“…BLINKED.”
The voice didn’t enter through my ears; it scraped against the inside of my skull like cold iron.
I stumbled backward, my heart hammering a frantic, violent rhythm against my ribs. I tripped over the smashed remains of my alarm clock and collapsed onto the hardwood floor. From the floorboards, I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the window.
The eye was incomprehensibly massive. It took up the entire frame of my third-story apartment window—and beyond. Where the morning sky and the brick wall of the adjacent building should have been, there was only a milky, translucent cornea laced with pulsing, blue-black veins the size of redwood trees. The iris was a swirling storm of ash and pale gold, and the pupil… the pupil was a bottomless void that seemed to pull the very gravity out of my living room.
Suddenly, twenty years of my parents’ erratic, paranoid behavior crystallized into sheer, blinding terror.
The pots of pitch-black coffee brewing at 2:00 AM. The frantic roll calls over the landline at 3:05 AM. The time my father burned his own hand on the stove just to stay lucid through a bout of the flu. I had spent my entire adolescence convinced I was raised by a cult of sleep-deprived lunatics. I moved out to escape their madness. I broke the rule to prove my freedom.
But it wasn’t madness. It was a quarantine.
“Generation after generation, your bloodline kept the vigil,” the voice echoed, vibrating through my teeth. “An unbroken chain of open eyes. As long as the sentinels watched the dark, the door remained locked.”
The glass of my window began to frost over, webbed cracks spidering outward from the center where the pressure of the cosmic entity pressed against the physical boundaries of my world. The temperature in the apartment plummeted, freezing the sweat on my forehead.
I scrambled on my hands and knees toward my phone, desperate to call my parents, to beg for forgiveness, to ask how to fix it. I grabbed the device. The screen was dead, but not black—it was a mirrored reflection of the pale gold iris outside.
“You rested, little sentinel,” the voice purred, sounding almost affectionate, a predator admiring a trapped prey. “You embraced the dark. And in your dreaming, the tether snapped. We are no longer on the outside looking in.”
The massive eye slowly began to pull back. As it retreated, the true horror of my mistake revealed itself. The sky was not the sky anymore. It was a sprawling, fleshy canopy of violet bruised clouds and jagged, floating monoliths. The city below my window was gone, replaced by a sprawling ocean of gray dust and writhing shadows. I wasn’t in my world anymore. By sleeping past the hour of the veil, I hadn’t just doomed myself—I had pulled my entire apartment into Its domain.
I stood up slowly, my legs trembling as the silence of a dead, alien world settled around me. There were no alarms left to ring. No ice water to shock me awake.
Because this wasn’t a nightmare. And I was never, ever going to sleep again.
