The sky was quiet.
Not cloudy. Not rainy. It was just... still.
A stillness that felt strange, especially in a place known for its winds.
The Netherlands, mid-afternoon. Rows of buildings stood like polite chess pieces. Bicycles clicked and clacked across the brick roads. Leaves swayed gently. And yet, something about the air felt wrong—too calm. Like a breath being held.
Shin watched a cursor blink.
He sat alone in his small, undecorated apartment, one leg hanging off the side of the couch. His laptop screen glowed with cold, sterile light. A single line stared back at him:
Grade received: 6.5 / 10
"…Again," he muttered.
No surprise. He hadn't studied.
Another 6.5. A floating, forgettable mark, just barely above average. The kind you got from effort without focus—or in his case, no effort at all.
He'd read the textbooks, sure. Skimmed them, mostly. But he didn't try—he never did. Do just enough not to fail, but nothing beyond it. That was just who he was.
He leaned back, staring at the ceiling. It had a stain vaguely resembling Australia. Back in middle school, teachers used to say he had a promise—that he could become anything if he 'put enough effort'.
They didn't understand. He didn't want to become anything. Or perhaps he just didn't have a reason to.
He flipped open a streaming tab—some fantasy anime episode he'd half-watched last week. A loud explosion played across the screen, followed by the protagonist shouting something about justice.
Click—Skip—next tab.
A war documentary now. A general describing battle logistics with surgical calm.
Click. Skip. News headlines. Dull. Next.
He gave up on finding something interesting and checked his fridge: a bottle of water and an expired yogurt were all he found there.
"…Right," he sighed. "Time to shop."
Outside, the streets were quieter than usual. Brick paths stitched the neighborhood together. A tram bell chimed. A boy laughed as his mother corrected his handlebars. The air smelled faintly of rain that hadn't arrived yet.
The cool breeze that brushed across his face made him slow. It was crisp and clean, and it carried something in it—not scent, not sound, just… clarity.
A small smile touched his lips. The kind that didn't happen often.
Most days, he could barely be bothered to move. But wind made sense to him: cold, fleeting, directionless—but never still. It was why he'd moved here. Not for school, work, or the myth of a better version of himself—but for that impersonal push the North Sea sent inland, the way it scraped haze off his thoughts.
He picked up his pace, hands in pockets, shoes tapping lightly on the sidewalk.
The supermarket wasn't far. A modest store—two aisles, one employee at the register, maybe a dozen customers on a quiet day. Shin stepped inside. The automatic doors hissed shut behind him.
The wind stopped. Instantly.
He didn't freeze from startle, but from the sense that something was missing—a heaviness in the air that pressed against the skin—not like heat, but like silence.
Shin took a basket—milk, bread, and something green enough to prove a point. He moved without hurry, letting his fingers trail the cool condensate on a line of bottles, considering nothing and noticing everything—everything hummed with fluorescent certainty. A scanner beeped steadily. A baby cried behind an arguing couple. A tourist stared down a wall of cheeses as if selecting a new religion.
Normal.
Yet his skin crawled. He reached for the pasta, and the air seemed to hold its breath. Somewhere, the baby's cry stopped mid-scream. Shin's hand stopped in the air.
Reality folded.
Sound vanished. Shelves bent like soft metal, collapsing toward a single point. The glass doors didn't shatter. They flowed. The aisle narrowed into a line and then flared outward in perfect silence, as if the world were a curtain cut clean down the middle.
The air screamed—once, without a voice—and the world was gone.
Shin stood—stunned—on a floating slab of stone. The supermarket had vanished, and so had the people, the carts, the ceiling. Everything. Above, a vault of pale sky. Below, a spiraling drop of shifting currents with no end he could see. Walls twisted around him like braided stone, pulsing with motion he felt more than saw, as if the place had been designed by something that distrusted gravity.
A thin whistle filled his ears—barely a sound. It might have been unbearable to anyone else, but to him, it was like the note you hear when a door finally shuts and the house exhales, relieved to be alone with you.
He was confused. His hands trembled—but not from fear. Something he didn't yet dare to name crept along his spine. His lips parted—not at the madness around him, but at the pulse within. He had no word for it, nor a reason to feel it.
But deep in his chest, a whisper stirred—like wind slipping through a locked room, sharp and electric with promise.
"…Finally."