Threads of Perception

Reality didn't crumble all at once. It broke in whispers, like frost spidering across a windowpane before shattering under its own weight.

At least, that's how it felt to Leo Valdez at 5:00 AM on a Thursday, though the wrongness had been building for weeks. Little things at first—pencils rolling uphill on his desk, his reflection lingering a moment too long in the windows, the taste of static in the air before rain that never came.

He lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling where the dawnlight played with the shadows. Except, these weren't normal shadows. They moved wrong, bending in ways the early morning light shouldn't allow. Shapes formed and dissolved—too deliberate to be random, too fleeting to make sense. Like the day before, when he'd seen Katie Chen's shadow split in three during gym class, right before she stopped coming to school.

The air in his room was dense, as if it had forgotten how to move.

Leo's chest rose and fell with shallow, uneven breaths. He counted the beats, trying to steady himself. His worn Iron Man bedsheets were twisted around his legs, damp with sweat. His body felt heavy, as though the weight of the unseen threads that hummed around him was pressing him into the mattress.

The LED display on his alarm clock glowed 5:01, blinking rhythmically, like a pulse. The same time it had shown yesterday morning, and the morning before. Leo had changed the batteries twice.

(Clocks don't have heartbeats, he told himself. Except maybe they do, and maybe time itself was sick.)

Something shifted in the corner of his room.

The electrical outlet, cracked and yellowed from years of use, blinked at him. Yes, blinked—two sharp flashes of light, so quick he almost convinced himself he'd imagined it. Like the morse code his dad had taught him last summer. Dit-dit. A letter 'I'. Or maybe a warning.

Almost.

Leo sat up too fast, the blood rushing from his head. The room tilted for a moment before steadying itself. He clutched his blanket like it was the only thing keeping him tethered to the real world. Behind his dresser, something chittered and scraped against the wall. Not mice. Never mice.

Outlets didn't blink. Posters didn't ripple like fabric. Shadows didn't coil at the edges of your vision, whispering in a language you couldn't name but somehow understood in your nightmares.

Except they did.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand, rattling against the empty can of Mountain Dew from last night. The sound cut through the thick silence like a blade. The same message, every morning, no matter how many times he blocked the number or factory reset his phone.

Leo grabbed it, his fingers clumsy, and squinted at the screen.

A text. No number. No name.

You see them now, don't you? The threads? They saw you first.

The letters crawled across the screen like living things, rearranging themselves when he wasn't looking directly at them. Sometimes they spelled other messages in the corner of his eye. Names of the missing. Dates that hadn't happened yet. Leo's breath hitched. He dropped the phone onto the bed and stared at it as though it might bite him.

The room was no longer still.

Thin, glowing strands shimmered into existence, stretching between the objects in his room. They connected his desk lamp to his Xbox, to the humming mini-fridge, and looped back to the tangled charger cable by his bed. They pulsed faintly, as though alive, carrying energy—or something worse. The same threads he'd seen wrapped around Jessica Winters' wrist in Physics yesterday, tugging gently every time she raised her hand.

The whispers came back, low and insistent, scratching at the edges of his thoughts. They spoke of hunger and patience, of a tapestry woven from stolen moments and borrowed breaths.

Leo pressed his palms against his temples, squeezing his eyes shut. "Not now," he muttered. "Not today."

But the threads didn't care. They never did.

The bathroom mirror reflected a boy Leo barely recognized.

Freckled skin, unruly black hair, hazel eyes rimmed with dark shadows from too many sleepless nights. His mother's eyes, though hers had started changing last week, flickering between colors like a broken kaleidoscope. He reached up to rub at his face, but his hand froze halfway there.

The edges of his reflection rippled, faint distortions bending the light. It wasn't the glass. It wasn't him.

It was the threads.

They hovered faintly around the mirror, curling and twisting in lazy spirals, as though testing the boundaries of reality. One reached out toward his reflection's throat, and Leo felt phantom pressure against his windpipe.

He turned away before they could do more.

His phone buzzed again, the sound sharp and intrusive.

The threads are just the beginning. Watch for the Weaver in gray. He's been watching you since the storm.

The words carved themselves into his mind, jagged and permanent. The storm—three months ago, when the sky had turned the color of television static and birds fell from the clouds like rain.

Leo didn't bother responding. He let the phone fall onto the countertop and gripped the edges of the sink until his knuckles turned white. The whispers in his head were louder now, overlapping voices that didn't belong to him. Some he recognized—Katie Chen's laugh, Mr. Peterson's morning announcements from two weeks ago, Jessica Winters humming that song she always did when solving equations.

Downstairs, the smell of pancakes drifted through the air, cutting through the noise in Leo's mind. The same breakfast his mom had made every morning this week, even though she used to hate cooking.

