Whispers of The Other Side

Lucas' bedroom looked more like the inside of a conspiracy theorist's van than a place anyone could sleep in.

Printer paper covered every wall—some pinned, others taped hastily. Arrows drawn in red marker connected phrases in multiple languages. Ancient glyphs. Latin fragments. Handwritten translations in the margins. On the far wall, a piece of cardboard was spray-painted with one phrase in big black letters:

"THE OTHER SIDE?"

Beneath it: coffee rings, noodles, a half-eaten protein bar, and a blinking monitor covered in open tabs.

Lucas sat in the glow of it all, hunched over his desk like a man trying to read the secrets of the universe before they disappeared again. His hoodie was stretched and misshapen. His eyes were bloodshot, flickering between tabs, his fingers twitching every few seconds with the urgency of caffeine overload.

William stood nearby with a Red Bull in one hand and a spiral notebook in the other. "You know," he said, "when I said I wanted to help, I didn't mean get inducted into the church of esoteric internet rabbit holes."

Lucas didn't respond.

William sighed. "What are we looking at this time?"

Lucas gestured to the middle screen. "Cross-referencing linguistic anomalies in early Indo-European scripture. These phrases keep coming up across completely separate civilizations—Mesopotamian, Mayan, early Slavic. Different words, same ideas. Threshold. Beyond. Violet mark. Broken veil."

William frowned. "And this one?"

Lucas clicked the tab. "This is the real kicker."

Onscreen: a screenshot of an archived web forum post from 2007—white text on a black background.

"The Other Side speaks through art and madness. The ones who come from there do not belong to any era. They do not forget. They arrive when the old world breaks open."

Beneath that:A grainy photo of a mural half-erased by mold. A figure surrounded by otherwordly light.

Lucas leaned back, rubbing his eyes. "They all talk about it like a myth, but they're describing the same entity. Or phenomenon. Or—"

"Or you're seeing what you want to see," William cut in gently.

Lucas turned to him, dead serious. "No, dude. That's the thing. I wasn't looking for this. I was tracking how Ryunosuke's leak spread through private servers. This stuff came up because the data trail bled into classified religious archives."

He grabbed a folder from under a pile of ramen wrappers and shoved it into William's chest. "Look. Even DARPA has a redacted project with the header 'OTHERSIDE-CROSSWALK.' Like it was a gate. Or a breach."

William opened the folder, scanning the blurry photocopies and code names. "Why would a government defense program care about ancient theology?"

Lucas didn't smile.

Didn't blink.

"That's what scares me the most," he said. "They didn't treat it like religion."

He looked at the photo again.

"They treated it like a map."

Lucas' words hung in the stale air of his room long after he'd said them. William didn't respond. He just closed the folder, carefully, like it might break if handled wrong.

Ten minutes later, they were in his car—Lucas cradling a backpack stuffed with printouts and flash drives, William driving in silence through the rain-slicked streets of Westwood, the UCLA campus slowly coming into view.

"You're sure we won't get caught?" Lucas asked, adjusting his hoodie over his head.

"I still have a faculty keycard from my T.A. internship," William muttered. "It's not official anymore, but the archives haven't updated their security since 2003. We'll be fine—unless you start screaming about purple-eyed gods in front of a security camera."

"No promises," Lucas muttered, gripping the straps tighter.

They parked in the empty lot behind Royce Hall and slipped into the undercroft, descending a service stairwell most students didn't know existed. The air grew colder as they went deeper—concrete giving way to sandstone and dust. At the bottom of the stairwell stood a sealed metal door, yellowed with time.

William scanned his card.

A click.

They stepped into darkness.

With a flick, the emergency fluorescents sputtered to life above them, revealing stacks of brittle scroll cases, boxed folios, and handwritten catalogs kept in waxy plastic bins.

Lucas looked around with wide eyes. "This feels cursed."

"It is," William said flatly. "Welcome to the theology black archive. The stuff the university keeps off the books so donors don't ask questions."

They moved down a narrow row of shelving, past collections labeled Apocrypha (Pre-325 A.D.), Samaritan Ciphered Psalms, Feral Gospel Fragments. Lucas ran his fingers along the dusty spines like he was in a dream.

Then he stopped.

"Here," he said, pulling a heavy leather-bound book from a crate marked "Non-Canonical Cosmology – Mixed Source."

They opened it across a rusted reading table.

Inside were crude, hand-inked reproductions of tablets and scrolls. Some in Greek, others in pictographs. Each page was followed by scholarly footnotes in red ink—half of which were crossed out or replaced with question marks.

Page after page, the same phrase kept appearing in different forms:

"The Other Side.""The Veiled Kingdom.""Realm Between Worlds.""Where Light Fails but Thought Continues."

Lucas leaned in. "They weren't describing heaven or hell. This was something adjacent. Something... unreachable."

One illustration stopped them both.

