An Uninvited Omen [3]

The weight of the blanket was suffocating, every thread pulled taut with sweat and panic, yet Taejun didn't dare loosen his grip.

The air inside his cocoon was hot and damp, tasting of fabric, fear, and the acid of his shallow breath, but even the thought of shifting his fingers or adjusting his grip felt dangerous, as though any motion might attract something watching from the corners just outside.

He could feel the tension in his muscles turning brittle, like his body was beginning to forget what comfort felt like, curling tighter and tighter until he could hardly tell where his limbs ended and the blanket began.

Somewhere in the dark, behind the canvas of his eyes, the world outside the fabric did not rest. I

He could hear the silence, not empty, but brimming with microscopic noise.

Not one single sound, but an orchestra of impossibilities: a groan in the floorboards where no footsteps fell, the click of the doorknob as it imperceptibly nudged against its socket as though the air itself had shifted in weight, the faint tap-tap of nails, or fingers, drumming on the wall in a rhythm too irregular to be anything natural.

The darkness was awake, it was alert, and no longer keeping its distance.

Beneath the blanket, the air thickened into something living, something oppressive that wormed its way into his lungs and pressed against his ribcage like invisible hands trying to squeeze out his breath.

A cold seeped through the mattress, slow but steady, like something was crawling up from under the bed frame, or had perhaps been there all along, unmoving, yet present, curled against the wooden slats just beneath his spine.

Then came the shift.

It was almost imperceptible, no more than the weight of a hand, a single palm pressing gently into the foot of the bed, flattening the mattress by a hair's breadth.

Not footsteps, not an impact, just the subtle, horrifying suggestion of intent.

A voice followed, but not from beyond the door or beneath the floorboards.

It wasn't carried through the air.

It bloomed within the space between Taejun's ears, a whisper so quiet it vibrated in his skull more than it touched his hearing.

"Don't… look…"

The words dragged like they had been pulled from lungs filled with dust, from a throat that hadn't tasted water in years.

The sound was more than a warning, it was a plea, trembling and ancient, cracked with something like grief, or memory, or rot.

Taejun clenched his teeth so hard he felt the pressure rise behind his eyes, but still he didn't move, didn't breathe too deeply, afraid that even the tiniest sound would trigger something waiting to lunge from just outside his thin cotton barrier.

His entire body trembled beneath the soaked blanket, his knees jammed against his chest, his arms locked so tightly around them that his shoulders burned.

His mouth remained sealed behind his hands, muffling the hitch of his breath as he felt it, a draft.

It kissed the side of his face like a whisper of winter, unnaturally cold, drifting down from the ceiling where no window was open, brushing across his temple as if someone had leaned down to breathe against his skin.

The kind that carried intention, the kind that knew him.

Somewhere outside the blanket, something shifted with a rustle of fabric, a wet creak like muscle sliding over bone.

Then stillness.

Then another whisper, closer, hoarse, dripping with something that felt like rot and sorrow.

"Don't…"

And then it was gone.

Not like something leaving a room, not like a noise fading into the distance, but like a hand that had hovered just above his chest pulling back into the dark, retracting, withholding, as if waiting for a better moment.

Yet the emptiness it left behind was not peace.

It was a vacuum, a hush so profound it seemed to swallow time itself.

Taejun didn't sleep, he didn't blink.

He barely remembered how to move his lungs.

His muscles had locked into a state of paralysis so total that when, at last, the first colorless hints of morning began to bloom across the drawn curtains, the only proof of the passing hours was the dull ache in his bones and the shivering weight of his sweat cooling beneath the blanket.

He didn't recognize the room anymore.

The shapes had changed.

The shadows clung to the walls like mold, disfigured and wet, and the mirror.

Now, just as light began to peel apart the edges of the dark, he could feel its presence pulsing against him like a heartbeat, unnatural and silent.

The glass had warped in the night.

Its surface rippled with a faint, metallic sheen, like oil across water, and though he couldn't see it clearly from where he lay, still frozen beneath the damp folds of his blanket, he felt eyes watching him through it.

From the other side.

He didn't cry.

The tears had dried somewhere between panic and paralysis, leaving only a ringing hollowness behind his eyes, a burn in his throat, and a raw, frayed edge in his mind that would not stop pulsing with the memory of that voice, that breath, that pressure on the bed.

When Haneul's voice finally broke the silence with a sleepy call from the bathroom down the hall, muffled and unaware, Taejun didn't answer.

All he could do was lie there, motionless and silent, still clinging to the final shreds of the night's horror, knowing full well that daylight would never erase it.

The terror hadn't passed; it had retreated.

Smiling behind the mirror, watching for the next moment, he would be alone.

The morning came not with brilliance, but with a subdued hush that crept across the city like a careful breath held too long.

Pale sunlight poured over rooftops and dripped between buildings in slanted streaks, soft and filtered through a gauze of lingering mist.

