An oppressive silence, heavy like wet velvet, was the only thing that existed beyond the Gray Mist. It was not a simple vapor, but a thick, living substance that clung to Ethan's skin like icy cobwebs, muffling every sound and distorting his perception of distance and time. He moved forward with cautious steps, each movement an effort against the almost liquid resistance of the environment. The ground, invisible beneath his feet, felt soft and organic, as if he were walking on a giant, slumbering tongue.
It was then that his eyes, burning from the strain of peering through the perpetual gloom, discerned a shape. It did not appear abruptly, but rather as if the mist itself was condensing, solidifying into dark, angular contours. It was a staircase. Its steps were not made of stone or wood, but of a substance akin to dull obsidian, which seemed to absorb the faint light rather than reflect it. A primal attraction, a silent and irresistible call, pulled Ethan toward it. With an inexplicable reverence, he placed his hand on the icy railing and began to climb. Each step sounded like a muffled sigh in the great silence.
At the top, hovering in the void where the staircase ended, was the Door of Light.
It was an abomination of beauty and terror. It was not a closed entryway, but a rotating, pulsating portal composed of countless concentric spheres of light, each glowing with an intense, deep blue-black, the color of a marine abyss lit from within. The glow was hypnotic and painful to the eyes.
Ethan drew closer, and the true horror was revealed: within each spherical layer of light, countless grotesque larvae writhed in silent agony. Their bodies were transparent or translucent, revealing bizarre internal anatomies that shimmered with the same malevolent light. They did not swim; they spasmed, beating against the walls of their luminous prison as if begging for release.
And beyond the door, the veil of reality was torn asunder. There lay an even denser mist, a static storm of black-blue energy, wreathed in a palpable aura of pure darkness that seemed to consume the very air. Within it, indistinct and monstrous shapes thrashed about, terrifying things that deliberately hid in the folds of perception, suggesting presences that could drive a man to madness with a single glimpse.
Then, his vision adjusted to the nightmarish scene above. Suspended by thin, almost invisible black threads that descended from nowhere, there were cocoons. They were perfectly transparent, like giant, frozen soap bubbles.
Inside each one, a body was held in suspended repose. They were souls, or perhaps echoes, of every imaginable race. They wore jeans, jackets, modern dresses. A young woman held a smartphone, its screen still dark. A man had headphones hanging around his neck.
Todos eles irradiavam o calor e a vibração da vida, uma aura que gritava que eles pertenciam ao mundo dos vivos, não aos reinos dos mortos. Mas seus olhos... todos, sem exceção, estavam firmemente fechados, seus rostos serenos em um sono profundo e não natural. O horror foi ampliado quando Ethan viu quatro dos casulos. Eles estavam rompidos, suas cascas abertas como flores murchas, penduradas e vazias. Alguém – ou algo – já havia saído.
"What... is all this?" His voice was like a grain of sand in a desert of quietude, a rough whisper laden with a soul-freezing dread. He looked around, his instincts screaming for him to flee, but his feet seemed rooted to the obsidian step. It was then he noticed the particles. Tiny motes of cosmic dust, some glowing with an electric blue, others with a pulsating red of freshly spilled blood, began to float around him, dancing a slow, predatory waltz.
And then.
Pop!
The sound didn't come through his ears but echoed directly inside his skull. It was a dry snap, the sound of a reality bubble bursting. It was like a single drop of water falling onto the flat, infinite surface of a cosmic ocean, and the ripples that followed were catastrophic.
An imago formed before him, not in his eyes, but in his mind, crushing his consciousness with its weight.
It wasn't an image. It was a mass of alien thoughts. It was a concept of existence beyond his comprehension. It was everything that ever existed and everything that never would, and at the same time it was nothing, an absolute void that devoured meaning. It was contradiction given form, a paradox that unraveled the threads of sanity.
