Chapter 1: Threads of Perception

Reality didn't crumble all at once. It broke in whispers, like frost spidering across a windowpane before shattering under its own weight.

At least, that's how it felt to Leo Valdez at 5:00 AM on a Thursday, though the wrongness had been building for weeks. Little things at first—textbooks rearranging themselves on his dorm shelf, his reflection lingering a moment too long in his laptop screen, the taste of static in the air before rain that never came.

He lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling where the dawnlight played with the shadows. Except, these weren't normal shadows. They moved wrong, bending in ways the early morning light shouldn't allow. Shapes formed and dissolved—too deliberate to be random, too fleeting to make sense. Like the day before, when he'd seen Katie Chen's shadow split in three during their Quantum Physics lecture, right before she stopped coming to class.

The air in his cramped dorm room was dense, as if it had forgotten how to move.

Leo's chest rose and fell with shallow, uneven breaths. He counted the beats, trying to steady himself. His rumpled sheets were twisted around his legs, damp with sweat. His body felt heavy, as though the weight of the unseen threads that hummed around him was pressing him into the mattress.

The LED display on his alarm clock glowed 5:01, blinking rhythmically, like a pulse. The same time it had shown yesterday morning, and the morning before. Leo had changed the batteries twice and even unplugged it from the wall.

(Clocks don't have heartbeats, he told himself. Except maybe they do, and maybe time itself was sick.)

Something shifted in the corner of his room.

The electrical outlet, cracked and yellowed from years of use, blinked at him. Yes, blinked—two sharp flashes of light, so quick he almost convinced himself he'd imagined it. Like the morse code he'd learned in his first-year engineering course. Dit-dit. A letter 'I'. Or maybe a warning.

Almost.

Leo sat up too fast, the blood rushing from his head. The room tilted for a moment before steadying itself. He clutched his blanket like it was the only thing keeping him tethered to the real world. Behind his mini-fridge, something chittered and scraped against the wall. Not mice. Never mice.

Outlets didn't blink. Posters didn't ripple like fabric. Shadows didn't coil at the edges of your vision, whispering in a language you couldn't name but somehow understood in your nightmares.

Except they did.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand, rattling against the empty Red Bull can from last night's desperate study session. The sound cut through the thick silence like a blade. The same message, every morning, no matter how many times he blocked the number or factory reset his phone.

Leo grabbed it, his fingers clumsy, and squinted at the screen.

A text. No number. No name.

You see them now, don't you? The threads? They saw you first.

The letters crawled across the screen like living things, rearranging themselves when he wasn't looking directly at them. Sometimes they spelled other messages in the corner of his eye. Names of the missing students. Dates that hadn't happened yet. Leo's breath hitched. He dropped the phone onto the bed and stared at it as though it might bite him.

The room was no longer still.

Thin, glowing strands shimmered into existence, stretching between the objects in his room. They connected his desk lamp to his laptop, to the humming mini-fridge, and looped back to the tangled charger cable by his bed. They pulsed faintly, as though alive, carrying energy—or something worse. The same threads he'd seen wrapped around Jessica Winters' wrist in Advanced Calculus yesterday, tugging gently every time she raised her hand.

The whispers came back, low and insistent, scratching at the edges of his thoughts. They spoke of hunger and patience, of a tapestry woven from stolen moments and borrowed breaths.

Leo pressed his palms against his temples, squeezing his eyes shut. "Not now," he muttered. "Not today. I have a midterm."

But the threads didn't care. They never did.

The bathroom mirror reflected a young man Leo barely recognized.

Fair skin, unruly black hair, hazel eyes rimmed with dark shadows from too many sleepless nights and caffeine-fueled study sessions. His mother's eyes, though hers had started changing last week during their video call, flickering between colors like a broken kaleidoscope. He reached up to rub at his face, but his hand froze halfway there.

The edges of his reflection rippled, faint distortions bending the light. It wasn't the glass. It wasn't him.

It was the threads.

They hovered faintly around the mirror, curling and twisting in lazy spirals, as though testing the boundaries of reality. One reached out toward his reflection's throat, and Leo felt phantom pressure against his windpipe.

He turned away before they could do more.

His phone buzzed again, the sound sharp and intrusive.

The threads are just the beginning. Watch for the Weaver in gray. He's been watching you since the storm.

The words carved themselves into his mind, jagged and permanent. The storm—three months ago, when the sky had turned the color of television static and birds fell from the clouds like rain. The same day the university had mysteriously lost power for exactly 19 minutes and 87 seconds—a timespan that shouldn't have been possible.

Leo didn't bother responding. He let the phone fall onto the countertop and gripped the edges of the sink until his knuckles turned white. The whispers in his head were louder now, overlapping voices that didn't belong to him. Some he recognized—Katie Chen's laugh, Professor Peterson's lecture from two weeks ago, Jessica Winters humming that song she always did when solving equations.

