Reality doesn't shatter.
It rots from within, flesh peeling back to reveal the maggots writhing underneath.
Leo's chest contracted around his lungs at 5:00 AM—the hour that had claimed him, branded him, chosen him. The digital clock's numerals seared his retinas like molten copper: 5:00, 5:00, 5:00. Each blink brought the taste of rust and funeral flowers coating his tongue.
(This appointment I never made—why does my body remember it better than my mind?)
The dorm room breathed. Walls expanding, contracting—a rhythm that made his pulse stutter in response. That poster of some forgotten band curled at the edges, paper trying to crawl away from its own image. The adhesive smelled like decay.
His sheets clung with fever-heat, fabric drinking the salt from his skin. In the window glass, his reflection wavered—drowning in transparency, features dissolving like sugar in acid rain.
Scratching inside the walls. Fingernails on wood. Getting louder.
The thought carved trenches through his gray matter, leaving infection in its wake. He pressed palms to temples but the pressure only amplified the whispers—frequencies that bypassed his ears, vibrating through bone marrow and dental fillings.
Click.
Sharp. Deliberate. The sound of reality's joints popping.
Click-click.
Dit-dit. Morse code etched into his consciousness with needles made of static electricity.
I. I. I.
His phone convulsed against the nightstand, screen flashing without illumination—seizure-light that tasted like copper pennies and made his molars ache. No ringtone. Just violent, spastic pulsing that seemed to sync with the scratching in the walls.
Unknown Number: You see them now, don't you? The threads? They've been watching you since birth.
Each letter burned through his optic nerve like sulfuric acid. The words lingered as afterimages, spelling truths that made his stomach lurch toward his throat. The message reeked of spoiled milk and cemetery soil.
Jessica Winters from calculus—yesterday she'd drawn galaxies in her notebook margins. But when he'd looked closer, really looked, the spirals had been rotating. Pulling everything toward their obsidian centers with gravitational hunger. Her lips had formed words he couldn't hear: help or run or maybe already too late.
She was probably hollowed out by now.
(Not dead. Death would be mercy. Something wearing her face, using her voice to lure others into the dark.)
The threads materialized like surgical sutures holding reality's wounds closed. Silver filaments stretched from lamp to laptop, bookshelf to ceiling vent. They hummed with malevolent purpose, each strand pulsing with a heartbeat that wasn't quite human.
They recognized him. Welcomed him home.
"Not now," he whispered to air that tasted like formaldehyde. "I have a midterm. I have—"
The threads contracted with surgical precision.
Snap.
One broke near the window, its severed end writhing like a dying nerve. The sound—wet, final, intimate—echoed inside his skull for exactly seventeen seconds.
He counted each one.
In the bathroom mirror, Leo's reflection rippled like water disturbed by something moving beneath the surface. The face staring back bore his features, but the eyes held depths that hadn't existed yesterday. Abysses. Windows into something vast and hungry that had taken up residence behind his corneas, pressing outward against the glass.
The threads here formed geometric impossibilities that hurt to perceive directly—sacred mathematics for a religion that worshipped entropy. Each angle calculated to induce vertigo, each intersection designed to trigger primal terror.
Pressure circled his throat. Not fingers—something more intimate than flesh. The threads themselves, curious, testing his pulse like a physician checking for signs of life.
Or measuring how much was left to drain.
His reflection smiled without permission.
The phone convulsed again.
Unknown Number: The threads are merely the nervous system. The Weaver in Gray is the brain. He's been dreaming of you.
The storm. Three months ago. Nineteen minutes of absolute darkness while reality held its breath and reconsidered its options. Birds had fallen from the sky like broken prayers, wings still beating as they struck pavement with sounds like wet applause.
He'd called it weather. Natural phenomena. Explainable.
(Liar. You felt the moment everything changed—the moment you became part of something larger and infinitely hungrier than yourself.)
