Adrian woke to silence.
Not the comfortable kind—the dead, suffocating kind. No hum of the fridge. No pipes groaning in the walls. Not even the faint city noise outside.
The world had stopped.
He sat up slowly, his joints aching like he'd been frozen in place for days. The couch beneath him felt damp. Wrong. When he looked down, the cushions were slick with condensation, like he'd been sleeping underwater.
The TV across the room was on.
But it didn't play shows.
It showed his apartment.
Adrian blinked, throat tightening. The screen displayed a live feed—himself, sitting on the couch, staring at the TV. A perfect mirror. But then, on the screen, he stood up.
He hadn't moved.
---
Adrian staggered to his feet, heart pounding, eyes locked on the screen. His double walked slowly toward the door, reached for the handle—then stopped.
On-screen Adrian turned his head, looking directly at the real Adrian.
And smiled.
The screen went black.
---
Adrian stumbled back, slamming into the coffee table. The journal spilled to the floor, pages splayed. He scrambled for it like a child for a talisman, flipping pages, searching for something—anything—that could explain what was happening.
Halfway through, a sentence he'd overlooked before seemed to shimmer on the page.
The Dimensional doesn't arrive. It leaks.
As if on cue, the ceiling above him groaned. A hairline crack spread across the plaster, black light seeping through like ink bleeding into paper. The floor rippled beneath his feet. His vision tilted—no longer flat, no longer reliable.
The room stretched, corners pulling farther apart. The kitchen doorway elongated, narrowing until it looked like the mouth of a tunnel. The shadows inside writhed as though something was crawling just out of sight.
---
Adrian clutched his head, dizzy. His apartment wasn't his apartment anymore.
The clock on the wall spun backward. The second hand ticked in jerks—forward, backward, skipping minutes entirely. The air tasted metallic, sharp, filling his mouth with the tang of blood though he hadn't bitten his tongue.
Through the windows, the city was gone.
In its place stretched a horizon of spirals. Dozens. Hundreds. Floating in black nothingness, each one pulsing like a wound in the fabric of the universe. Some small, some so massive they swallowed whole stars.
Adrian's breath stuttered. His legs gave out, and he crawled backward until his spine hit the wall.
But the wall wasn't solid anymore.
It rippled against him, soft, like pressing into skin.
And then—something pressed back.
---
A hand pushed through.
Not a shadow this time. Not a reflection.
Flesh. Black and glistening, fingers too long, bending at wrong angles. They curled against his chest, pinning him to the floor.
Adrian screamed, thrashing, but the hand wasn't heavy. It wasn't even physical in the way he understood. It was inside him, pressing against his thoughts, his memories, pulling pieces of him loose like threads.
The static roared in his skull.
"...between worlds..." the voice thundered.
"...you cannot belong to one..."
The ceiling cracked wide open, and for a moment—just a moment—Adrian saw it.
The Dimensional.
Not a figure. Not a monster. Something vast, folding in on itself, endless spirals of bone and light and darkness, an architecture that breathed. It was too big for his eyes, too infinite for his mind. He felt his sanity buckle.
He looked away—too late.
When he blinked, the apartment was gone.
He stood in a hallway he didn't recognize.
Every door down its length was open. Every room inside glowed with spirals.
And all of them whispered his name.
---