There was no birdsong, only the faint rustle of leaves quivering in a wind that barely stirred, and the distant hum of powerlines whispering to each other above the silent streets.

Taejun stepped out of the apartment complex with his bag slung low on his back, shoulders hunched not from the weight but from something unseen that clung to the edges of the dawn.

The world felt wrong in a way he couldn't name, like a stage set that hadn't been properly dressed, like he had awoken in a copy of reality, almost the same, but not quite.

His footsteps echoed louder than they should have, reverberating down the narrow, cracked sidewalks as though the city were emptier than usual.

Doors remained closed, windows reflected nothing but grey.

The usual clutter of commuters and morning routines seemed absent, as if the world had hit pause and forgotten to tell him.

He walked slowly, dragging his feet through the heavy quiet, each breath trailing faint wisps in the cool air, though the calendar claimed it was well past the chill of spring.

He passed shuttered stores, their awnings limp, their signs dim.

Even the traffic lights blinked their cycle with mechanical indifference, changing from red to green for no cars at all.

When he neared the crossroad, where the sidewalk met a strip of faded asphalt at the foot of a crooked lamppost, he saw her.

She stood just past the curb, hunched low beneath the tattered folds of a faded shawl that clung to her shoulders like old bark.

The fabric was thin, its color lost to time, neither grey nor brown but some colorless blend of both, like ashes soaked in rain.

Her back was twisted with age or ailment or something deeper, and her movement was slow, methodical, as though each step cost her something she no longer had to give.

She was facing away at first, her form little more than a slouching silhouette cast against the light, and for a brief moment, Taejun wondered if she were real at all or merely a figure trapped in the folds of a strange morning dream.

But then she moved.

A slight shift, a subtle readjusting of weight, and something in her gnarled hand slipped free.

It fell, not heavily, but with a delicate clink that somehow pierced the hush like a needle to skin.

The object struck the pavement with a soft ting, rolling slightly before coming to rest near the worn edge of the sidewalk.

It gleamed faintly in the morning light, and that glint pulled Taejun forward.

He didn't know why he moved.

His feet acted before his thoughts could catch up, drawn toward the old woman not out of concern but out of something quieter, stranger, a tug deep in his chest that felt equal parts dread and curiosity.

As he neared, the shape on the ground became clearer, glass, sharp-edged and irregular, a fragment of something larger and long since broken.

It wasn't dirty or dull like litter.

It shimmered oddly, catching the light in chaotic angles that twisted the surroundings into warped reflections, as if for a moment, the shard wasn't showing the street or the sky or his approaching hand, but something underneath it all, something older, buried beneath the cracks of the visible world.

Taejun crouched, heart thudding a little harder now, and reached for it with slow, cautious fingers. The edges threatened to cut, but the glass remained dry and cold in his hand, unnaturally so—cold not with morning dew but with something deeper, a chill that seemed to soak into his skin the moment he touched it.

Then the woman turned.

It was not sudden.

Her head rotated slowly, with the deliberate stiffness of an ancient doll long forgotten in an attic, revealing the side of her face shrouded in heavy shadows.

Her features were shrunken and pale, the skin stretched thin over her bones, but it was her eyes that paralyzed him.

They looked not at him, but through him, milky yet sharp, vast yet empty, eyes that had seen too many mornings and had stopped counting long ago.

They held a depth that did not belong to the frail shape in front of him, a watching that felt both intimate and otherworldly.

Her lips barely parted, the lines of her mouth rigid and dry as though they hadn't been used in years.

And yet, from within that hollow crevice, a voice emerged, a voice that didn't sound spoken so much as released from some pressure deep beneath the earth.

"Keep it," she said, the words brittle and rasping like fallen leaves dragged across stone. "It carries the pieces of what's broken."

There was no inflection, no question.

Just certainty, like the delivery of a sentence passed down long ago, finally reaching its intended hands.

Taejun's mouth opened, but his voice caught behind a wall of fear that hadn't yet become panic.

Before he could ask what she meant, or even what it was, she turned again and began to move.

With her head bowed and her gait limping, she shuffled away without a backward glance, her figure dissolving into the lengthening morning haze.

One moment, she was there, walking along the curb.

The next, she was gone, consumed by the fog, the light, or something far stranger.

Taejun stood motionless at the edge of the street, the shard cradled in his palm like something living.

The surface of the glass no longer shimmered with light.

It had grown dim, the reflections inside shifting, twisting like smoke trapped in a prism.

His fingers tightened around it, not to drop it, not to crush it, just to feel that it was real.

A slow, crawling chill moved up his spine, wrapping around his shoulders, pressing into the base of his skull like fingers made of cold breath.

He didn't know why, but he knew, in the same way someone senses rain before a cloud appears, that this wasn't just some broken mirror discarded on the street.

This fragment didn't reflect him. It showed something else.

And he understood, deep down, in the marrow of his quiet little morning, that from now on, nothing in his world would stay whole.