The night had teeth, and I walked willingly into its mouth.
The fog was not weather; it was a presence, a memory exhaled by the world and forgotten. It curled around my ankles like fingers reaching from beneath a bed—cold, damp, and patient. It didn’t just obscure the path, it erased the view from sight. Trees lost their edges, stones lost their weight, and the horizon simply ceased to exist. I was adrift in a sea of pale nothing, the air thick with moisture and a weight I could not name.
Every breath scraped like silk across a blade. The chill didn’t just kiss the skin; it crawled beneath it, settling into the bone and the blood. It pooled behind my eyes and sank into my spine, filling the hollows of me I thought long sealed.
My feet moved because they had to. There was no wind, no birds, no sense of time—only the soft, wet sound of my footsteps, like heartbeats on a cathedral floor, slow and echoing. The fog did not clear; it parted only when it chose to, revealing what it was ready for me to see.
The town emerged like a carcass mistaken for shelter. Buildings leaned into each other like mourners too tired to stand alone. Walls peeled, doors gaped, and windows stared without blinking. Every inch of it felt watched, and worse—remembered. There was a violence in the stillness, an old stain that no longer bled but would never wash out. Above, the sky was starless, a sheet of black silk without seam or stitch. The fog kissed the cobblestones, leaving them slick and glassy, as if the streets themselves were trying to forget.
Crows lingered in the eaves, silent and heavy. Their wings beat in slow, deliberate gestures, as if the act of mourning took physical effort.
I passed through the marketplace, where stalls rotted into the mud and tattered cloth hung from wooden bones. The air smelled of mould, iron, and paper left to drown. Every corner held the memory of voices now missing—laughter, bargaining, shouting—all of it devoured by the quiet.
At the end of the square, the fog thinned one last time.
The church loomed at the cliff’s edge like a forgotten god, hunched and rotting. The stone was blackened by rain and age, and the ivy was so thick it had become muscle. The steeple cracked like a snapped neck; the doors sagged, heavy with moisture, too tired even to groan.
I stepped inside, and the air changed immediately. It grew thicker, colder, and more aware. Silence fell with a physical weight—not an absence of sound, but a suppression of it, like something nearby was holding its breath. The scent was overwhelming: old wood and melted wax, mildew and bone-dry parchment. It filled my lungs and stayed there, clinging.
The sanctuary stretched ahead, long and hollow. The pews were collapsed, snapped like ribs. The floor wept damp, and the ceiling had caved in jagged gaps that let the night in—but the night didn’t illuminate, it punctured. Blades of light fell sharp through the dark, cutting slits into the floor but never reaching the corners.
The altar was strangled in vines—black-veined and pulsing. Flowers bloomed from them, white and soft like burial shrouds, petals so thin they looked translucent, whispering things I couldn’t hear but understood all the same.
I walked deeper. With every step, the space folded around me, pressing inward as though it knew I didn’t belong and was trying to remake me into something that did. My pulse slowed or vanished; I couldn’t tell. The further I went, the less I felt like I had ever existed before this moment. My name, my voice, and my life felt like nothing more than a prelude to this descent. I was no longer walking through a ruin; I was walking into a memory that was not my own.
Then, the world tilted. Not the floor or the walls, but me.
The world stuttered, and suddenly I was outside myself, watching. There I stood in the nave’s dying light, small and fragile beneath the hollow gaze of heaven, shoulders curled inward as I braced for what I already knew was coming.
From the darkness behind my body, a hand breached the veil. It was black, like soot made flesh, the fingers long and slow. It shimmered with the weight of centuries. It reached out and touched my shoulder.
I turned—sharp, ripped from the stillness, ready to scream.
But there was nothing. Only the church, the ruin, and the space behind me now filled with something that had waited too long.
The voice did not speak; it entered. It unfurled through me like smoke in the lungs or silk across wet skin. It didn’t enter through the ears—it slipped into the vertebrae, wound through the base of my skull, and curled into my chest as if it had always lived there.
“Come to me,” it said. “And you will watch everything that hurt you fall into ruin.”
In the space between the promise and the breath I hadn’t taken, I finally understood. I was not alone. I had never been. This church, this town, and this fog were not the end of the path.
They were where the path began.
Escrito el 14 de junio de 2025; basado en un sueño y la música de Sleep Token.