I used to believe the world was stable.
Not good. Not fair. Just stable.
People woke up, followed routines carved into them by habit and fear, and went to sleep believing tomorrow would be more of the same. I was one of them. I think. At least, I tried to be.
That was before I noticed the door.
It sat embedded in the stone wall of a narrow passage I walked through every day on my way home. No sign. No frame. Just a door where there shouldn't have been one. Dark metal, smooth and unadorned, as if someone had erased every detail that could give it meaning.
The strange part wasn't that it existed.
It was that no one else seemed to see it.
At first, I assumed it was new. Construction, maybe. The city was always changing in quiet, inconvenient ways. But days passed. Weeks. The door remained, unchanged, unacknowledged. People brushed past it without a glance, their shoulders nearly grazing the handle.
I started watching them.
None of them slowed. None hesitated. Their eyes slid over it like water over glass.
As if it wasn't there at all.
Today, the door hummed.
The sound was faint, more a vibration than a noise, but the moment it reached me, my steps faltered. The air felt heavier, like the seconds before a storm breaks. I stopped in front of the wall, pulse ticking louder in my ears.
The hum wasn't external. I realized that slowly.
It was inside my head.
I swallowed and glanced around. The passage was busy—students, workers, vendors packing up stalls—but no one reacted. No one flinched. No one even looked my way.
It was just me.
"Get a grip," I muttered under my breath.
I took a step closer.
The door didn't change, but my perception of it did. The metal surface seemed deeper somehow, like staring into still water and realizing it had no bottom. My hand twitched at my side, fingers curling and uncurling without my permission.
I didn't remember deciding to reach out.
My palm met cold metal.
The sensation shot straight up my arm, sharp and clean, not painful but certain. A shiver ran through me, settling somewhere behind my eyes. My breath caught.
This wasn't fear.
It was recognition.
I had never seen this door before.
And yet, every part of me knew it.
A pressure built behind my temples, followed by a flicker of images—too fast to grasp, too vivid to ignore. Stone towers under unfamiliar skies. A vast horizon split by light. The echo of something enormous opening.
I staggered back, clutching my head.
"No," I whispered. "That's not real."
The world steadied itself, the passage snapping back into place. The door remained, silent now, as if amused by my reaction.
I laughed weakly. "I'm tired. That's all."
But even as I said it, I knew it was a lie.
I had always felt… out of place. Like I was reading from the wrong script, a half-beat behind everyone else. Moments of déjà vu haunted me—knowledge without memory, familiarity without cause. I'd learned to ignore it.
Until now.
The door hummed again, louder this time.
I felt it in my chest, a resonance that matched my heartbeat perfectly. My breathing slowed without conscious effort, as if my body had already made a decision my mind was lagging behind on.
A thought surfaced, uninvited and absolute.
I'm the only one who can feel this.
The realization should have terrified me.
Instead, it grounded me.
I stepped closer, close enough that the faint glow bleeding from the seams of the door brushed against my fingers. Pale, colorless light, like dawn filtered through fog. It didn't illuminate the passage. It illuminated me.
"This shouldn't exist," I murmured.
The words felt less like an observation and more like an accusation—directed at the world itself.
The handle was warm now.
I hesitated.
Every instinct I had screamed that this was a threshold—one that couldn't be crossed without consequence. Not danger. Something worse.
Change.
My reflection stared back at me from the metal surface, distorted and uncertain. For just a moment, I thought I saw someone else layered beneath it. Older. Sharper. Familiar in a way that made my chest ache.
Then the handle turned.
Not because I pulled it.
Because it allowed me to.
The hum swelled, filling my senses until the passage, the people, the city itself faded into background noise. Light spilled outward, brushing my skin like a living thing. Cold raced through my veins, followed by a strange warmth that settled deep in my core.
A door opened.
Not just in the wall—but somewhere inside me.
A whisper stirred in my mind, low and indistinct, like a memory surfacing from deep water. Words without language. Meaning without sound.
I saw fragments again—another sky, another ground beneath my feet, a weight of responsibility pressing down on my shoulders. I felt the certainty of someone who had known things. Done things.
Things I had no right to remember.
I gasped and stumbled forward.
The light flared.
And for the briefest moment before everything shattered into white, I understood one thing with perfect clarity:
This world was built on rules.
Rules that could be bent.
Rules that could be broken.
Rules that someone—something—had decided I was allowed to touch.
This world was not what it seemed.
And whatever truth lay beyond this door…
it had been waiting for me far longer than this life.