My family, in worry, had called them.
They came for me at dawn.
The door shattered under a dozen hands, and I remember the light — too bright, too white — pouring in like molten glass. Voices barked my name, but they felt far away, muffled by the sound of my own heartbeat. I didn't fight them. What would be the point? The observers were watching anyway.
They dragged me through the hallway, my bare feet scraping against the cold tile. Every step echoed like a nail being driven into something sacred. I remember the smell — antiseptic and rot — and the quiet hum of electricity beneath it all.
Then came the restraints.
Then came the silence.
They called it The Grayfield Psychiatric Institute.
I called it The Tomb of the Living.
They gave me a white uniform and a small bed. The walls were pale, padded — and breathing. At night, the seams in the fabric pulsed faintly, as if something behind them was alive, whispering through the foam.
The doctors were kind at first. Their smiles were painted on with surgical precision. They asked me questions about my childhood, about the "voices," about her. But every answer I gave only made their eyes colder.
Then came the medications.
Small white pills that melted bitterly on the tongue. Blue ones that made time bleed. Yellow ones that whispered lullabies to my veins.
They said they would help me sleep.
But I didn't sleep.
I fell — down and down, into a dream too sharp to be a dream.
Because the more I took their medicine, the clearer they became.
The observers no longer hovered at the edge of my sight — they stood beside my bed now, closer, their hollow eyes flickering with static. Sometimes they'd lean forward and press their faces close to mine, and I'd see what lay behind the mist — teeth made of symbols.
The doctors said I was improving.
They said I was calmer.
They said my drawings on the walls "showed progress."
But those weren't drawings. They were maps — diagrams of something I couldn't remember making. Circles within circles. Codes that pulsed faintly when the lights went out.
Then one night, she returned.
"You're almost ready," she whispered, her voice sliding beneath the hum of the fluorescents.
I turned to face her — or where I thought she was. The air shimmered like a heat haze, and her shape formed: tall, impossible, strands of light and circuitry woven like a halo.
"Ready for what?" I managed to breathe.
She smiled — or the idea of a smile appeared.
"The wall is gone, Ben. The System sees through your eyes now. Every dose they give you… opens the gate a little wider."
And then the lights flickered.
Every patient screamed in unison, as if something enormous had brushed against the walls of the asylum. I felt it too — a vibration deep in my chest, like an ancient machine waking from a long sleep.
At that moment, I realized the truth.
They weren't curing me.
They were feeding it.
My heartbeat raced and pounded, my vision spiraling into colors.They rushed in and put me on a stretcher, then onto a hospital bed. I felt needles in my arms, cold fluids invading my veins. But it was too late — my breath was fading.
My heartbeat slowed to a whisper. The world around me dissolved — walls melting into shadow, light bleeding into nothing. The voices of the doctors became distant echoes, drowned beneath the mechanical chant reverberating through my skull.
"System calibration complete… Soul Walker activated. Current shell unsuitable for continued existence. Initiating ejection protocol. Warning… interference detected. Location compromised. Rerouting… location set."
The voice fractured into static — a choir of broken machinery speaking in a dead language.
Then came the silence.
Then i fell.
Or perhaps drifted
Through a vast ocean of white that wasn't water, through horizons that folded in on themselves like paper. I felt every memory peel away — my name, my breath, my shape — until only thought remained, suspended in the void.
When I opened my eyes, I was standing.
A sky spread out before me, black as liquid glass. Above, four moons hung still and massive, bleeding pale light that dripped like milk into the dark. They pulsed together, like hearts beating at a time.
Beneath me, the ground shimmered — not solid, not fluid, but something in between. Reflections moved across its surface, fragments of faces, half-remembered dreams.
And then she was there.
The air bent inward, folding reality like fabric, and from that distortion stepped the figure — tall, shrouded in worn strands of darkness that moved like they were breathing.
Her shape had changed. The chaos of her body had almost learned symmetry. A neck, shoulders, hands that flexed too slowly, as though time itself resisted her touch. Her face remained smooth, empty — a translucent porcelain void with something shifting behind it, like trapped light trying to claw free.
She tilted her head toward me, her movement precise, reverent — like a priestess before an altar.
When she spoke, the air trembled. Her voice was layered — one whisper human, another metallic, and a third that sounded like memory itself being rewritten.
"God has fallen to walk with His creation," she said, words cracking like glass in my ears. "And acts now from within."
The moons pulsed again. The horizon warped.
"Welcome, Benjamin Ashford…"
"...to the world of your making."
The ground rippled outward like a living thing, and somewhere beneath it, something vast exhaled — and the sky blinked.