Ethan screamed, but no sound came out. He saw – or felt – the air in front of him crack like glass. Reality, the solid, reliable matter of the world, collapsed in on itself at a singular point. From this fissure, this tear in the universe's tapestry, forms erupted. Tentacles of bone-white, pale and featureless, not moving through the air, but unfolding it as if it were fabric. Worms of an impossible size, their iridescent surfaces reflecting dimensions that hurt to look at, crawled forth. They did not turn on him with hostility.
They parted the way. Their sinuous, hypnotic movements created a corridor, a tunnel through the shattered reality, leading toward the heart of the black-blue mist and the empty cocoons. It was an invitation. An order.
Tap!
The sound of his boot on the step was absurdly normal, an anchor point in a sea of insanity. Without hesitation, because the choice had already been taken from him, because his will was no longer his own, Ethan took a step forward. And then another. He walked the path the not-creatures had opened, entering the heart of the nightmare.
The path opened by the pale tentacles and dimensional worms did not lead to a place, but to a sensation. It was a route that seemed to bend the very fabric of existence itself, shortening the distance between Ethan and the cocoon he intuitively knew was his destination. His footsteps did not echo; they were absorbed by the anomaly surrounding him, each movement a surrender to the unfolding absurdity.
eco. Um reflexo em um espelho quebrado pelo tempo.
He stopped before one of the intact cocoons. Unlike the others, which held adults, this one was smaller, more delicate. The black-blue mist seemed to respect its space, forming a dark halo around it. Inside, enveloped in the cocoon's soft, protective light, was a child. A baby.
Its skin was pale, speckled with residue of dark, damp earth. Tiny leaves and fragments of roots clung to its body, painting a picture of profound and visceral abandonment. It was curled in a fetal position, but there was no sign of peace in its countenance. There was a tragic stillness, that of a seed plucked before it could germinate. It was an image that spoke of cold, of loneliness, and of a premature end in nature's merciless indifference.
The iridescent worms drew closer, their impossible forms hovering like curious cosmic vultures. The bone-white tentacles coiled in the air around the cocoon, not as a threat, but as a bizarre funeral procession, an honor guard for the dead. Ethan expected to feel revulsion, terror, the primal instinct to recoil from the agonizing creature and the entities observing it.
But no fear came.
Instead, an overwhelming empathy, so deep and ancient it seemed to come from before his own birth, flooded him. It was a recognition that went beyond sight, a knowledge that resided in every cell of his being. He wasn't looking at a stranger. He was looking at an echo. A reflection in a mirror shattered by time.
Slowly, almost in a trance, Ethan reached out his hand. His fingers, which moments before had felt the unnatural, icy air of that place, trembled slightly. The surface of the cocoon wasn't solid, but viscous and energized, like touching the tense skin of an energy bubble. He pressed gently.
The touch was not a contact. It was a silent detonation.
It was like being ripped from his own body and hurled into a cosmic whirlwind. The reality around him—the staircase, the door, the cocoons, the worms—disintegrated like a dream upon waking. But he did not wake up. He was projected.
The power that took him was not violent; it was absolute. It was the force of a memory breaking the dams of the mind. He saw suburban houses fold like paper, their structures screaming against laws of physics that no longer applied. Skyscrapers of steel and glass twisted and inverted, their foundations pointing toward a sky that was no longer sky, but a vortex of impossible colors. Streets unfurled like Möbius strips, rushing past him at the speed of light, a hallucinatory succession of asphalt, signs, and streetlights that were pure illusion. Gravity became a suggestion, not a law. The horizon, the line that had always promised order and an end, warped into an infinite spiral, a whirlpool that sucked the meaning from the world.
It was the internal landscape of a mental collapse, externalized on a cosmic scale.
And then, at the apex of this sensory journey, at the moment his identity was being unraveled and rebuilt simultaneously, a simple, devastating thought sprouted from the chaos, like the last air bubble of a drowning man.
"How did I get here?"
His voice did not come from his mouth. It echoed throughout the distorted universe, with the resonance of a deity, with the timbre of paradox itself. It was not a question. It was a declaration of existence, and at the same time, the admission that it was a fraud.
