The breeze was a wheezing, frigid thing that rattled through the university quad, but Jonas remained motionless.
He sat on a splintered bench, his posture unnaturally rigid, eyes anchored to a single, iridescent oil stain on the grey concrete. To any student passing by, he was merely a silhouette—a twenty-year-old ghost draped in a charcoal suit that was a size too large. The fabric was cheap, synthetic, and frayed at the cuffs, a pathetic testament to a life spent chasing the crumbs of a society that didn't know he existed. In the grand machinery of the city, Jonas was a gear with stripped teeth, spinning uselessly while the rest of the world ground forward.
In the local vernacular of his own mind, Jonas was a Dry-Soul.
It wasn't a poetic metaphor; it was a grueling physical sensation. It was the feeling of his lungs being lined with sandpaper and his heart beating against hollow, wooden ribs. He was an anomaly in the vibrant, pulsing ecosystem of the university. While others moved in packs, fueled by the arrogance of youth and the promise of a golden future, Jonas existed in the extreme periphery. He was a smudge of graphite on a high-definition screen – easy to ignore, and even easier to delete.
The migraine behind his eyes was a dull, rhythmic hammer, striking with the precision of a clock. It had been twenty-eight hours since he last tasted sleep. Between the suffocating weight of his morning lectures and the grueling ten-hour graveyard shifts at the shipping docks, Jonas had learned to navigate the "in-between." He lived in the narrow, lightless crack between wakefulness and delirium – a grey purgatory where the sky felt like a sheet of oxidized lead and the air tasted of copper, exhaust, and stagnant dust.
The campus was a cacophony of useless, abrasive noise. He watched a group of freshmen toss a frisbee near the fountain, their laughter sounding distorted and tinny, as if Jonas were listening from the bottom of a pressurized steel tank. Their movements were fluid, effortless, and offensive in their vitality. His own movements were a series of calculated negotiations with a failing nervous system. Every blink felt like a chore; every breath felt like a risk. He felt brittle. He felt as if a sudden change in atmospheric pressure or a loud enough shout would shatter him into a thousand nameless shards of glass.
"Jonas. Are you even present, or has your consciousness finally checked out for the season?"
The voice belonged to Khael. If Jonas were a dying, cold star, Khael was the only planet still stubbornly caught in his weak gravitational orbit. He was leaning against a nearby oak, his expression a weary mix of pity and genuine frustration. Khael was a miracle of misplaced loyalty; he was the only person who refused to acknowledge that Jonas was a sinking ship.
"I'm here," Jonas muttered.
His voice was a dry rasp, sounding as if it were being dragged through miles of gravel. He forced his gaze toward Khael, but the sunlight was an invasive, oily glare that turned the campus green into a sickly, jaundiced yellow. The world was losing its resolution. The edges of the trees were bleeding into the sky, and the faces of the passing students were becoming featureless, pale blurs.
The morning lecture had been an exercise in absolute futility. The professor's voice had been a low-frequency vibration that rattled Jonas's molars but conveyed no linguistic meaning. The equations on the chalkboard weren't mathematics anymore; they were a swarm of black insects, scrawling incomprehensible, shifting patterns across a white void. Jonas had sat in the middle row, his spine a frozen column of lead, fighting the primal, animal urge to let his skull meet the desk and simply stop.
He was parched – not for water, but for the substance of existence. His soul felt like an abandoned canteen, rattling in a sun-bleached desert, empty, rusted, and forgotten by the one who carried it.
"Forget the rest of the day," Khael said, his brow furrowing as he took in the grey pallor of Jonas's skin. "You're weaving like a drunk on a listing deck. Your eyes are bloodshot and glazed over, Jonas. Let me get you home before you collapse and force me to fill out an incident report with campus security. You look like you're seeing ghosts that haven't even been born yet."
Jonas didn't offer a rebuttal. Pride was a luxury he had long ago traded for the base mechanics of survival. He allowed Khael to lead him toward the subway, his feet moving on autopilot, his mind already retreating into a dark, silent corner of his cranium.
The walk back to his apartment was a fragmented montage of grey streets and disjointed sensory inputs. The acrid smell of bus exhaust. The screech of metal on metal. The cold, mocking bite of the wind against his neck. Jonas barely registered the pavement beneath his soles; he felt as if he were walking on a thick layer of invisible silt, sinking deeper with every step. The world was losing its friction, its grip on him slipping.
