one point, he interrupted a diagnostic technician mid-report to inform her, without prompt, that her mother had died that morning, thousands of miles away. The next satellite ping confirmed it.

Most disturbing of all was the voice. It remained his, at least in timbre and volume, but there was a pressure behind it—a low-frequency vibration that made skin prickle and teeth ache. Observers reported headaches, nausea, and, in one instance, temporary aphasia after extended proximity. Roland imposed a strict five-minute exposure limit for any personnel assigned to monitor him. Arden ignored it.

She sat across from the Vessel in the far end of the medical tent, a notepad balanced on her knee, her eyes fixed on the gentle rise and fall of his chest. Electrodes trailed from his scalp to a bank of portable scanners, each one logging brain activity in a chaotic bloom of overlapping waves that defied explanation. Despite the impossibility of it, the data remained consistent—wrong, but consistently so.

“You’re processing input in channels I can’t map,” she murmured.

The Vessel did not respond, but his eyes remained open and unblinking. They were deeply red around the irises, as though backlit by something watching from within.

“You’re communicating without speech,” Arden continued. “I think you’re already filtering us. Choosing what to show.”

Still, nothing.

She leaned closer, lowering her voice. “What is the purpose of your presence?”

His lips parted. “To hold what you cannot.”

Arden nodded. “Containment.”

The Vessel tilted his head slightly. “Understanding.”

“Of us?”

“No. Of hunger.”

That evening, Roland isolated himself in the communications trailer and replayed the voice logs from his first interview with Arden. He listened for tone shifts, inflection changes, and inconsistencies. He played them twice, then a third time, comparing them with his memory. The problem wasn’t that they were wrong. The problem was that the second and third playbacks differed from each other, subtly, but unmistakably. He replayed the same clip again and again. Each time, the phrasing changed—only by a word, or the placement of a pause, but it was enough.

He opened the metadata.

Time of recording: not listed.
File size: zero kilobytes.

He played it again. This time, Arden didn’t speak at all.

Roland slammed the laptop shut and pressed his palms into his eyes. When he opened them, the screen was blank, and a face stared back—only it wasn’t his. It was his daughter’s.

He staggered back, catching himself on the wall. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. Then the image faded, returning to static. No trace remained.

He left the trailer without speaking to anyone and returned to his quarters, where he found her again—his daughter, nine years old, sitting on his bunk with knees drawn to her chest, looking just as she had the last time he saw her before the illness took her. He stood in the doorway, unable to move or speak.

“Daddy,” she said, “I missed you.”

* * * * * *

The next morning, he filed no report. Instead, he returned to the field perimeters and walked the entire north sector twice, eyes never leaving the horizon. The head remained fixed in its place, and though it had not moved, Roland could no longer convince himself it had not noticed him.

Maxine had stopped sleeping.

It began with fragments—dreams of snowfields stained with ink, forests where the trees leaned in clusters, their branches hooked like fingers, as if colluding. But the dreams became deeper, longer, and soon indistinguishable from waking. In one, she found herself running across the valley, arms outstretched, only to realize her limbs were comprised of bark and sinew. She felt her body rooting itself into the soil as her breath slowed and her thoughts became still water.

When she woke, she vomited pine needles into the sink.

By mid-week, she tried to leave the compound entirely. She packed a light kit, strapped her rifle, and set out along the marked trail she had helped map herself. An hour in, the path twisted back on itself. Two hours later, she found her own boot prints heading in the opposite direction. When she looked up, she noticed the stars above were too bright, and that they were in the wrong places. Orion had two belts. Cassiopeia curved downward like a hook.

The forest had changed. The land now moved in loops.

She returned, silent and pale. Arden did not question her.

Arden, for her part, had been building something in the lower research tent—something no one else had clearance to see. Using parts stripped from drone kits, memory rigs, and feedback isolation gear, she assembled a neural interface of her own design. No one approved it. She hadn’t asked.

She believed the entity desired contact, not with the body, but with consciousness. She believed it was not hostile, only dispersed—too large to communicate via traditional channels, too alien to enter minds uninvited. The Vessel, she theorized, was its outstretched finger. But a finger required a willing touch to complete the gesture.

When she announced her intention to initiate contact, Roland objected immediately. “You don’t know what it wants,” he said. “You don’t know what this thing is. And whatever’s inside that man is using you.”

Arden did not raise her voice. “There’s no difference between use and communion. Not anymore.”