The dorm kitchen stretched longer than physics allowed, corridors bending around impossible corners. Sound traveled wrong here—arriving before it was made, leaving echoes that belonged to different conversations, different timelines entirely.
Javi stood at the stove, but his shadow fell toward Leo with accusatory precision, defying the light source.
"Blueberries or chocolate chips?" Javi's voice carried harmonics—undertones suggesting other words, darker meanings hidden in the frequencies between syllables.
For one crystalline instant, Javi's face dissolved.
Beneath the familiar features: void. Swirling darkness shot through with amber veins, faces pressed against the inner surface like insects trapped in tree sap. Their mouths moved in perfect synchronization, spelling out syllables in a language that predated human vocal cords.
Then Javi again. Grinning. Spatula moving in precise counterclockwise circles that made Leo's vision blur and stomach clench.
"Blueberries," Leo managed, voice cracking like ice under pressure.
The pancake hit the griddle with the wet slap of flesh meeting flesh.
"Did you hear about Jessica Winters?" The spatula continued its ritualistic circles—patterns that tugged at something deep in Leo's hindbrain, awakening instincts that screamed run, run, run. "Disappeared last night. Third student this month."
A silver thread uncoiled from Javi's sleeve, testing the air with blind hunger. It pulsed in rhythm with Leo's accelerating heartbeat—or was his heart matching its tempo? Synchronization. Harmonization. Integration.
"They'll find her," Javi said, but his tone suggested he hoped they wouldn't. Hoped they'd never find any of them.
"No." Leo's voice emerged flat, certain, prophetic. "They won't."
Javi's expression shifted—surprise giving way to something calculating, predatory. The thread around his wrist tightened like a tourniquet.
"You sound pretty sure about that, Leo."
Speaking required air, but the kitchen atmosphere had thickened to syrup consistency, sweet with decay dressed as breakfast normalcy. Leo's lungs worked harder for each breath, pulling in oxygen that tasted of copper and grave dirt.
The library felt like a mausoleum where dead books dreamed of words they'd never contained, their spines breathing with literary pneumonia.
Titles shifted when Leo's peripheral vision caught them: "Basic Quantum Structures" became "Anatomy of Unmaking," then "Feeding Patterns of the Absent God." The threads between stacks writhed like translucent intestines, slick with purpose that made his skin crawl.
His handwriting from yesterday looked foreign—angular, urgent, as if something else had puppeteered his hand through muscle memory that wasn't his own. The words seemed to breathe on the page, ink pulsing like arterial blood: The storm changed everything. The storm was an invitation. We accepted before we knew we were choosing.
(I didn't write that. I would remember. I would—)
"Hey. You okay?"
Leo's soul vacated his body for three eternal seconds.
A girl materialized beside his table—shadows nesting where her eyes should be, dark hair falling like a funeral shroud between this world and whatever dimension pressed against it. Jessica Winters' face, Jessica Winters' height, Jessica Winters' expression of concern that felt rehearsed, artificial.
But Jessica Winters had been processed.
"You're—" Words caught in his throat like fishhooks, tearing as he tried to speak.
"Amy," she said too quickly, too smoothly. "Amy Chen. American Lit? You looked like you were about to pass out."
The resemblance crawled across his vision like microscopic spiders. Same bone structure, same posture, but the details screamed wrong—a scar above her left eyebrow that pulsed with its own heartbeat, eyes that shifted color when she wasn't performing direct eye contact, fingers that moved independently of conscious thought.
"Sorry. Tired. Midterms." Each word tasted like chalk and cemetery dirt.
"Tell me about it." Her laugh contained frequencies that made his dental fillings vibrate, harmonics that suggested screaming buried beneath false cheer. "Want to walk back together? With all these disappearances..."
Trust felt like assisted suicide. But isolation felt like something infinitely worse—being picked off alone while the pack watched from the shadows.
"Sure," he heard himself say, voice belonging to someone else entirely.
