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—pencils rolling uphill on his desk, his reflection lingering a moment too long in the windows, 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 class, right before she stopped coming to school.
The air in his dorm room was dense, as if it had forgotten how to move. His 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 alarm clock glowed 5:01 AM. It pulsed—soft, rhythmic. Like a heartbeat.
Except it had read the same time yesterday. And the day before that.
Leo swallowed hard, pushing himself up onto his elbows. He'd changed the batteries twice. Unplugged it from the wall. Time wasn't just stuck. It was watching him.
(Clocks don't have heartbeats, he told himself. Except maybe they do, and maybe time itself was sick.)
Something flickered in the corner.
His eyes snapped toward the electrical outlet near his desk. Cracked, yellowed plastic. Harmless.
Then it blinked.
A sharp flash of light. Twice. Dit-dit.
Morse code. The letter I.
Leo's stomach twisted.
A soft chittering noise rasped behind the mini-fridge.
Not mice. Never mice.
His phone buzzed.
The vibration rattled against an empty Red Bull can, cutting through the silence like a blade.
Leo hesitated before grabbing it. No number. No name. Just a message crawling across the screen:
You see them now, don't you? The threads? They saw you first.
The letters moved when he wasn't looking. Reshaping themselves. A name flickered in his peripheral vision—Jessica Winters.
Leo's breath hitched.
Jessica. She sat beside him in Advanced Calculus, always doodling galaxies in the margins of her notebook. Yesterday, she'd looked at him with something desperate in her eyes, lips moving silently—help or run—before she turned away.
She hadn't come to class today.
Thin glowing strands stretched between objects in his room—linking his desk lamp to his laptop, to his fridge, looping back to the tangled charger cable.
And he'd seen them before. Wrapped around Jessica's wrist. Tugging. Pulling.
The whispers started again. Low, insistent. Words he couldn't understand but somehow felt deep in his bones.
Hunger. Patience. A tapestry woven from stolen moments and borrowed breaths.
Leo clenched his fists. "Not now," he muttered. "Not today. I have a midterm."
The threads didn't care.
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 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 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.
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 Chen, or Professor Peterson, or Adam Park, 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."
In the Library.
The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, their hum blending with the rhythmic scratching of his pen against paper. Equations sprawled across his notebook in uneven scrawls, half-finished thoughts interrupted by a pressure building behind his eyes. He rubbed his temples, trying to focus, but the sensation only intensified.
Then he saw it.
A silver thread, barely visible, glimmering in the dim light. It stretched from the corner of his vision, winding through the air like a whisper of something unseen. His breath hitched.
He blinked. It didn't disappear.
Leo turned his head slowly, following the thread's path as it wove between bookshelves, vanishing into the depths of the library. His pulse quickened. The air around him felt charged, humming with something just beyond comprehension.
"Hey, you good?"
The voice jolted him back.
Jessica Winters stood beside his table, her expression a mix of concern and amusement. Strands of her dark hair fell across her face as she tilted her head, studying him.
Leo hesitated. He could still see the thread, even with Jessica standing right in front of it.
"Yeah," he lied, closing his notebook. "Just—tired."
Jessica didn't look convinced. "You've been staring into space for like, five minutes. Thought you were about to ascend or something."
Leo forced a chuckle, but his gaze flickered back toward the thread. It pulsed—just once, like a heartbeat.
He swallowed hard.
"You heading back to the dorms soon?" Jessica asked, shifting her bag over her shoulder.
Leo nodded. "Yeah, in a bit."
She hesitated. "Walk with me?"
Something in her voice made him pause. There was an edge to it, a quiet urgency beneath her usual confidence. He glanced at her properly then—really looked.
Shadows clung to the hollows beneath her eyes. Her shoulders were stiff, tense in a way that had nothing to do with carrying a backpack full of textbooks.
Jessica Winters, the girl who never looked over her shoulder, was afraid.
Leo stood, ignoring the way the thread trembled as he moved.
Westlake University was different at night. The buildings, familiar and mundane in the daylight, loomed like silent sentinels under the glow of the streetlamps. Shadows stretched too long across the pavement. The wind carried a whisper that wasn't quite there.
The campus outside looked normal at first glance. Mrs. Henderson shuffled across the quad with her service dog, Meatball, trotting along behind her. Except Meatball had died last spring—Leo had helped bury him in the backyard. 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 social media months ago.
Jessica walked beside him in silence, her fingers gripping the strap of her bag with white-knuckled tension.
"You gonna tell me what's up?" Leo finally asked.
She exhaled sharply. "It's stupid."
"Try me."
Jessica chewed on her lip, gaze flicking toward the darkened windows of the dorms ahead. "Have you ever felt like... you're being watched?"
Leo's skin prickled. His mind immediately went to the silver thread.
"All the time," he admitted.
Jessica slowed her pace. "It's more than that," she said, her voice dropping lower. "I—I think something's wrong, Leo. With this campus. With the people who've gone missing."
The words hit him like ice water.
Jessica glanced around before continuing. "Katie Chen. Professor Peterson. Adam Park. They didn't just disappear. They were taken."
Leo's pulse pounded in his ears. "Taken by what?"
Jessica opened her mouth—
And the world lurched.
A sound, low and resonant, vibrated through the air. Not quite a growl, not quite a whisper.
The silver thread in Leo's vision snapped taut, pulling toward the alley between the science building and the student center.
Jessica gasped, stumbling back. "Do you see that?" she whispered.
Leo turned.
The alley was dark, impossibly so. A void where the streetlights refused to touch. And from within that darkness, something moved.
Not footsteps. Not the shuffle of an animal.
Something unfolding.
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 barely registered the sharp intake of Jessica's breath before she screamed.
The thread—his thread—wrapped around her wrist like a noose.
Leo lunged forward, but it was too late.
Jessica was pulled into the dark.
The last thing he saw was her wide, terrified eyes—her mouth forming words that didn't reach his ears.
And then she was gone.
The alley was empty. Silent.
Only the thread remained, frayed at the edges where it had snapped.
Leo stood there, chest heaving, the world spinning beneath him.
And then, slowly—
—another thread appeared.
Reaching for him.
Leo blinked, and the man in gray 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, Leo knew he wasn't dreaming.
This was real.