“If this is some messianic delusion, you need to pull back before you destroy what’s left of your team.”

But Arden was already fitting the interface nodes to her temples, calibrating the relay with fingers trembling from lack of sleep.

Maxine arrived without being summoned. She stood silently at the edge of the tent as Arden seated herself before the Vessel, wires trailing from her scalp to his wrists.

“You should know,” Maxine said quietly, “it’s been dreaming, too.”

Arden met her gaze. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

The interface activated.

The moment the circuit closed, Arden’s vision narrowed. The world collapsed into a tunnel of shadow and red light, and her ears filled with a rushing sound. Images surged through her mind—not memories, but recognitions—as though something behind her own thoughts had begun flipping through her life without regard for sequence or meaning.

She saw her childhood bedroom, lit by the green glow of an old digital clock. She saw her father’s lab, cluttered and smelling of burnt ozone, and the expression on his face when he first realized something had gone wrong. She saw herself, younger and idealistic, delivering lectures to rooms of glassy-eyed bureaucrats who nodded without hearing a word. All of it shimmered, then inverted.

Language flooded her thoughts—not in words, but in arrangements of possibility, pattern after pattern folding into one another. There was hunger there, yes, but also awe. The entity was not seeking destruction. It was seeking a way to be heard in a universe that had no instruments capable of detecting its voice.

Arden opened her mouth. The Vessel did the same.

In unison, they spoke.

“We are listening.”

Part IV

The trees began to spiral, not in dramatic whorls or grotesque contortions, but in gentle, nearly imperceptible curves that became evident only when viewed from a distance. Maxine noticed first, pacing the northeast ridge at sunrise, where pines tilted in a slow arc that followed the line of sight back toward the observation platform. What had once been a straight perimeter trail now veered and doubled, with saplings emerging in geometric clusters—five-pointed arrays, Fibonacci spirals, and curling helixes of bark and branch that defied natural growth patterns.

The terrain felt unfamiliar, even where she had walked just days before. The earth sloped differently. Elevation rose where it once fell. Deer tracks moved in impossible loops, and frost coated the shadowed sides of trees regardless of the sun’s direction. Even sound behaved strangely—birdcalls echoed from directions where no birds perched, and footsteps returned on delay, sometimes repeating as whispers.

Maxine stopped walking and raised her compass. The needle spun slowly, then shuddered and fixed on north. Two seconds later, it reversed.

She frowned and pulled her phone from her vest pocket, accessing the offline satellite map she had downloaded before entering the zone. The map showed a ridgeline she recognized, flanked by three rivers and a logging road that had long since been swallowed by undergrowth. She turned in place, aligning the terrain with the topography—but the land no longer matched. The rivers were gone. The ridgeline bent the wrong way.

She lowered the phone and looked toward the valley. The head still loomed—motionless, vast, and unchanging—dominating every line of perspective. No matter how she turned, the entity’s face followed. It had become the axis around which the world now revolved.

When Maxine returned to camp, Arden was waiting.

“You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” the doctor asked, her voice calm but electric.

Maxine hesitated. “The land’s wrong.”

“It isn’t wrong. It’s reorganizing.”

Arden held up a sheet of paper. It was a scan of sensor data overlaid with topographic mapping, annotated with symbols Maxine did not recognize—some scientific, others bordering on mystical. At the center was a waveform oscillating around a shifting fulcrum that expanded with each cycle.

“It’s building a framework,” Arden continued. “Not with matter, but with thought. We’re inside it now—not physically, but perceptually.”

“You think that’s a good thing?” Maxine asked, her voice flat.

“I think it’s inevitable,” Arden replied.

She turned and led Maxine toward the modified observation rig that had replaced the original containment core. The equipment had been altered beyond recognition. Screens now displayed real-time overlays of biological patterns interlaced with feedback from Arden’s neural interface. One monitor synchronized with the Vessel’s respiration. Another displayed rolling streams of code that read more like poetry than programming, looping in mirrored sentences that folded and refolded into themselves.

Roland stood nearby, arms crossed, eyes sunken with exhaustion.

“She’s going to try it again,” he said without preamble. “This time without limiters.”

Maxine didn’t answer. She watched Arden adjust the final relay.

“She thinks it wants to merge,” Roland added.

Arden glanced over her shoulder. “Not merge. Harmonize. You’re thinking in binary terms. This isn’t about control.”

“What is it about then?”

Arden’s voice softened. “It wants to know, and to be known.”