And with that question, the last pillar of his reality crumbled. The whirlwind of images gave way. The Gray Mist, which had perhaps always been just a veil over his eyes, suddenly dissipated. And there was no more ground. There was no more up or down.
Only the fall.
He fell through the nothingness, through the vacuum that existed between memories. And then, the impact. It was not violent; it was a transition. The cold came first. A damp, real cold that penetrated his bones, so different from the metaphysical cold of the mist. The moisture, the thick, sticky muck beneath his body… no, beneath his back. He felt the weight of the wet earth.
And the smell. The rich, heavy, organic smell of fresh mud, of decomposition and plant life. It was a primordial smell, the smell of the world.
And then, the tears. They did not begin as the cry of a man. They sprang from a well of anguish so pure, so inconsolable and infantile, that he had no control over it. It was a weeping that came from the depths of his soul, a pain that predated language, reason, consciousness itself.
"Wah!"
The sound came from his throat, but it wasn't his voice. It was high-pitched, fragile, helpless. A sound he recognized immediately, not from memory, but from being. It was an echo finding its original source after an eternity of separation.
And he heard it better than anything in his life, because it was his own crying. The cry of the baby abandoned in the mud. The cry that was, he now understood with terrifying clarity, his own.
The cry, sharp and hopeless, seemed to be the only real thing in a world that had disintegrated into pure feeling. Every sob was a hurricane in my small chest, a raw burn in my throat. The mud was cold, the night air a knife against exposed skin, and the darkness around was absolute, punctuated only by the indistinct shapes of plants swaying like specters in the whisper of the wind. The loneliness was a physical weight, crushing.
It was then, at the peak of this primordial helplessness, that a voice cut through the darkness.
"My God, what kind of man would leave a child out here?"
The words reached me distorted through the prism of my own weeping. They were deep, marked by a cadence and clarity I had never heard before – a precise, educated British accent that sounded strangely out of place in that wild solitude. I couldn't see. My eyes were swollen and full of tears, turning the world into a blur of wet shadows. The voice was a faraway thing, a sonic anchor point in a universe of pure terror. But I knew, with an instinctive certainty, that it was there. It was real. And it was directed at me.
The sound of heavy, decisive footsteps drew closer, crushing the wet grass and earth. And then, the hands. They were large, rough with the texture of a life of labor, but infinitely careful. They didn't grab me; they enveloped me. A calloused finger stroked my tear-soaked cheek, and the contact, unexpectedly gentle, made my convulsive crying begin to subside into a breathless, exhausted sob.
My eyes, slowly clearing with the backs of my tiny hands, finally managed to focus. Leaning over me, blocking the dark vault of the sky, was a face. It was an elderly man, his face a map of lines and deep furrows carved by time and experience. His hair, thin and combed back, was white as snow under the faint moonlight. His shoulders were broad, his posture erect and firm, speaking of a physical strength that age had not completely eroded.
But it was his eyes that captured and soothed my troubled soul. They were a light gray, like the sky before a storm, and they shone with a light that was not from the outside world, but from a deep, unshakable inner goodness. They looked at me not with pity, but with a serene determination, a resolute promise of protection. There was a quiet ferocity in them, that of an old lion who had found a lost cub.
"Come now, child," he said, his voice a low murmur that vibrated in his broad chest, a sound I felt as much as heard. "The world is a far too large and cold a place for one so small. I'm quite certain my home is a much better place to be."
With movements that were both strong and delicate, he unbuttoned his heavy tweed coat, which smelled of tobacco, burnt wood, and an ancient security. He wrapped me completely in the rough fabric still warm with the heat of his body, creating an improvised cocoon that was a thousand times more comforting than the sickly light one I had witnessed. The biting cold that had penetrated me to the bone began to recede, replaced by a warmth that was more than physical; it was the warmth of human presence, of contact, of salvation.
He lifted me, settling me into the crook of his arm with a naturalness that suggested a long-forgotten comfort with fatherhood. Wrapped in his coat, lulled by the steady rhythm of his footsteps and the low rumble of his voice whispering assurances I didn't understand but felt, exhaustion finally overcame the fright.