The sky was quiet.
Not cloudy. Not rainy. Just... still.
A stillness that felt strange, especially in a place known for its winds.
The Netherlands, mid-afternoon. Rows of buildings stood like polite chess pieces. Bicycles clicked across brick roads. Leaves swayed lazily with the occasional gust. And yet, the air felt wrong—it was too calm. Like a breath being held.
In a dim apartment, a man sat before a screen, oblivious to the change about to unravel his world. He sat alone in his bare, undecorated space, his leg draped over the edge of the couch. The silver laptop's glow cast a cold, sterile light across his face; a single line stared back at him:
Grade received: 6.5 / 10
"…Again," he muttered.
No surprise. He hadn't studied.
It was yet another 6.5. A floating, forgettable mark, that was just barely above average. The kind you got from effort without focus—or in his case, no effort at all.
He'd read the textbooks, sure. Skimmed them, mostly. But he didn't try—he never did. Do just enough not to fail, but nothing beyond it. That was just who he was.
He leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. It had a stain shaped vaguely like Australia. Or maybe a badly fried egg. Back in middle school, teachers used to say he had a promise—that he could become anything if he 'put enough effort'.
They never understood. He didn't want to be anything.Or maybe he just didn't have a reason to.
Tch. The memory itself annoyed him.
He flipped open a streaming tab—some fantasy anime episode he'd half-watched last week. A loud explosion played across the screen, followed by the protagonist shouting something about justice.
Click—Skip—next tab.
A war documentary now. A general describing battle logistics with surgical calm.
Click. Skip. News headlines. Dull. Next.
He yawned. "I should really find something better to watch."
Well, whatever. The stomach was calling. He gave up on finding something interesting and checked his fridge. The door opened with a soft creak, and a cool breath greeted him. But his delight was short-lived. A small bottle of water and an expired yogurt were all he could find inside.
"…Right," he sighed. "Time to shop."
Outside, the streets were quieter than usual. Somewhere far away, a tram bell chimed. But besides a young boy laughing as his mother corrected his handlebars, no one was really there. The air smelled faintly of rain that hadn't arrived yet.
The cool breeze that brushed across his face made him slow. It was crisp and clean, and it carried something in it—not scent, not sound, just… clarity.
A small smile touched his lips. The kind that didn't happen often.
There's a good wind today.
Most days, he could barely be bothered to move. But the wind was different. It never asked. It never waited. Cold, fleeting, directionless—yet alive. It was why he'd moved here in the first place.
That impersonal push the North Sea sent inland—the way it scraped haze off his thoughts—that was the one thing that could still make him feel.
He put his hands in his pockets and picked up his pace, his shoes tapping lightly on the sidewalk.
The supermarket wasn't far. It was a modest store—two aisles, one employee at the register, maybe a dozen or so customers on quiet days. Shin stepped inside. The automatic doors hissed shut behind him.
The wind stopped. Instantly.
He froze—not from surprise, but from the sense that something was missing. The air pressed against his skin—a heaviness not like heat, but like silence.
Why is it so warm? Groceries were supposed to be cool. But this… wasn't cold. It was absence—the kind he hated most.
Sigh. Forget it.
He grabbed a basket—milk, bread, something green enough to pretend balance. His fingers trailed condensation on glass bottles as he walked. Everything hummed with fluorescent certainty—the buzz of the freezers, the beep of scanners, the way the baby cried behind an arguing couple. Even the tourist that stared down a wall of cheeses as if selecting a new religion.
Normal.
Yet his skin crawled. He reached for the pasta—
and the air held its breath.
Somewhere, the baby's cry stopped mid-scream. Shin's hand stopped in the air.
Then—
Sound vanished.
Shelves bent like soft metal, collapsing toward a single point. The glass doors didn't shatter—they flowed. The aisle narrowed into a line and then flared outward in perfect silence, as if the world were a curtain cut clean down the middle.
The air screamed—once, without a voice—
—and the world was gone.
"Wha—"
Reality folded.
Shin stood—stunned—on a floating slab of stone. The supermarket had vanished. The people, the carts, the ceiling—gone. Above, a pale vault of sky. Below, a spiraling abyss of shifting currents. Walls twisted like braided stone, pulsing with a motion he could feel more than see, as if the place had been built by something that distrusted gravity.
A thin whistle echoed—not loud, but endless. To anyone else it might have been unbearable. To him, it sounded like relief—like the moment a door shuts and a house exhales.
He trembled—not from fear, but from recognition. Something deep within him—something he didn't have words for—stirred awake.
The pulse of it ran down his spine. His lips parted.
He didn't understand what he was feeling.But for the first time in his life, he felt something.
And deep within that silence, a whisper moved—sharp, electric, and alive.
"…Finally."