Nikki did not live; he merely existed within the grey.
His world had shrunk to the four walls of a cold, personality-less apartment in the heart of the city. For months, he hadn't left. The blinds remained drawn, filtering the sun into a sickly, pale twilight. He had no family left to call, no friends who hadn't quietly slipped away when the darkness became too heavy to bear. He was completely, unequivocally alone, left to rot in a dark world of his own making.
He stared at his hands, trembling slightly as they rested on his knees. He used to be so strong. He used to be the kind of man who could step out into the terrifying open sky without a flinch, a builder who could take raw materials and digital lines and carve something beautiful out of absolutely nothing. A go-getter. A force of nature. Now, he was a hollow shell. At the slightest hint of stress, he would simply dismantle, shattering into a million terrified pieces.
The phantom smells of the hospital still clung to him, bleach, stale sweat, and despair. His mind relentlessly replayed the nightmare of those days. It had been his wife who found him, his wife who had bundled him into the car and checked him into that grungy, terrifying government casualty ward. He had waited days for help in that purgatory, surrounded by the desperate and the lost. Some were genuinely broken; others pretended to be crazy or suicidal just for a bed and a meal. It was a terrifying place to close his eyes, and even worse to wake up in.
But the true horror had come when they finally let him out. She had come to pick him up, but her eyes were dead. The woman who had been his tether for so long didn't want him to come home. She didn't want him anywhere near her. She had asked him to leave, her voice devoid of anger, filled only with an exhausted finality. She threw him away, and in that moment, whatever fragile pieces of Nikki remained were crushed to dust. He was broken. Completely.
After months of suffocating in the stagnant air of his apartment, the realization hit him: he couldn't do it anymore. He couldn't survive another day in this miserable box. Not knowing what else to do, he picked up his phone. The screen's glare hurt his eyes as he aimlessly searched for places, desperate for an escape. An old photograph caught his eye, a gorge, a river, a memory from a childhood that felt like it belonged to someone else. It was a place he used to go with his father. They hadn't been close, but those trips were the only times the heavy silence between them felt peaceful.
What the hell, he thought, hitting the button to book a nearby room. Let's go there.
The next morning, he climbed into his car and pointed it away from the city skyline. The four-hour drive was agonizingly silent. There was no radio, no music, just the rhythmic hum of the tires on the asphalt. Nikki stared blankly at the open road, his mind a chaotic loop of the past. He played back every failure, every moment that had led him to that filthy hospital ward, drowning in the heavy, suffocating regrets of what had gone down and the devastating consequences that followed.
He finally arrived at a small farm where he had booked the Airbnb. It was a beautiful, simple place, far removed from the concrete monoliths of the city. Small, comfortable, and devastatingly quiet. Nikki dropped his bags inside and walked back out into the crisp air.
As he looked out over the property, a spark of memory flared to life. He remembered a spot from those trips with his father. A tunnel. A river.
Acting on a sudden, magnetic compulsion, he climbed back into his car and drove. He navigated the winding dirt roads until he found it, the dark mouth of an old tunnel cutting through the rock. He parked the car, the engine ticking as it cooled, and began the hike down into the gorge. He pushed through the damp, overgrown brush, following the rush of the river upstream. His muscles burned, a strange, physical reminder that he was still in a body, until he finally broke through the tree line and found the spot where the rivers collided.
Nikki sat down on a wide, flat stone. The rivers met in a swirling basin in front of him, while the main, towering waterfall roared at his back. He sat there for what must have been hours, a statue against the misty backdrop, just taking it all in. He was contemplating why he was even there. He didn't know. It was a mystery even to himself.
The air grew damp and heavy. Seeking his water bottle, Nikki blindly reached a hand into his canvas bag.
Prick.
He recoiled slightly, sucking on his index finger. Reaching back in carefully, his fingers brushed against cold metal and smooth plastic. He pulled it out. It was a small, red Swiss Army knife, a gift from his childhood, long forgotten at the bottom of the bag.
He stared at the small silver blade. The memory of his wife's hollow eyes flashed in his mind. The isolation. The cold apartment. He was completely, unequivocally alone.
Nikki didn't make a conscious choice. There was no thought pattern, no weighing of options. It was as if something else, some dark and absolute exhaustion, had simply taken hold.
The blade was at the base of his wrist. Then, it was pushing through the skin.
That sharp, familiar pain came rushing back, grounding him for a fraction of a second before the warm trickle began. The blood wrapped around his forearm like a crimson bracelet. When it couldn't travel any further along his skin, it began to fall. Heavy, dark drops splattered against the grey stone he sat on, running down the natural grooves and bleeding into the swirling water below.
As more blood hit the ground and found its way into the water, Nikki's head began to swim. The roaring of the rivers started to fade, replaced by a sudden, descending silence. The air grew instantly crisp and biting, as if the sun had simply been extinguished from the sky.