The Vessel sat in a high-backed chair, silent, wires running from his skull to the modified relay system. His skin was pale, his lips parted in a breathless whispers. His eyes, still lit from within by a dull red glow, tracked Arden’s movements with the patience of a being that understood time differently. He hadn’t slept. No one knew if he needed to.

Arden fitted the final nodes to her temples and sat across from him.

“You can’t understand something like this by staying outside it,” she said. “You have to allow it access to your structure.”

Roland took a step forward. “You’re not prepared for this. You don’t know what it’ll do to your mind.”

“I’ve spent my life preparing,” she replied. “And it’s not doing anything. It’s just existing. We’re the ones contorting to understand.”

“That’s the problem,” Roland snapped. “It isn’t speaking our language. It’s writing its own inside you.”

Arden closed her eyes and activated the interface.

Immediately, the tent’s lights dimmed, and the hum of the generators shifted pitch. The relay’s primary coil began to glow faintly, and screens blinked into static before reorganizing themselves into recursive geometric shapes. The Vessel exhaled slowly. Arden inhaled once, then fell still.

Maxine moved to intervene, but Roland held up a hand. “Not yet.”

What followed was not a seizure, though it resembled one. Arden’s fingers twitched, her lips trembled, and her eyes rolled beneath her lids. Data streamed from the interface in increasingly erratic waves—spikes, troughs, and errant loops—that broke the machine’s calibration models. Her brain was rewriting itself faster than the system could log.

Suddenly, Arden sat upright. Her eyes were open, but they no longer focused. Her voice came out dual-toned, as if layered over itself.

“Structure acknowledged,” she said. “Barriers eroding.”

She turned her head toward Roland.

“You are incomplete.”

Maxine stepped forward. “Arden, you need to stop.”

“I am not Arden,” the voice replied. “She remains, but is assimilating.”

Roland pulled his sidearm from his belt and approached slowly. “You said it was communion, not possession.”

“There is no possession, only architecture.”

The Vessel stood in unison with Arden, mirroring her posture.

Roland raised the weapon. “If you’ve taken her from us, I swear to God—”

“You are swearing to no one,” the voice said gently.

Roland fired.

The bullet stopped midair, hovering between them. Then it fell.

Roland stumbled backward, his hand trembling. His vision blurred, and the air around him fractured. He felt memory leak through his awareness—disjointed images of childhood days that never occurred, glimpses of events still to come, people he had never met speaking his name in languages he had never learned.

Maxine caught him as he collapsed to one knee. “Stay with me,” she whispered, gripping his shoulders.

But Roland could no longer speak. He opened his mouth, and only fragments emerged.

Arden stepped forward. “This was not conquest,” she said. “It was an invitation.”

She reached toward Maxine.

“You are the last door.”

Maxine backed away.

“No,” she said.

“You were always going to say that,” the voice replied. “But I had to ask.”

The Vessel and Arden turned in unison and walked toward the edge of the platform. Beyond them, the forest had begun to shimmer. Trees bled into the sky. The clouds moved in reverse. The head above the valley glowed brighter, and for the first time, something changed.

Its lips parted.

Inside the opening, there were no teeth—only a spiraling corridor of mirrors, each surface reflecting a different version of the world.

Maxine stood frozen as Arden’s form shimmered. Her edges softened, then restructured. For a brief moment, she seemed made of script—rows of curling characters that rotated in sequence before folding inward, vanishing in a burst of impossible geometry.

The Vessel followed.

Then there was silence.

The forest settled. The equipment powered down.

Roland sat curled on the ground, muttering phrases in a language that bent time around sound.

Maxine stepped to the platform edge and looked out. The head still loomed. Its gaze remained fixed, but it no longer needed to reach; it had become the space.

And they had helped it remember the shape of the door through which it had entered.

* * * * * *

The forest was quiet again.

A survey drone swept low across the valley, transmitting heat signatures to a secure uplink that no longer existed. Its onboard camera recorded pine canopy, scrub, and fog—nothing unusual. The field where the Threshold Dynamics compound had once stood was overgrown, the scaffold removed, the generators gone. No satellite records marked the facility. No roads remained visible from above.

The drone’s logs would later be reviewed by an automated system tasked with monitoring atmospheric radiation in disused government zones. It flagged no anomalies. It also failed to record the moment the drone’s reflection appeared in the air five meters above its own body, lagging half a second behind.

