For the next several days, Elias moved through life with the uneasy grace of someone walking across thin ice. Nothing outwardly strange occurred—no whispers behind doors, no flickering lights, no pages turning on their own. Yet something in him had shifted, and every breath he took seemed to echo against an invisible chamber he did not remember entering.
He tried to return to his routine: work, reading, wandering between cafés and libraries. But the world no longer met him the way it used to. Conversations sounded slightly delayed, as if the words reached him from behind a veil. When people spoke to him, he found himself searching their eyes for… something. He did not know what.
It was on the fourth night, just past midnight, that the silence began behaving strangely.
Elias had left his window open—a habit he adopted to chase away the heaviness lingering in his room. The wind was gentle, brushing the curtains like a whispering tide. He sat at his desk, staring at the closed book. He hadn't opened it again. He didn't need to. The memory of that faint, breathing glow clung to him like the afterimage of a bright light.
In an attempt to distract himself, he opened a random novel. But he couldn't get past the first page. His eyes kept drifting toward the old book, as though something inside it waited… patiently.
He stood up, exhaled, and walked to the window.
The street outside was unusually empty. Even the stray cat that haunted the alley was nowhere to be seen. A hollow calm stretched across the road, too still to be natural. Elias leaned forward, searching for movement—anything that affirmed the world was still functioning.
Then it struck him.
There was no sound.
Not from the street.
Not from the wind.
Not from the rustling curtains.
The world had muted itself again.
His heartbeat quickened. He pressed his palm against the window frame, trying to ground himself, but the silence grew heavier, denser—like a presence rather than an absence. He stepped back.
And then the room breathed.
A slow, deliberate exhale, like someone standing right behind him.
Elias spun around—nothing.
But the sound had been real. He knew it. It had weight, shape, intention.
The book was no longer on the desk.
It was on the floor.
Lying open.
A cold pulse crawled down his spine.
He approached it carefully, the way one might approach something alive. The page it had opened to was blank—no symbols, no ink, no burn-like writing. Just the pale emptiness of untouched paper.
But the blankness felt wrong.
He knelt and reached toward the page. His fingers hovered just above it… and the surface rippled. The paper moved like a thin layer of water disturbed by a fingertip.
Elias recoiled, his breath caught in his throat.
The page rippled again—this time on its own—and a faint imprint began appearing on the surface. Not letters. Not words.
Shapes.
Circular. Interlocking. Shifting slightly, like a constellation adjusting itself by a fraction of a degree. They faintly glowed, almost imperceptible, as if awakening from a long slumber.
A distant, rhythmic thrum filled Elias's mind—not in his ears, but inside his skull. He pressed a hand to his temple, trying to steady himself. The glow pulsed once… twice… and then froze, leaving behind a pattern that felt ancient.
He didn't understand it.
He understood it.
Both feelings struck him at once.
His breathing grew uneven. He closed the book with a shaky hand and stood up, but the moment he did, the pattern burned itself into his memory—not visually, but like a sensation etched into the back of his thoughts.
That was when he felt it.
Something inside him observing him from within.
A subtle awareness, like a stranger stepping quietly into a room inside his mind and gently closing the door behind them.
He staggered backward, gripping the edge of his desk.
Whatever had recognized him that night, whatever had reached out through the pages—
—it was not finished.
Elias swallowed hard and forced himself to breathe. His room felt smaller than ever, the shadows thicker, the silence now aware of him in a way silence should never be.
And somewhere deep in his chest, beneath fear, beneath confusion, beneath the thin thread of reason still holding him together…
…something else stirred.
A curiosity not entirely his own.
A whisper of hunger.
A beginning.