The first time I saw the Veil, it was behind my reflection.
I was washing my face, water dripping from my chin, eyes burning from exhaustion. I looked up at the mirror, and there it was—hanging over my shoulder, rippling like silk caught in a slow-motion breeze. It wasn’t a shadow, nor a trick of the light. It was something else.
The fabric of it shimmered, pulsating in colors I had no name for—colors that didn’t belong in this world. Deep violets that whispered. Reds that felt wet. A green so intense I could taste it, metallic and electric on my tongue. The Veil undulated, folds shifting like it was breathing.
And then the eyes opened.
A thousand of them. Maybe more. Spiraling, blooming, unfurling along the fabric, each one distinct—some impossibly small, others gaping like black voids, layered over each other in fractal symmetry. They blinked, watching me with a hunger I could feel in my bones.
I stumbled back, knocking over the soap, my stomach turning inside out. My reflection did the same—but his face was wrong. His pupils dilated into bottomless wells, his mouth slightly parted like he was about to speak, but no sound came.
Then, he smiled.
Not a human smile. Not my smile. It stretched too far, the skin at the corners of his lips cracking, dark liquid seeping out like ink.
I turned and ran.
I don’t remember leaving the bathroom. I don’t remember how I got outside, but suddenly, I was in the street, heart hammering, lungs burning. The city around me looked wrong—stretched, twisted. Neon lights bled down the sides of buildings like melting wax, the road beneath me undulating as if breathing.
And the air—God, the air.
It hummed. A thick, vibrating pressure, like a cello string being plucked deep in my skull. It pressed against my skin, sank into my pores, made my thoughts ripple—as if my mind itself was now made of water.
The people were worse.
They didn’t walk—they glided, their limbs moving in delayed, trailing echoes. Their faces flickered between expressions, eyes shifting places, lips parting and closing as if struggling to find the right shape. They were human, but not.
One of them turned to look at me, and his face broke apart.
Not shattered—peeled. Like paper burning from the center outward, revealing a swirling, chaotic void beneath, filled with tiny, writhing hands. They reached out, clutching at the air, grasping for something unseen.
The Veil was everywhere now.
I saw it hanging from rooftops, coiling around streetlights, slithering through alleyways like liquid shadow. It pulsed in and out of existence, growing, spreading, consuming.
And the eyes.
Oh God, the eyes.
They blinked in sync, watching, waiting. Every time they closed, the city around me flickered—new angles, new impossibilities. A building where there hadn’t been one before. A door leading to somewhere that shouldn’t exist. A man in a black suit with no face, standing perfectly still in the middle of the road.
I tried to scream, but the sound came out backward.
I clamped a hand over my mouth, choking, my breath spiraling out in twisted, mirrored syllables. The faceless man tilted his head, as if amused.
Then, the Veil moved.
Not drifted—lunged.
It reached for me, the eyes widening, the fabric splitting open like a gaping mouth, and inside—I saw everything.
I saw all of time.
I saw my birth and my death collapsing into a single moment. I saw myself at five years old, staring at a bedroom ceiling that never existed. I saw a future where I stood in the same spot, older, my face sunken, my eyes black and hollow.
I saw the space between thoughts—the moments that don’t belong to us, where something else peers through, unnoticed.
I saw the Thing behind reality.
And then, I fell.
Fell through myself. Through time. Through endless, spiraling repetitions of the same moment, fractal and infinite. My skin melted, reformed, shattered into glass, rebuilt from ash. My bones stretched into pillars, into trees, into screaming stone.
I was nothing.
I was everything.
I was—
The Veil closed.
And suddenly, I was back.
Standing in my apartment. In the bathroom. The sink running. My reflection staring back.
But I knew.
I knew.
The Veil never left.
And the eyes?
They never blink.