Lucian sat alone at a desk in the corner of the library, the quiet hum of computers and the occasional student chatter the only signs of life around him. The glow of the computer monitor reflected softly in his tired eyes as he stared at the blinking cursor on the screen. His half-written essay felt irrelevant, his life was growing boring.
He rubbed his temples, trying to focus, but the words refused to come. Something about this evening felt… off. Not wrong exactly, just unsettling. The kind of subtle dread you couldn't place—a pressure in the air you only noticed when everything else fell quiet.
Almost Too quiet.
No whispers from the other study tables where some students where. No printer noises. Not even footsteps on the tile. Just… silence.
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The air felt thick. Warmer than it should've been. His hoodie sticked to his back with sweat, but he hadn't noticed when he started sweating. His throat felt tight like wires where wrapped around his neck. And then the sound came.
Not a noise, exactly—more like a low, ambient hum. It came from somewhere behind his ears, then crawled along the base of his neck and into his chest. At first, he thought it was an air vent, but there was no breeze. No shift. Just that steady, oppressive vibration, like a tuning fork pressed inside his skull.
He looked up.
The fluorescent lights overhead flickered once… then again.
The monitor glitched—its text splitting, stuttering across the screen.
His heart skipped.
Then, his body began to burn.
First in his core. Then his chest. Then everywhere.
It wasn't fire. It was worse. Like molten heat under his skin. Like his blood was boiling.
Lucian stood up abruptly, his chair scraping loudly across the floor—but no one looked. There was no one to look at. The entire library was empty.
"Where did everything go, there were some
People here?"
He stumbled back a step. His pulse was racing now, thundering in his ears. His vision blurred, then sharpened too fast.
Then the pressure hit.
It slammed into his skull like he'd been beaten with a hammer, tightening second by second. His knees buckled. He gripped the edge of the desk to steady himself, but his fingers felt like they slipped through it.
the desk faded out of reality like it had never existed.
The world bent inward.
The light scattered.
And then—nothing but silence.
Lucian wasn't falling, He was being pulled.
There was no wind. No light. No sense of direction. Only the terrible pressure—pressing in on him from all sides, collapsing his body into a single, suffocating point.
Then—a break.
Something cracked around him, like thin glass being stepped on.
And in that breathless pause, that absolute stillness—
He felt it.
Something else. Watching.
His eyes stung as he tried to focus. The air was thick with mist, featureless and dim.
And then he saw it.
Just for a moment. A figure—standing still in the fog.
Shrouded by only blackness, he couldn't make out a face or body, unmoving. Not distant, not close. Just there, as if it had always been.
No words. Not even a slight movement . Just a eerie presence.
Lucian's chest clenched. His breath caught.
And in that moment, he felt it a pulse behind the mist.
Not a sound. Not a heartbeat. Almost like a frequency.
It throbbed once—and then the world surged forward again.
His body was ripped downward, Darkness swalloing everything.
Lucian gasped.
The air rushed into his lungs, dry and cold like he'd never breathed before. His cheek was pressed against something jagged and damp. Stone? His fingers twitched uselessly at his sides, and pain — real, unforgiving pain — bloomed though out his entire body.
He opened his eyes.
Darkness.
not pitch-black. There was a faint glow, like a dying ember or distant bioluminescence. Something on the walls.
He tried to move.
His muscles screamed in his protest.
Everything ached — his legs, his shoulders, even his teeth. It was like he'd been dropped from a plane and slammed into the earth tearing into pieces, then poorly stitched back together. His breath came in uneven pulls, panic barely held behind clenched teeth.
"Where… am I?"
He sat up with effort, dragging himself against the wall behind him. His back touched something rough and wet. The surface was uneven, cold, slick like mossed-over concrete.
His eyes adjusted slowly.
He was in what looked to be a cave.
The walls curved inward, natural and jagged. They stretched high into the darkness above, then folded into deeper shadow. The air smelled stale — ancient. Like stone that hadn't seen sunlight in centuries.
Water dripped somewhere in the distance, rhythmic and slow. Every sound echoed faintly.
He stared at the wall for a long time before daring to speak aloud.
"Hello?" His voice cracked, fragile in the open space.
It vanished into silence.
He swallowed hard, his throat dry and raw. "Anyone there?"
Still nothing.
Lucian let his head fall back and exhaled slowly. A quiet, bitter laugh escaped his lips.
"Nope. Of course not. Just me and… fucking stone, that's just great."
The cave pulsed faintly with greenish light. Moss? Fungi? He crawled toward the nearest wall and ran his fingers over it. The growth was soft, slightly warm and wet — glowing with an eerie, ambient shimmer. It didn't help much. The glow was too weak to see more than a few feet ahead.
"Okay. Focus. Think."
"You're not dead. That's good."
"Probably."
"I'm in a cave. Somehow."
"How the hell did I get here?"
The last thing he remembered was the library at his college doing some school work he hated.
Then… pain. Heat. Crushing pressure. That figure in the fog.
His chest tightened again. Not from panic — from memory.
There'd been something there.
A presence.
Not a hallucination. Not a dream.
It felt real. Something had been watching him before his world disappeared.
He glanced around, suddenly hyper-aware of the silence. The cave didn't feel entirely empty. It just felt too quiet.
Lucian shuddered. He pushed himself to his feet, legs shaky, vision wobbling at the edges. The floor beneath him was slick in places, smooth in others. Jagged rocks jutted out here and there, just waiting for someone to trip and split their skull.
He moved cautiously.
His thoughts spun.
"Is this a kidnapping? Some VR prank? No — no headset. No sensors. No plugs. This… this feels too real. This pain is real."
He touched the side of his head and winced. His skin was clammy, scraped. The cold cave air settled deep in his body.
"Stay calm," he muttered to himself. "Just breathe. You've seen worse stuff in shows. Just do what they do."
He laughed nervously. It didn't sound convincing.
He began pacing — or more accurately, stumbling — deeper into the cave. Every step echoed, multiplied by the emptiness. The faint light of the moss followed him, dotting the walls in uneven patches.
Time passed strangely.
Minutes? Hours?
There was no way to tell.
Eventually, he stopped and leaned against a wall, breathing hard. The physical exhaustion was catching up. His body had limits. And wherever this was, he didn't have food. Or water. Or light. Or signal.
He pulled out his phone instinctively.
Dead.
Not just dead — the screen wouldn't even light up.
He clenched it in his fist, then dropped it to the floor angrily .
"Guess that confirms it. Wherever I am… it's not Earth….fuck"
He slept eventually.
Isolated. Cold. Alone.
And then—he dreamed.
The dark around him rippled like water. They throbbed across his skin, into his chest, up his spine — like he'd fallen into an ocean made of sounds.
In the distance, something pulsed.
A circle of light suspended in nothing — not glowing, but resonating. Lines of pressure danced outward like ripples across water. He could feel it vibrating against his head.
Shapes appeared — too abstract to be faces, too fluid to be stable. A rhythm formed. Slow.
"What the hell is this shit"
And then something that felt like it was whispering. Not in words. Just a presence.
It stood at the edge of the plane — unseen, unformed, but listening. Watching.
Lucian didn't run.
He simply stared back into the dark.
The pulse stopped.
He awoke — back in the cave — drenched in sweat, clutching his chest.
That night, the silence felt heavier.
But Lucian didn't sleep again.
He sat by the moss, tracing circles into the dirt with a stone, and whispered to himself just to fill the air.
Because the worst part wasn't being alone. It was wondering if he actually wasn't.