The strangest thing about the attention was how polite it was.
Michael had expected noise—outrage, obsession, backlash, something sharp and immediate. Instead, what followed the sketch's release was softer, almost reverent. Like people approaching a chapel without knowing why their voices lowered.
The image spread slowly at first. A repost here. A cropped screenshot there. Someone used it as a phone background. Another printed it out and taped it to a wall beside their bed.
No one could explain why.
They tried.
Articles began to appear—small ones at first, buried in arts sections and niche blogs. Titles that danced around the thing without touching it.
The Drawing That Refuses Interpretation
An Image That Feels Like Memory
Why This Sketch Feels Familiar, Even If You've Never Seen It Before
Michael read them late at night, sitting cross-legged on his couch with his laptop balanced on his knees. He wasn't searching for himself exactly—he just kept stumbling into it. Links sent by friends he barely talked to anymore. Mentions in forums he didn't belong to. Comments written by strangers who spoke about the sketch as if it had chosen them.
One woman wrote:
"I don't know what I'm looking at. I just know I don't want to look away."
A man claimed he'd dreamed of it before he ever saw it online.
Someone else said it made them feel calm. Another said it made them feel watched. A therapist wrote a thread about how patients had independently brought it up in sessions, describing it with eerily similar language.
Michael closed the laptop and rubbed his eyes.
"I just drew it," he said to the empty room.
But even to himself, the words sounded thin.
The gallery became busier.
Not packed. Not chaotic. Just… steady.
People came alone more often than in groups. They stood in front of the sketch longer than was socially comfortable, then stepped back like they'd realized they were holding their breath.
Michael started going during off-hours, standing quietly at the edge of the room. He didn't announce himself. He liked watching what happened when no one thought the artist was there.
A teenager stared at it for nearly twenty minutes, then whispered, "I almost remember."
An older man laughed softly and shook his head. "That's not how it's supposed to look," he said—not angrily, just confused.
A woman reached out, stopped herself inches from the glass, and wiped at her eyes without knowing why.
No one asked what it meant.
They asked him questions instead.
"Where did you learn to draw like this?"
"Did you plan it?"
"What were you thinking about when you made it?"
Michael always answered honestly.
"I don't know."
"It just happened."
"I wasn't thinking about anything."
Those answers satisfied them more than explanations would have.
Opportunities followed, but they didn't feel like opportunities. They felt like invitations.
A small arts magazine requested an interview. The interviewer—a man with tired eyes and ink-stained fingers—spent most of the time asking Michael about his process, his habits, the way he sketched late at night.
"Do you believe art reveals something true?" the man asked near the end.
Michael thought of the figure in the sketch. Of the eyes.
"I think," he said slowly, "sometimes it shows you where the truth would be. If you were ready for it."
The quote made it into the headline.
More people came.
A curator from out of state emailed him—not aggressively, not with promises of stardom. Just a simple message:
There's something patient about your work. I'd like to talk.
Michael stared at the email for a long time before replying.
"Yes," he typed.
At night, the dreams returned.
They weren't frightening. Not really. Just… expansive. Michael dreamed of standing in vast spaces that felt unfinished, like ideas still forming. Of voices speaking in tones he couldn't quite understand, not because they were complex, but because they weren't meant for him.
Yet.
Sometimes he woke with the sensation that someone had been watching him—not intrusively, not cruelly. With curiosity.
Once, half-asleep, he murmured, "I didn't mean to see you."
He had no idea who he was talking to.
Far beyond the limits of Michael's awareness, the Halls of Eternity were no longer quiet.
The sketch had become a point of discussion—not openly, not yet, but in glances and pauses, in Laws lingering longer than necessary at the edges of perception.
Nyxara felt it first.
"Something is decaying out of order," she said softly, fingers tightening around her staff. "Or being born too soon."
Kaelith watched the ripple spread outward through causality, his expression unreadable. "A consequence without a clear cause," he said. "That should not be possible."
Seraphel laughed and scrolled through a mortal device that should not have existed there. "Relax. Humans do weird things all the time. Maybe this one just drew something interesting."
Varaek said nothing.
He stood apart, gaze fixed on the echo of the image as it existed here—not as a drawing, but as a conceptual wound. A place where the veil between perception and Law had thinned just enough to let something bleed through.
"It was never meant to be shared," Aurelion said at last, time flickering through his features. "But now that it has been…"
Varaek's voice, when it came, was quiet.
"He saw me," he said. "Not as myth. Not as monster. As I am."
"That makes him dangerous," Kaelith replied.
Varaek shook his head once.
"No," he said. "It makes him inevitable."
Michael didn't know any of this.
He only knew that, one morning, he woke up and realized he no longer dreaded Mondays.
That his sketchbooks were no longer full of distractions, but beginnings.
That when he sat down to draw now, his hand felt steadier—like something had aligned, just slightly, inside him.
He bought better paper. Better pencils. A larger desk.
He told himself this was still just art.
But sometimes, when the pencil moved on its own, when lines appeared that felt closer than sight, he wondered—briefly, quietly—
What else might be looking back.
And why, despite everything, the thought didn't scare him at all