Reality felt thin. Not broken, not warped, not torn. Thin, as though someone had pressed their fingers against the world and rubbed until the surface wore down to a translucent membrane. Wendell often wondered if he had simply lived long enough to see the edges fray, or if the fraying had begun inside his own mind long ago. It was difficult to tell nowadays. Memory was an unreliable companion. Sometimes he remembered being young. Sometimes he remembered being old. Once, he remembered dying.
He tried to remember what it was that he had experienced. His memories started to form. A trickle of liquid began to pour into his mind. A memory began to form... only to be accompanied by a searing pain, waking Wendell from his unnatural haze.
He was in the bar. Always in the same bar. The bar that he had lived in for as long as he could remember.
The counter stretched before him, covered in faint scratches and stains he no longer bothered trying to scrub out. The shelves behind him displayed bottles half filled with liquids of dubious origin. A single bulb hung overhead and flickered with the little remaining light it had. Wendell had stopped wondering long ago whether the light was malfunctioning or simply nearing its end. Yet it kept on. Day in, and day out.
He polished a glass…. polishing a glass felt right, and because the gentle, circular motion kept the pain in his skull at bay. Whenever he tried thinking too deeply, a stabbing ache blossomed behind his eye. Polishing held it back. Closing his eyes helped too. He had developed habits, even if he could not remember learning them.
His name was Wendell Weaver. That he remembered. He was a bartender. That was another truth. And he was not allowed to serve someone a second drink. That rule lived in him with an iron weight, though he could not recall who had carved it there or why.
The rest of his memories drifted like smoke, and like smoke, trying to catch them only left him more confused. Still he tried to recall what it was he was meant to be doing.
He paused his polishing as something tugged at the base of his mind. A memory rising from the dark. Its shape felt familiar. Its importance radiated through him like warmth. The answer to his question.
The next moment the pressure surged.
His memory vanished... Again, and Again, and Again, and Again. Becoming more painful with each attempt at recollection.
A voice slipped through the buzzing of his mind.
"Hey. Can I order a drink? Hey, bartender. A second one."
Wendell blinked and returned to the present. His voice emerged rougher than he meant. "Don't you think you've had enough?"
The man at the counter recoiled. He looked to be in his late twenties, though the dust coating his clothes and hair made him appear older. He frowned, confused. "I only had one."
Wendell knew that too, but the rule was absolute. He didn't want the man to get hurt.
Ignoring the man, he returned to the rim of the glass, polishing with slow precision. Continuing to polish with a dirty rag as the man stared eagerly at the bartender.
The next moment the man lifted his arm in protest, grabbing a glass behind the bartender, and bringing it to his face. A small stream of liquid ran down the glass and into his dry, cotton mouth. A disturbed look fell on Wendell's face. He raised his arm towards the counter hoping to stop the man. However his arm faltered halfway. It thinned for a heartbeat, as though it had never existed. His face rippled strangely, like a reflection distorted by an unseen presence. It was too late.
"Hey… what's happening to me?" The mans voice cracked with sudden fear.
The man grabbed the counter to steady himself. He stood from the stool he had been sat in and stumbled backwards. Gasping for air that would not enter his body. "I asked you, what is happen..."
No further words came out as his body slid down the old brick wall. His eyes still staring at Wendell.
Lying on the wall across from the bartender he let out his final breath. Collapsing the next moment. The thud echoed through the bar with hollow finality. Wendell watched him for a moment, ensuring the rule had still existed.
The man was dead.
Wendell resumed polishing the glass.
A dark stain grew across the floor. But the stain did not come from the man's body. His corpse was bloodless, hollow, an emptied shell. The stain dripped instead from above. Something thick and blackish tapped steadily onto the floorboards.
Wendell looked up. The light fixture swayed without wind. Its flickering grew erratic, each pulse stretching the shadows across the counter. The world felt misaligned.
He attempted to study the strange, dark substance dripping from the bulb, but the pressure behind his eye intensified. He flinched and looked away, allowing the memory of it to fade.
The bell at the door chimed.
A sharp scream followed.
Wendell turned with slow, mechanical effort. His gaze passed briefly over the fallen man's empty drink. The liquid inside had changed. Not the cloudy, bitter spirit he remembered pouring, but something thicker, darker, as though reflecting a sky that did not belong to this world.
A woman stood in the doorway. Her expression was horrified, her breath frantic. She stared at him first, then at the corpse, then back again. Something in her face tugged at him sharply, painfully.
Recognition.
A memory tried to surface.
The pressure crushed it instantly.
He winced and whispered the only thought left in the aftermath. "What was I thinking about?"
He let the question dissolve alongside everything else.
"Oh well."
The woman backed away, her vivid eyes wide with terror. She fled into the wasteland outside.
Wendell watched her silhouette vanish into the storm-lit horizon. Something deep in him urged him to follow her, as though her presence tied a thread directly to the part of himself that still had shape. But he could not step outside. He had tried before. The doorway might as well have been a wall. The bar was not his prison so much as it was his master. He could only exist within its boundaries.
He returned to his glass.