Official records stated that the site had been decommissioned following the withdrawal of funding. No reason was listed. No incident report filed. FOIA requests returned with redacted blocks and template responses citing expired clearances. Attempts to trace Threshold Dynamics led to disconnected phone numbers, expired domains, and offshore holding companies that folded within weeks of inquiry.

The name Arden Vale appeared briefly in one academic journal—an article on dimensional topology later pulled for formatting inconsistencies. The author profile linked to no institution. The portrait was blank.

And yet, the land remembered.

A pair of hikers from an outlying township wandered into the valley late in October, following a trail that did not appear on modern maps. Along it, they found no buildings or roads. At the river’s edge, they watched, curiously, as the water run uphill briefly before resuming its natural course.

They did not return the way they came. One claimed they had been followed by something just out of sight. The other refused to speak about the trip entirely. When prompted, she insisted she had never gone hiking in that area, despite photographic evidence to the contrary.

Elsewhere, a retired contractor in Michigan suffered a stroke during breakfast. When he awoke two days later, he spoke a phrase repeatedly to his daughter before slipping into a coma.

He said: “The door was made of mirrors, and I couldn’t find the frame.”

No one knew what he meant.

In the weeks that followed the event, Maxine remained off-grid. She traveled west by train, avoiding digital records, changing aliases, and moved through towns as though haunted by something she could neither name nor explain. At night, she dreamed of forests she had never explored, mouth-like valleys, and colossal visages rising against the sky. She kept a journal, though the ink often faded by morning. Once, she found pages she hadn’t written—filled with curved symbols that vaguely resembled letters.

She burned them all.

Some nights, she woke convinced she was no longer the sole occupant of her body.

She never spoke to Roland again. His fate was uncertain. Witnesses claimed he boarded a cargo plane under a false name two days after the final incident. The flight’s manifest was later lost. No one at the receiving airport remembered seeing him disembark. His apartment in Maryland remained untouched. Rent payments continued for four months, and then stopped. The landlord entered the unit to find a message scrawled hastily on the bedroom ceiling with what appeared to be permanent marker. It read:

“I remember things that haven’t happened yet. I don’t want to.”

The landlord did not call the police. He simply painted over the message and rented the apartment to someone else. The new tenant complained of vivid dreams and insomnia, but chose not to move out.

In Washington, a clerk in the Geological Survey Department flagged a series of magnetic anomalies centered on a cluster of remote wilderness regions—one of which included the former breach site. When she presented the findings to her supervisor, she was told to shelve the report. Three days later, her system credentials were revoked. When she protested, she was informed she had never been employed there.

She still receives voicemail messages with only static and distant whispering. She no longer answers her phone.

In the heart of the valley, the air remains dense in ways no barometer can measure. On mornings when the fog rolls in from the east, shapes appear for seconds at a time—massive, slow-moving silhouettes with curves too perfect to be natural. Photographers sometimes capture them by accident. Most delete the images, convinced they’ve glitched the sensor.

And yet, once in a while, one photograph surfaces—passed around forums, dissected, dismissed as a hoax, and reedited into artwork. But those who spend too long staring into the grainy outline, especially if they invert the contrast, soon begin to dream of faces with stonelike skin and unblinking eyes. The image always finds its way back to obscurity.

The being itself no longer appears in full, not all at once—but traces remain. Distorted, inaccurate reflections ripple in puddles near the valley floor. Trees lean in gentle curves. The sky folds subtly where the head once appeared, like fabric pressed too long against a sharp edge.

People feel watched in places where no one is present. Children sometimes wake from sleep, in tears, claiming they heard a woman’s voice reciting their name.

On the winter solstice, a freelance surveyor crossing through the valley alone reported hearing the word ‘home’ repeated in his own voice, though he hadn’t spoken. He continued walking but eventually stopped when his shadow split in two and then rejoined, the light no longer reflecting it properly afterward. Later, when interviewed by a forest ranger, he claimed he saw something that “wasn’t there and never was, but always would be.” The ranger filed no report. That section of the forest was already listed as restricted.

And on one fog-choked morning, a boy from a nearby township strayed from a family hiking path and wandered too close to the treeline. His mother found him standing still, eyes fixed on nothing.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

The boy tilted his head.

“I think it sees us.”

She followed his gaze. There was only mist. She turned to lead him away.

Behind them, in the distance, faint and far too large to be real, a silhouette emerged—vague and nearly translucent.

Its eyes opened.

And a voice came, as if on the wind, from nowhere and everywhere, all at once.

“I see you.”