The anomalies didn't scream; they whispered. They started small, like a hairline fracture in a dam.
It began with a puddle. Just yesterday, after a light drizzle, Ogdi stepped into a shallow pool of water on the sidewalk. Instead of his own reflection set against the grey concrete, he saw himself walking inverted into a sky of brilliant, unfamiliar constellations—burning violets and sickly greens. He blinked, a cold dread seizing him, and the image vanished. But the memory lingered, a disquieting ripple in the fabric of his day.
He shook it off, a shiver running down his spine, but more followed.
At the park, he idly imagined a swing that could rise into the clouds. The next morning, one did. Children cheered until a sudden, unnatural gust of wind pulled the seat too high, snapping the chains of gravity. One boy vanished for three hours, only to return, wide-eyed and trembling, claiming he had seen sprawling cities made of glass on the dark side of the moon.
At night, the roots of the oak tree near his house bent into glyphs he didn't recognize. They seemed older, thicker, and infused with an ancient, silent malice that made his blood run cold.
Ogdi was terrified.
"You're bleeding into the Veil," Azad said. His voice was no longer just a thought; it was a dry rustle in the back of Ogdi's mind, cutting through the rising panic. "The fabric between worlds is responding too fast. You lack control."
Ogdi frowned, a knot tightening in his stomach. He sat on his bed, the familiar comfort of his techno-orchestral playlists and ambient sunlight feeling distant, unreal. He traced one of the new glyphs on his notepad with a trembling finger.
"So what happens if it tears?"
"You stop drawing," Azad's voice hardened, sending a jolt of alarm through Ogdi. "And the world starts drawing you."
...
In a dimly lit chamber that smelled of ozone and redacted history, a gaunt figure sat enthroned. His visage was a mask of grim authority, his eyes like two dark holes in a sheet of paper. He was known only as "The Director."
Before him, a subordinate trembled, clutching a tablet that displayed a heat map of reality distortions.
"The situation is dire, Director!" the subordinate stammered, his voice strained with barely contained terror. "The spikes are logarithmic. Sollyn Crescent is practically glowing."
A cold, almost childlike chuckle escaped the Director's lips. It was a sound that didn't belong in a human throat.
"Another one? Can they not be contained? Decades ago, one almost breached. Now this! There were once millennia between each appearance. This is... untidy."
"Sir, is he active? Should we initiate Protocol Black?"
A flicker of exasperation crossed the Director's face. "Silence. There is no need for such fervor yet. We do not break the ant farm just because one ant found a ladder."
His gaze drifted, lost in a chilling reverie.
"Dispatch two more agents from the Velm Accord. Observe the genesis of this incursion. If he bleeds too much... stitch the wound."
"YES SIR!" the subordinate barked.
...
University of Oravus – Twilight
Outside the university, the evening air had grown heavy, pressing against Ogdi's skin like wet wool.
He walked quickly, his head down, trying to ignore the way the streetlights seemed to bend toward him as he passed. He turned a corner and froze.
Three figures stood across the street.
They weren't merely standing; they were placed there, like statues dropped into a scene. Their bespoke three-piece suits seemed to drink the ambient light, casting no reflections in the polished storefront windows. On their collars, a stark emblem was stitched in silver thread: three ominous slashes and an inverted triangle.
"Velm Accord," Azad's voice hissed—a ragged whisper, the ghost of a forgotten nightmare. "Run. It has been too long since their last emergence."
Ogdi watched them from a guarded distance. One of the figures held a small, polished sphere. Inside the glass, swirling in a milky fog, was a distorted, screaming visage of Ogdi's face.
They looked up. Simultaneously.
"They hunt to preserve balance," Azad warned, his tone vibrating with a low, guttural hum. "Even if balance demands utter annihilation. Move, boy. Don't let them lock your signature."
Ogdi didn't wait. He ducked into a crowded metro station, his heart hammering against his ribs, weaving through the throngs of commuters until he felt the oppressive gaze lift.
...
1473 Sollyn Crescent
His home, tucked beneath the jagged ridgelines of South Farren, was supposed to be a sanctuary. It was a glass-paneled loft layered with safety and comfort. But this evening, the comfort didn't cling.
Ogdi sat cross-legged on his bed, hands buried in the lush folds of a silver-threaded blanket. He stared at the ceiling where a constellation projector flickered—but the stars it projected were wrong. They were moving.
"There have been too many incidents," he murmured to himself. "Too many leaks."
He closed his eyes and listed the errors: a pigeon that spoke in scrambled riddles; a streetlight that turned to watch him; the Velm Accord hunting him.
"I wished for no consequences," Ogdi whispered, frustration bubbling up. "My phrasing was perfect. 'Exempt from interference.' So why is the world breaking?"
"Your phrasing was flawless," Azad replied, his voice echoing in the room. "But you are not. You passed your trial with 73% Integrity, Ogdi. You are a cracked vessel pouring water. The water goes where you want, yes... but it also drips through the cracks."
Ogdi fell silent. The imperfection of his soul was the loophole in his godhood.
