Adrian didn't remember walking.
One blink, and he was no longer in his apartment—or the stretched hallway, or any place that could be mapped by human geometry. He was inside it.
The Dimensional.
The ground beneath him wasn't ground. It was a vast, spiraling lattice of bone-white stone, twisting into itself endlessly. He couldn't tell if he was standing on a surface, or dangling upside down, or walking along a curve that led nowhere. His stomach lurched with every step, as though gravity couldn't decide where to belong.
Above—below—everywhere—spirals hung in the void like suspended galaxies. Some turned slowly, whispering as they rotated. Others stuttered in violent shudders, grinding against unseen barriers. The sound was deafening yet somehow inside his skull rather than in his ears.
The air (if it was air) vibrated with static. His skin prickled. Every breath was wrong—too sharp, too thick—like inhaling liquid light. His lungs screamed, but he couldn't stop breathing it in.
---
A spiral opened before him, wider than the sky, its edge rimmed with pulsing veins of black fire. Adrian stared into it and nearly collapsed. Inside, he saw his apartment again. His couch. His journal. His life.
But when he stepped closer, the image warped. The couch dissolved into teeth. The journal bled words that dripped off the pages and crawled away like insects. The shape of his old world twisted into a mockery of itself, as if the Dimensional was remembering it wrong on purpose.
The spiral pulsed like a living eye, and Adrian staggered back, gagging.
"You are already unmade," the voice thundered.
It wasn't spoken—it was inside him, heavy and final.
"You bleed across worlds. You are the crack."
Adrian clutched his head. "No—no, I didn't ask for this! I didn't—"
The lattice beneath him shifted. Tiles peeled away like scales, revealing abyssal depths beneath. Something stirred in the black, massive and slow. He couldn't see it fully—only fragments: a horn the length of a skyscraper, an eye that blinked sideways, a spiral of ribs coiled into infinity.
The Dimensional wasn't a monster. It was a world that breathed. And Adrian was inside its lungs.
---
He ran.
But the path ran with him. The lattice spiraled tighter, funneling him downward, dragging his body no matter how much he fought. His footsteps echoed like cracks in glass, and each one left a smear of light instead of a shadow.
The farther he descended, the more his memories broke apart. He tried to think of his mother's face. It dissolved into spirals. He tried to picture his own childhood bedroom. The walls bled static. He tried to remember who he was before tonight—before the journal, before the whispers—and the thought slipped through his fingers, gone.
The Dimensional wasn't just bending space. It was erasing him.
---
At the bottom of the spiral stood a doorway.
Not stone. Not wood. Something else. It writhed, shimmering with impossible colors that hurt to look at, as if light itself rebelled against being shaped into an entrance.
And carved across its surface, in letters he shouldn't be able to read but somehow understood, was his name.
ADRIAN.
He stumbled toward it, shaking. The whispers built into a roar. Every spiral in the void turned, all of them watching, all of them chanting his name in perfect unison.
He pressed his hands against the door. It pulsed beneath his palms like flesh.
And then—slowly, inevitably—it opened.
The world beyond was nothing but spirals. Spirals folding into spirals, spirals consuming spirals, a fractal ocean of infinity.
And Adrian fell into it.
---