Michael had never planned to show this one to anyone.
That, later, would be the strangest part.
The sketch began the way most of them did—late, quiet, and accidental. His apartment was lit by a single lamp angled toward the desk, the rest of the room left to shadow. Outside, the city hummed in that low, tired register it took on after midnight, traffic distant, sirens mercifully absent. The kind of quiet that didn't ask for attention, only patience.
Michael sat hunched slightly forward, shoulders loose, pencil balanced between his fingers. The paper was blank in the way blankness always was: not empty, just waiting.
He'd spent the evening flipping through an old book he'd found at a secondhand store—a battered translation of The Divine Comedy. He wasn't sure why he'd bought it. The pages smelled faintly of dust and time, and some of the margins were annotated in a careful, looping hand that wasn't his. He hadn't read much, just fragments. Lines that lingered longer than they should have.
Through me the way into the suffering city…
He shook the thought loose and turned back to the desk.
This sketch wasn't planned. There was no reference image, no concept. He hadn't even stretched his hands. The pencil touched the paper and moved before he could decide what to make.
At first, it was abstract—lines intersecting, pulling away from one another, converging again. Shapes that suggested structure without defining it. He thought, briefly, of architecture. Of impossible staircases and vast halls that felt older than function.
Then the lines deepened.
The pressure changed without him noticing. What had been light, exploratory strokes grew deliberate. Darker. He erased nothing. Every mark stayed.
Something emerged that made his breath slow.
Not a place exactly.
A presence.
He sketched a figure without outline—defined instead by absence. Space bent subtly around it, as if the paper itself were unsure how to behave there. He shaded carefully, not the figure, but the void around it, giving the impression that whatever stood at the center was too real to be contained by graphite.
The figure's posture was neither aggressive nor passive. Upright. Still. Watching.
Michael paused, pencil hovering.
"This is stupid," he murmured, though he didn't stop.
He added detail to the surrounding space—fractured planes, drifting fragments that looked like shattered mirrors or broken windows into other places. Some reflected stars. Others reflected nothing at all.
And behind the figure—
He hesitated.
There was a shape forming there that made his skin prickle. A blade, maybe. Or a crystal. Or something that remembered being a weapon.
He swallowed and kept going.
The feeling wasn't fear, not exactly. It was… pressure. Like standing too close to deep water. The awareness that if he leaned just a little further, something vast would notice.
His hand trembled once.
"Okay," he whispered. "Okay."
He didn't know why he was whispering.
The eyes came last.
He hadn't planned them, but when they appeared, they were inevitable. Dark, almost consuming the space of the face, and within them—rings. Not pupils. Rings of deep red light, muted, controlled, like embers banked beneath ash.
When he finally lifted the pencil, his fingers ached.
Michael leaned back slowly, heart thudding louder than the room.
The sketch stared back at him.
It wasn't finished. He knew that instinctively. It might never be. But it was complete enough to unsettle him in a way his other work hadn't.
He turned the page.
Then, after a moment, he turned it back.
He didn't sleep well that night.
Dreams came in fragments—vast halls, voices echoing just out of comprehension, a sense of being observed with neither kindness nor malice. When he woke, the image of the sketch was still there, burned behind his eyes.
He almost tore it out.
Instead, he packed it carefully between two sketchbooks and went to work.
Days passed.
The sketch stayed hidden. He worked on others—street scenes, figures on the subway, the curve of a woman's shoulder he'd seen once at a café and never again. Those felt normal. Comfortable. They were good, some even very good, but they didn't pull at him.
The other one did.
It was there when he ate. When he showered. When he tried to paint something else and found his hand drifting back to the same lines.
A week later, he brought it to a small local gallery.
Not on purpose.
The gallery was hosting an open submission night—nothing fancy. A chance for local artists to pin work to a corkboard, get feedback, maybe sell a piece or two. Michael had gone before, usually left with polite nods and vague encouragement. He told himself this was no different.
He almost left the sketchbook closed.
Then the curator—a woman in her forties with sharp eyes and charcoal-stained fingers—noticed the weight of it.
"You draw?" she asked.
"Yeah," Michael said. "A bit."
She smiled in a way that suggested she'd heard that exact understatement a thousand times. "Let's see."
He hesitated.
Just for a second.
Then he opened to the wrong page.
The room changed.
Not literally. No lights flickered. No one gasped. But conversations faltered, then thinned, then stopped altogether as people drifted closer without realizing why.
The curator didn't speak.
She leaned in.
Her breath caught.
"This," she said quietly, "is not a bit."
Michael felt heat crawl up his neck. "It's unfinished."
She shook her head slowly. "No. It's… unresolved. That's different."
Someone else murmured something. Another person took a photo.
Michael closed the sketchbook too late.
Within hours, the image was online.
Within days, it was everywhere he didn't expect it to be.
People argued about it. Critics dissected it. Forums bloomed with theories. Some called it haunting. Others called it pretentious. A few claimed it made them feel sick.
One comment stuck with him:
It feels like something you weren't supposed to see—but now that you have, you can't unsee it.
The gallery asked to display it.
Michael said yes.
That was the moment he stopped pretending art was something he did on the side.
Far away—elsewhere, in a place that did not exist inside time—the Halls of Eternity were very quiet.
Too quiet.
Varaek stood alone, staring at a projection that should not have been possible. Not here. Not ever.
A mortal sketch.
Graphite on paper.
And yet—
He felt it like a wound.
Not because it hurt.
Because it revealed.
"That was not yours to witness," he said softly, to no one.
The image showed him not as monster, not as tyrant, not even as antagonist.
It showed him as he was when no one was watching.
Balanced on the knife-edge between restraint and ruin.
Necessary.
Varaek's fingers curled slowly.
A Law stirred somewhere in the Halls, uneasy.
Another laughed, nervously.
Something had begun.
And for the first time in a very long existence, Varaek did not know how—or if—it should be stopped.
Michael stood in the gallery on opening night, hands shoved into his jacket pockets, watching strangers stand in front of his work.
They didn't know his name yet.
They would.
He felt it in his bones—not ambition, not hunger, but inevitability. A door had opened, and whether he liked it or not, he had stepped through.
He didn't know what he'd drawn.
He only knew one thing with absolute certainty:
This was his life now.
And somewhere, unseen, something vast had noticed him back.