"I can't test things here. Not anymore," he said aloud, a resigned exhale. "Too many variables. Too much vulnerability. Nala texted me three times asking if I'm okay. If I stay, I put her in danger. I put Alone in danger."
He needed somewhere infinite. Somewhere empty.
A low chuckle escaped him—half daring, half delirious. "Why not space?"
Ogdi whispered slowly, savoring the shape of each word. The language of a wish was now second nature to him, but this time, he had to account for the cracks.
"Let me safely reach an uninhabited celestial location far from Earth, stable in time and space, where my presence causes no harm to existing lifeforms, and where I may freely experiment without disruption."
The room remained silent for a long moment.
Then—a shimmer. A shift.
His blanket folded inward like a portal, a silent vortex of silver threads and swirling light. Gravity inverted.
Ogdi vanished.
...
Virethuun (Coordinates Unknown)
Ogdi materialized onto a surface that crunched softly under his boots.
He looked down. It wasn't soil; it was a pearlescent glass, scattered with crushed emeralds that glowed with a faint, radioactive pulse.
He looked up. The sky was a breathtaking canvas of gradient violet, punctured by three distant suns looping in endless, silent orbits. No storms. No decay. Just an infinite canvas of possibility.
"Wow," Ogdi whistled, the sound a tiny, lonely echo in the vastness. "This place is... nicer than expected."
Azad appeared beside him. Not as a flame this time, but as a coalescing mist of thought.
"Do not build here," Azad warned, his tone stern. "You'd be drawing too close."
"Close to what?"
"Beings reside in this place on another plane of reality. They have no fixed form. No language. They respond to... disruption. And you, my boy, are a disruption."
Ogdi instinctively reached for a wish—a half-formed thought to see them out of sheer curiosity.
Don't.
A primal tremor of instinct stopped him cold. It was a biological rejection of the idea, a deep-seated 'DO NOT' stamped on his DNA.
"Good call," Azad said, his voice softening with a hint of satisfaction. "That was the smartest thing you've done all week. Keep a sharp mind. You may be powerful, but you're not ready to see everything. Not yet."
For the next six days, Ogdi remained on Virethuun.
He ran silent experiments within a folded region of space-time he had shaped like a rotating prism. He tested the limits of his 73% integrity.
He found the cost.
Every time he modified space around him, the opposite happened elsewhere. When he froze time in his pocket dimension to sleep for ten hours, he watched a flower outside the barrier age and rot in seconds.
"My wish protects me from the cost, so the Universe charges someone else." He realized with horror.
By day six, Ogdi felt dizzy with a terrifying blend of possibility and guilt.
He sat on a ridge of emerald glass, yawning. The heavy air of the alien planet pressed down on him.
"How long has it been?" he asked aloud, rubbing his eyes. "Feels like hours."
Then, a voice answered.
It was robotic. Amused. Cold as the void between stars.
"Almost a week."
Ogdi froze. His heart slammed against his ribs like a trapped bird.
The voice came from directly in front of him.
But there was nothing there. No heat signature. No distortion. Just air.
"Azad?" he whispered, a tremor in his voice. "Is that you?"
"Boy!" Azad's voice erupted in his mind, frantic and terrifyingly loud. "You sensed the voice's direction. I am not in any direction!"
A pause. Then the truth dropped like a guillotine.
"You attracted one of them. I warned you. RUN. Run now if you don't want your mind shattered."
Ogdi didn't hesitate. He didn't look. He leapt backward, triggering his personal fold—the pocket dimension he'd created to return home.
Time compressed. Space bent. Silence screamed.
Then blackness.
He collapsed inside the fold, hurtling through the void between places. His eyes were open, but the dark was watching him back, an abyss that wasn't empty but filled with a terrifying, silent intelligence.
He fell unconscious.
...
The Pocket Dimension
When he woke, he was drifting in the grey nothingness of his travel fold.
Azad was pacing. Not physically, but his presence moved back and forth like a caged tiger.
"Why did I run?" Ogdi asked groggily, sitting up. "I didn't see anything."
Azad chuckled. It was uncharacteristically loud—a dry, brittle sound that cracked.
"Because your instincts outran your curiosity. Good. You didn't see anything because it hadn't formed for you yet."
Azad stopped pacing. His tone dropped, the levity gone, replaced by the weight of eons.
"They aren't vile. They aren't kind. But they are drawn to entertainment—especially those who bend reality. They have no native form, so they borrow one from the observer's deepest fear."
Ogdi shivered. "So... since I didn't see it..."
"I saw it," Azad whispered. "For a fraction of a second, before we jumped. It looked at me."
Silence stretched, heavy and suffocating.
"The shape it chose... was the one I feared most. A face I haven't seen since the First Era."
"I overcame it, eventually," Azad lied—or perhaps he was trying to convince himself. "But you... you aren't ready. Not yet."
Ogdi stared upward through the transparency of the fold. The stars of the distant galaxy twitched. One flickered and was replaced by a star he didn't recognize, but felt like he used to know. A star that felt like a missing piece of himself, a secret from a life long forgotten.
"Let's go home," Ogdi whispered. "I think Earth missed us."