The communal kitchen was empty when Leo stepped in, which was unusual for a Thursday morning. Normally, at least a few early risers would be making coffee or scrambling eggs before their 8 AM classes. The silence felt wrong, oppressive.

He paused at the kitchen doorway, one hand resting lightly on the frame. The smell of pancakes drifted through the air, cutting through the noise in Leo's mind. But nobody was cooking.

His gaze drifted to the shadows around the room. They moved wrong, curling toward the center in thin tendrils before recoiling, as if afraid to touch something invisible. Or as if they'd already taken what they needed.

"Blueberries or chocolate chips?" a voice asked, light and casual.

Leo spun around, heart hammering. His roommate Javi stood by the stove, spatula in hand, smiling. Leo hadn't heard him enter. Hadn't seen him. But there he was, making pancakes as if nothing was wrong.

For a moment, Javi's face wasn't his face.

It flickered, replaced by a swirling void of shadows. Endless and deep, it pulled at Leo, whispering promises he couldn't understand. His stomach churned, bile rising in his throat. In that void, he saw faces—dozens of them, pressed against some invisible barrier like insects in amber.

He blinked, and it was just Javi again.

"Blueberries," Leo said, his voice barely above a whisper. Like yesterday. Like always.

Sliding into his usual seat, he stared at the syrup pooling on his plate. The amber liquid moved against gravity, forming patterns that looked almost like letters. Across the table, Javi was scrolling through his phone. His usually vibrant face was unusually pale. A thin thread wrapped around his wrist, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.

"Christ on a bicycle," Javi muttered, the words cutting the silence. "That's the third one this week."

Leo looked up sharply. "Third what?"

"Jessica Winters," Javi said, his voice heavy. "She's gone. Vanished last night. Campus security found her backpack in the computer lab, but she was just... gone."

Jessica Winters. The girl from Advanced Calculus who wore rainbow shoelaces and doodled galaxies in the margins of her notebook. Who'd looked right at Leo yesterday and mouthed something that might have been "help" or "run" before the threads pulled her attention back to her equations.

The fork slipped from Leo's fingers, clattering against the plate. In the sound, he heard screaming.

"They'll find her," Javi said, his tone too bright, too forced. A thread slithered from his sleeve, reaching toward Leo's plate.

"They won't," Leo said quietly. "Just like they won't find Katie, or Professor Peterson, or any of the others."

Javi turned toward him. His face tightened in concern, though his expression took too long to change, like a video buffering. The thread around his wrist pulsed faster.

"What do you mean, Leo?" Javi asked, his voice sharper than before. "What others?"

Leo opened his mouth, but no words came out. How could he explain it? The threads took her. They're taking all of them. They're taking you too, piece by piece, memory by memory.

"Nothing," he mumbled, pushing his plate away. "Never mind. I'm late for class."

The campus outside looked normal at first glance.

Dr. Henderson shuffled across the quad with her service dog, Meatball, trotting along behind her. Except Meatball had died last spring—Leo had attended the memorial the department had held. The campus shuttle roared past, Kenny behind the wheel like he'd been for as long as Leo could remember, even though Kenny's retirement party had been all over the university's social media months ago.

Everything seemed ordinary.

But the light bent wrong around the edges of things. The air was heavy, like a storm was brewing just beneath the surface. And the whispers—they were still there, faint but persistent, carried on a wind that didn't stir the leaves. They spoke of a hunger older than time, of spaces between spaces where lost things went to scream.

By the rusty chain-link fence that separated the university from the abandoned research facility, a man in a gray suit was waiting.

Leo stopped in his tracks.

The man's silver hair caught the sunlight, but instead of reflecting it, the light seemed to disappear, swallowed into the strands. His smile was too wide, his teeth too sharp, his presence too wrong. Where his shadow should have been, threads writhed and twisted like dying snakes.

The threads around him pulsed violently, jagged and erratic. They reached out toward Leo, slicing through the air like claws. Each one hummed with a different stolen voice, a different borrowed life.

When the man tilted his head, the world tilted with him. Reality creaked and groaned like ice in spring, threatening to break.

Leo blinked, and the man was gone.

But the threads remained, vibrating with a warning Leo didn't yet understand. Or maybe he did understand, but that knowledge lived in the parts of his mind he'd locked away, in memories that tasted like static and smelled like burning time.

Sometimes, Leo would think later, the worst part wasn't seeing the monsters.

The worst part was realizing they'd always been there, waiting for him to notice. And now that he had, they would never let him look away again.

In his pocket, his phone buzzed one last time:

Welcome to the unraveling, Leo Valdez. Try not to scream—it only encourages them.

And for the first time since entering university, Leo knew he wasn't just sleep-deprived or stressed about exams.

This was real.

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