He paused at the kitchen doorway, one hand resting lightly on the frame. His mom stood at the stove, flipping pancakes with a calm efficiency that felt almost surreal. The same mechanical movements, the same angle of her arm, the same small smile that never quite reached her eyes.

Her humming drifted through the room, soft and sweet. But the tune felt off, like a melody from a dream you couldn't quite remember. Notes that shouldn't exist, played in an order that hurt his teeth.

Leo's gaze drifted to the shadows around her. They moved wrong, curling toward her body in thin tendrils before recoiling, as if afraid to touch her. Or as if they'd already taken what they needed.

"Blueberries or chocolate chips?" she asked, her voice light and casual. She turned to him, smiling.

For a moment, her face wasn't her face.

It flickered, replaced by a swirling void of shadows. Endless and deep, it pulled at Leo, whispering promises he couldn't understand. His stomach churned, bile rising in his throat. In that void, he saw faces—dozens of them, pressed against some invisible barrier like insects in amber.

He blinked, and she was his mom again.

"Blueberries," Leo said, his voice barely above a whisper. Like yesterday. Like always.

Sliding into his usual seat, he stared at the syrup pooling on his plate. The amber liquid moved against gravity, forming patterns that looked almost like letters. Across the table, his dad lowered the tablet he'd been scrolling through. His salt-and-pepper hair was sticking up in every direction, and his face was unusually pale. A thin thread wrapped around his wrist, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.

"Christ on a bicycle," his dad muttered, the words cutting the silence. "That's the third one this week."

Leo looked up sharply. "Third what?"

"Jessica Winters," his dad said, his voice heavy. "She's gone. Vanished last night."

Jessica Winters. The girl from AP Physics who wore rainbow shoelaces and doodled galaxies in the margins of her notebook. Who'd looked right at Leo yesterday and mouthed something that might have been "help" or "run" before the threads pulled her attention back to her equations.

The fork slipped from Leo's fingers, clattering against the plate. In the sound, he heard screaming.

"They'll find her," his mom said, her tone too bright, too forced. A thread slithered from her sleeve, reaching toward Leo's plate.

"They won't," Leo said quietly. "Just like they won't find Katie, or Mr. Peterson, or any of the others."

His parents turned toward him. His mom's face tightened in concern, though her expression took too long to change, like a video buffering. His dad's expression darkened, suspicion flickering in his eyes. The thread around his wrist pulsed faster.

"What do you mean, Leo?" his dad asked, his voice sharper than before. "What others?"

Leo opened his mouth, but no words came out. How could he explain it? The threads took her. They're taking all of them. They're taking you too, piece by piece, memory by memory.

"Nothing," he mumbled, pushing his plate away. "Never mind."

The world outside looked normal at first glance.

Mrs. Henderson shuffled down the sidewalk with her pug, Meatball, waddling along behind her. Except Meatball had died last spring—Leo had helped bury him in the backyard. The garbage truck roared past, Kenny behind the wheel like he'd been for as long as Leo could remember, even though Kenny's daughter had posted about his retirement party on Facebook months ago.

Everything seemed ordinary.

But the light bent wrong around the edges of things. The air was heavy, like a storm was brewing just beneath the surface. And the whispers—they were still there, faint but persistent, carried on a wind that didn't stir the leaves. They spoke of a hunger older than time, of spaces between spaces where lost things went to scream.

By the rusty chain-link fence that separated the high school from the abandoned drive-in theater, a man in a gray suit was waiting.

Leo stopped in his tracks.

The man's silver hair caught the sunlight, but instead of reflecting it, the light seemed to disappear, swallowed into the strands. His smile was too wide, his teeth too sharp, his presence too wrong. Where his shadow should have been, threads writhed and twisted like dying snakes.

The threads around him pulsed violently, jagged and erratic. They reached out toward Leo, slicing through the air like claws. Each one hummed with a different stolen voice, a different borrowed life.

When the man tilted his head, the world tilted with him. Reality creaked and groaned like ice in spring, threatening to break.

Leo blinked, and the man was gone.

But the threads remained, vibrating with a warning Leo didn't yet understand. Or maybe he did understand, but that knowledge lived in the parts of his mind he'd locked away, in memories that tasted like static and smelled like burning time.

Sometimes, Leo would think later, the worst part wasn't seeing the monsters.

The worst part was realizing they'd always been there, waiting for him to notice. And now that he had, they would never let him look away again.

In his pocket, his phone buzzed one last time:

Welcome to the unraveling, Leo Valdez. Try not to scream—it only encourages them.

And for the first time, Leo knew he wasn't dreaming.