When he finally reached the door of his cramped, one-room apartment, the lock felt like a complex, alien mechanism from a different era. His fingers were numb and unresponsive, fumbling with the key with the clumsy, frantic desperation of a dying man reaching for a life raft. Inside, the air was stagnant and heavy, smelling of stale coffee, damp paper, and the sharp, metallic tang of neglect.
He didn't have the strength to disrobe. He didn't even have the energy to kick off his salt-stained, scuffed shoes. He stumbled three steps into the room, his knees finally buckling under the weight of a thousand sleepless hours, and collapsed onto the thin, stained mattress. He surrendered to the darkness before his head even made contact with the pillow. It wasn't sleep. It was a total system failure. A blackout of the soul.
Then, the anomaly began.
Jonas opened his eyes, but the sensory input was impossible. He wasn't horizontal. He wasn't feeling the scratchy, cheap polyester of his suit against his skin. He didn't feel the weight of his own limbs or the ache in his head. Instead, he was standing in the corner of his own room, weightless, translucent, and utterly silent.
He was a spectator in his own sanctuary.
From a height of six feet, hovering near the water-stained ceiling, he watched the scene below with a cold, clinical horror. He watched himself—the other Jonas—lying on the bed. His physical shell looked pathetic, curled in a tight fetal position, chest rising and falling in a ragged, feverish rhythm. He could see the grime on the soles of his own shoes. He could see the salt-rimed sweat darkening the collar of his suit.
It was a perspective that defied every law of logic and physics. He tried to reach out, to shake his physical self awake, but he possessed no limbs. He tried to scream, to warn the sleeping boy of the wrongness in the air, but he had no lungs, no throat, no voice. He was a silent consciousness, a haunting, invisible presence in his own room.
The silence was a physical weight, pressing against his invisible mind like the pressure of the deep ocean, until a sound cut through the void.
Snap.
It was the sound of something structural failing. It felt as if the foundations of the entire building had shifted – a subtle, tectonic lurch. The Jonas on the bed bolted upright, his eyes blown wide, his pupils like black coins. His face was a mask of primal, unrefined terror, his breath coming in sharp, wet gasps.
From his vantage point, the Observer saw the breach happen first.
Directly beneath the bed, on the floor where the shadows were thickest and the dust had settled like grey snow, a single ceramic tile fractured. It didn't just crack; it imploded, the shards of porcelain clattering into a dark, bottomless void that should not have existed on the third floor of a city apartment. A yawning hole appeared where solid ground should have been.
And then came the sound. It was the rhythmic, haunting thrum of waving water – crashing against ancient stone, retreating, and crashing again. It was a tide. A deep, salty abyss was opening its mouth beneath him, breathing the scent of rotted kelp and old, cold deaths into the room.
But as the Jonas on the bed scrambled away toward the wall, his fingernails digging into the plaster, the temperature in the room plummeted. The air became a frigid, crystalline weight, frosting the windows from the inside.
A figure manifested out of the shadows. It didn't walk; it simply was. It was a tall, gangly entity with skin the color of a fresh, wet wound. It was hairless, earless, and lacked a nose – only two jagged, vertical slits that hissed with a predatory rhythm. Its body was draped in tattered, brine-soaked rags that seemed to move of their own accord.
But it was the face that destroyed the last of Jonas's sanity. It was a terrifying expanse of crimson, dominated by two burning yellow pits for eyes and a wide, toothless grin that seemed to have too many joints, stretching almost from one side of its head to the other.
The entity didn't acknowledge the Jonas cowering on the floor. It slowly, agonizingly, turned its head and looked directly into the corner of the ceiling.
It looked at the Observer.
The creature raised a long, spindly finger, and the observer felt a paralyzing, soul-deep chill. Before a thought could form, the red-faced horror lunged with flickering, impossible speed, its movement by passing the physical space between them.
The Jonas on the bed shrieked as a searing, white-hot agony exploded in his wrist, but the observer felt it too—a corrosive, brand-like sensation as if his very essence were being carved into with a rusted blade.
Outside the apartment door, the first heavy, metallic footstep echoed in the hallway. Clang. Then another. The unmistakable sound of rusted iron, the groan of leather, and the heavy drag of ancient, notched weapons announced the arrival of an army that had no business in the world of the living.
The observer felt his vision begin to splinter and crack. The last thing he saw before the world dissolved into grey silt was the red-faced entity leaning over his physical self, its yellow eyes reflecting a destiny that had just been written in blood.
The Dry-Soul was no longer empty. It had been marked.