He polished, and the world eased its pressure on him. The reflections shifting on the glass's surface deepened unnaturally. An image began to coalesce in the wake of his empty thoughts. The ridges on the glass began to shimmer. He glimpsed ruined buildings alongside canyons of collapsed concrete. The outline of a sun that flared brighter one moment and dimmer the next, as if confused about its own existence.
Each time he focused, the pressure rose, and the images scattered.
The door creaked again.
Another man stepped inside. Younger than the last. Tall, thin, dressed in battered clothes that bore dust from distant places Wendell had forgotten. His eyes were calm, but something unsettling stirred behind them, as though he was familiar with the shadows of the world.
He carried a briefcase. He set it gently on the counter and took a seat, but he did not order. He simply looked at Wendell with an unreadable expression, then glanced at the empty bar around them.
"I am waiting for someone," he said quietly. "Would you mind if she joined us?"
Wendell nodded. Polishing the glass occupied his mind. It also kept him from thinking too deeply about the faint unease this man inspired.
Time passed. Minutes that may have been hours. Hours that may have been days. The man waited in silence, unbothered by the emptiness around him.
The woman he had spoke of eventually appeared. It was the same one from before.
Her earlier fear was gone, replaced by a still, tense calm. Her hair was dark and tangled by the wind outside. Her eyes held a faint purple glow, hazy yet somehow sharp.
She sat beside the young man as though she had always known where to place herself. They exchanged no words that Wendell heard.
They ordered a single drink each.
They drank them with quiet deliberation.
They paid.
"Wait... they actually paid?" Wendell accepted the coins mechanically, stunned by the unfamiliar act.
The young man then gathered his belongings, leaving the briefcase behind, the girl followed shortly after with a grim look.
Still stunned by the foreign concept of someone paying, Wendell watched as they both left. Leaving the bar, and returning to the wasteland where a storm seemed to be approaching.
"She seemed apprehensive to leave. How strange," he murmured.
He gathered their glasses, his hands moving automatically. As he polished the first one, the reflections deepened again. This time the images that appeared were clearer. A young man traversing barren plains. A silhouette of a towering creature stalking behind him. A woman standing atop a dune, wind whipping around her, something bright and dangerous glowing behind her eyes.
Wendell felt warmth slide from his nose. He touched his upper lip and saw blood on his fingertips.
"I should clean this."
He reached for another rag.
A sudden thump echoed through the room.
The briefcase had fallen.
He stared. Confused. Had the man forgotten it? How could he leave something so deliberate, so weighted with meaning? Wendell tried to step toward the door, thinking perhaps he could call out to him, but the thought evaporated as the pressure behind his eye pulsed again.
He looked down.
The briefcase lay at his feet.
He bent and lifted it. The metal was cold, unnaturally so. The clasps gleamed like polished gold. A faint vibration hummed beneath his fingers.
He shook it.
Nothing... however something in his head beckoned him to open it.
A heavy, expectant silence called to him.
Wendell opened the clasps. The first clicking open with mechanical tension. The second followed. He opened the case slowly. Tension rising in the air. However there was nothing inside. Just an empty case.
He relaxed and placed it back on the counter. The man would probably be back for it. It would be bad if he was seen snooping through his stuff. He went to close it back, but as soon as he did the bar exploded with motion.
Air roared around the case. Every speck of dust, every stray memory, every loose shard of the world seemed to tear free and spiral toward the open case. Bottles rattled violently and fell from their shelves. Glass shattered around him in a chorus of brittle cries. The vortex inside the case expanded, its swirling light fracturing into countless shifting scenes.
Faces flashed through the vortex.
Moments.
Fragments of lives he might have lived.
Fragments of lives he could never have known.
The scar down his body throbbed. He touched the line running from his brow down toward his ribs with unease. He did not know when he had gotten it, but suddenly it felt unbearably hot, branded into him like the memory of something sharp and merciless.
The pull intensified.
He clung to a support beam, trying to resist the force dragging at his chest. His breath caught in his throat. His body felt light, hollow, as though the vortex was sucking the very essences of his soul away from him.
The images inside the spiraling lights sharpened. A girl with purple eyes crying his name. A hand reaching toward him. A bar in flames. A field of glass beneath a colorless sky.
He reached toward the memories instinctively.
The pressure inside his skull shattered every one of them.
Darkness swallowed his thoughts.
His grip slipped.
Wendell felt something tear free inside him. Something essential. Something he had guarded without understanding.
The vortex consumed him.
His body vanished in a streak of pale light, drawn into the impossible space within the briefcase.
The bar fell silent.
Dust settled like slow rain.
A moment later, the door opened again.
The young man stepped inside. Calm. Unbothered by the destruction. He moved as though he had expected this outcome all along. Stepping over a broken chair. He picked up his briefcase, closed the clasps, and smiled. A dark smile. One that breached the silence wrapped around him like a cloak.
The bell rang once more, as the young man left the now empty bar. A strange silence followed him out, a mistake that could not be undone.
One of the most dangerous prisoners on the continent had just been released without the knowledge of anyone. Not even the prisoner himself.