Then, a strange, low frequency vibrated through his boots. It wasn't coming from the water in front of him. It was coming from behind.
Through the haze of pain and light-headedness, Nikki turned his head. The air by the rocks near the base of the waterfall was warping. It was swirling, folding in on itself, pushing violently outward to form a strange, atmospheric image. Nikki, losing blood and struggling to keep his eyes open, battled to comprehend the impossible distortion. It looked exactly like a pool of water, but standing entirely upright, suspended in the air.
He felt a pull. It wasn't a suggestion; it was a physical drag, drawing his failing body toward the anomaly.
In that moment, as the blood poured freely from his arm and his sight began to fade to black, Nikki knew something was terribly wrong. This wasn't the slow, cold descent into shock he had expected. He wasn't freezing.
He was burning.
When the warping air caught him, pulling him toward the swirl, panic finally shattered his numb exhaustion. Nikki knew he had no control. His vision was fading rapidly, a dark vignette closing in from the loss of blood. He fell hard to his knees, his good hand frantically scrabbling over the wet, grey stone. He grabbed at slick moss and loose pebbles, trying desperately to anchor himself, to keep himself where he was. He was not successful. The magnetic drag was relentless.
Realizing in that terrifying moment that he was going to hit this anomaly, that there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it, the pain in his wrist spiked into a blinding agony. It felt as if the very oxygen was being violently sucked out of his lungs. The swirling picture in front of his eyes went pitch black, and without a warning, Nikki was out.
He awoke in an intense, crashing wave of awareness.
A cracking headache split his skull, accompanied by a sharp, throbbing burn in his wrist. He inhaled sharply, his lungs filling with the strangest smell he had ever encountered, a pungent mix of scorched ozone and sweet, overripe earth.
He lay still for a moment. The waterfall in the background was still there, the intense, familiar sound of rushing water echoing around him. Nikki dragged himself up, groggy and completely disoriented, convinced he had simply passed out from the blood loss on the rocks. It was getting late. The light was dying rapidly, replaced by a creeping dark, and a thick, unnatural fog was laying down heavy in the dip of the gorge.
He staggered to his feet, instinctively clamping his good hand over his slit wrist. But the skin felt dry. He pulled his hand back and squinted in the dimness. The bleeding had stopped.
Fuck it, again, he thought bitterly.
His body had always possessed this frustratingly fast clotting factor; wounds sealed themselves with a stubborn refusal to let him bleed out. He couldn't even die right.
He started his hike, desperate to make it back to his car. Being out here after nightfall, mentally and physically exhausted, shivering in the cold fog, was a terrifying prospect. As he trudged upstream, something felt deeply wrong. The river moved differently, the currents swirling in strange, unnatural patterns. The trees and forage pressing in on the banks were strange—twisted, too thick, alien in a way Nikki couldn't quite put his finger on. But the desperate need to reach his car pushed him forward, convincing himself his blood-starved brain was just playing tricks on him.
This must be it. The spot to go up. He found a break in the bank that looked familiar and started the grueling climb up the side of the gorge, his boots slipping in the damp earth.
He crested the top, expecting the crunch of gravel and the metallic gleam of his car. Instead, he stepped onto flat ground covered in strange, spongy moss. He spun around. Things looked completely wrong. I am sure this looks like the spot I parked my car.
But where was the tunnel? Where were the rusted guardrails? Where was the fucking road?
"This can't be the place..." Nikki whispered, his voice swallowed by the thick fog. Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through his chest. Nothing made sense.
He looked up. The fog was thinner up here, parting just enough to reveal the night sky above the gorge. Nikki froze, the breath catching in his throat.
Two moons hung in the sky. One was a brilliant, distinct silver, the other a bruised, necrotic green.
"What the hell..."
He looked back down, his eyes wide as they finally registered the alien foliage surrounding him, plants that seemed to pulse and twist in the dim, bicolored light.
A rustling in the brush forced his heavy head to turn. Crouched on a fallen, moss-covered log was a goblin. It was not a creature of his childhood imagination, but a scarred, wiry scavenger with leathery skin and a mouth full of jagged, serrated teeth. It locked eyes with him, its gaze calculating and hungry, before it chattered a series of clicks and scurried away into the dark.
Nikki stood there, completely shattered. The sheer impossibility of his surroundings broke whatever fragile resolve he had left. Hearing foreign, guttural sounds echoing from the bizarre trees around him, the terror and fear completely engulfed him. He looked around wildly and saw the faint outline of a path winding into the unknown dark.
In that moment, stripped of everything he knew, Nikki made a choice. He started to run. He hit the path, boots pounding against the strange earth, and he didn't stop.