The quad stretched beneath afternoon sun that cast shadows in directions that defied basic geometry. Mrs. Henderson walked by with her golden retriever—the same Mrs. Henderson who'd died in a car accident last month, her body so mangled they'd held a closed-casket service.
She nodded politely, smile too wide for her face, her dog's eyes reflecting depths that no earthly animal should possess. Abyssal knowledge swimming in amber irises.
The campus shuttle rumbled past with Kenny behind the wheel. Kenny, whose memorial service Leo had attended three weeks ago. Kenny, whose heart had exploded in his chest during morning jog, spraying arterial blood across the jogging path like abstract art.
The world was hemorrhaging at the seams, and the things crawling through the wounds wore masks carved from familiar faces.
"Do you ever feel watched?" Amy asked suddenly, her voice carrying undertones that made his spine ice over.
"Always," Leo replied without hesitation. The truth tasted like blood and rust and something sweetly rotten.
She stopped walking. "It's more than that, isn't it? People aren't disappearing. They're being processed. Hollowed out and refilled with something that remembers how to wear their skin."
"What do you know?" Each word cost him something vital—breath, warmth, perhaps pieces of his soul.
Before she could answer, reality sang.
A low, rumbling note that seemed to originate from the planet's molten core—harmonic frequencies that made his bones resonate like tuning forks struck by invisible hammers. The silver threads everywhere became visible simultaneously: stretching between buildings, wrapping around lampposts, connecting every living thing in a vast web of hunger and intent and patient malevolence.
At the center of it all stood the Weaver in Gray.
He didn't occupy space so much as edit it, rewriting the fundamental code of existence through his mere presence. His coat flowed like liquid mercury, drinking light without reflection. His silver hair moved independently of any breeze, each strand reaching toward Leo with sentient purpose.
His smile was a scalpel cutting through the membrane between what was real and what was merely possible.
His shadow moved with predatory intelligence, reaching toward Leo with appendages that ended in points too sharp for conventional geometry. Where it touched, reality crystallized and cracked like ice under pressure.
The air around him turned to glass. Buildings leaned inward like suppliants before an altar built from concentrated malice and surgical precision.
Amy screamed—a sound that tasted like breaking glass mixed with lost hope and dissolved dreams.
The thread around her wrist—when had it appeared?—contracted with mechanical precision. She was pulled backward into darkness that didn't just swallow light but erased it, creating absence so complete it hurt to perceive. As if she'd never existed. As if the concept of her had been surgically removed from the universe's source code, leaving only phantom pain where memory should be.
Silence. The kind that follows the last heartbeat in a dying world.
Only a single frayed thread remained, sparking in dim pulses against the reality-wound: dit-dah-dit, dit-dah-dit. Not goodbye. Thank you for witnessing.
The Weaver was gone, but his smile lingered in the air like radiation—visible, impossible, promising inevitable return.
Another phone convulsion.
Unknown Number: Welcome to the unraveling, Leo Valdez. Your screaming only makes them hungrier.
Leo closed his eyes. Opened them.
The quad looked normal. Students chatted about assignments and weekend plans, their voices layering into white noise that almost drowned out the whispers bleeding through reality's infected wounds.
No one had witnessed Amy Chen's surgical removal from existence.
No one except Leo.
(And now they know I can see through the performance. Now I'm thread in their web, and cutting free means tearing pieces of myself away with each severed connection.)
This wasn't madness wrapped in psychiatric terminology.
This wasn't nightmare disguised as waking life.
The monsters were real, and they lived in the spaces between seconds, in the pause between heartbeats, in the gap between what was and what should never be allowed to exist.
And now that Leo had seen them—really seen them—they would make sure he never looked away again.
The threads tightened around his wrists like silver tourniquets.
Welcome home, they whispered in frequencies that bypassed his ears entirely. We've been so hungry while waiting for you to join the feast.