A woman—or what looked like one—emerging from a pool of light surrounded by weeping figures. Her eyes were painted violet, glowing with unnatural brightness.

Below, in Latin:

"She crosses when the veil is thin. Her presence bends the breath of men."

William exhaled. "They all saw the same thing."

Lucas whispered, "Lilith."

They looked at each other.

And for once, neither of them had anything to say.

The silence between them lingered even as they climbed back into the car, the ancient text still fresh in their minds. Neither Lucas nor William spoke as they drove through the empty streets, the night city glowing in pulses of yellow and neon blue.

Lucas stared out the passenger window, fingers drumming anxiously against his knee.

"She crosses when the veil is thin," he murmured. "It's not metaphor. It's logistics."

William looked over. "You think she's from a different world?"

"No," Lucas said slowly. "I think she's from a different version of ours."

Back at the apartment, Lucas moved like a man possessed.

He pulled open his laptop, then a second terminal window. William collapsed onto the couch, cracking open a new Red Bull with a tired groan.

"Okay," William muttered, "what's the plan?"

"I'm going deeper," Lucas replied, already running scripts. "Old caches, dead boards, anything that hosted cross-religious forums or pre-digital conspiracy posts. Stuff you can't find with Google anymore."

"You mean the kind of stuff that makes your hard drive combust?"

"Exactly."

For the next hour, the only sound was the furious clacking of keys and the occasional hiss of steam from the portable kettle.

Lucas's screen flooded with server logs, IP bounces, forum indexes, corrupted archives. The timestamps ranged from the mid-90s to early 2010s—places that existed only in fragments, bits of forgotten digital graffiti.

Then—he froze.

"What is it?" William asked.

Lucas highlighted a thread title in faded gray, the page flickering with age:

THE OTHER SIDE IS NOT A PLACE. IT IS A WOUND.

The only post that loaded was a plain block of text.

No author. No reply count. Just a single message.

"You cannot reach it by prayer.You cannot reach it by math.But when the lines fray—When time knots like thread—It will bleed into the shape of this world."

And then—beneath it.

One word.

Bold. Isolated. Final.

DEN GI

Lucas stared at the screen, lips parted.

William leaned in.

"…What is that? A name?"

"I don't think so," Lucas whispered. "I think it's a place. Or maybe... what their world calls itself."

He scrolled further. Corrupted symbols filled the margins—pieces of code that didn't match any known language.

Lucas leaned back slowly, eyes wide with a mix of awe and fear.

"I think Den Gi is what lies beyond the veil," he said. "Not heaven. Not hell. Just... parallel. Coexisting. Touching us only when something breaks."

William swallowed hard. "Like now."

Lucas nodded.

"They call it 'The Other Side.' But it's not somewhere you go."

He turned to William, voice quiet now.

"It's somewhere that's already here. Waiting."

Lucas didn't move for a long time.

The word Den Gi remained on the screen, pulsing like a heartbeat frozen in digital amber. Around it, fragments of broken threads and mangled code hung like digital cobwebs—remnants of something once hidden, now half-exposed.

William sat across from him, more awake now than he wanted to be.

"You think this place—Den Gi—is… real?" he asked, cautiously.

Lucas nodded slowly. "Not in the way we think of 'real.' Not like coordinates or a country you can fly to. It's not on our map."

He leaned forward, eyes distant, voice hushed.

"I think it exists alongside us. Parallel. Close enough to touch—but only if something tears."

William frowned. "Tears? Like what?"

Lucas exhaled. "A massive emotional event. A global shift. Maybe even a death. Something that breaks reality's skin. And when that happens, Den Gi bleeds through."

William looked toward the darkened window, the glow of streetlamps flickering outside. "You're starting to sound like the people we usually laugh at."

"I know," Lucas said. "That's the worst part."

He stood and began pacing, gesturing as he spoke. "Think about it. Every ancient religion has stories of visitors—beings who arrive with strange powers, who speak in riddles, who change the world and then vanish. Half the time they're angels. The other half? Demons. But what if they're neither?"

William tilted his head. "You're saying… they're from Den Gi?"

"Or something like it. Not divine. Not infernal. Just—other. Close enough to be seen in dreams, myths, visions… but never understood."

He stopped pacing.

"There's this theory in quantum physics," Lucas continued, "that parallel timelines can briefly entangle—like fibers twisting together for a moment before separating again. Maybe Den Gi isn't another timeline. Maybe it's the part of reality that never got folded into ours."

William raised an eyebrow. "And what? We're just… side by side with it?"

Lucas looked him dead in the eye.

"I think we've always been."

A silence settled between them.

Then William stood, walked to the kitchen, and poured the last of the cold coffee into a cracked mug. He stared into it for a long second before speaking.

"Let's say you're right. Let's say this place exists. Why does it matter now?"

Lucas didn't answer at first.

Then, quietly: "Because something's changed. The veil's thinning."

William looked up sharply.

"You've seen it?"

Lucas shook his head. "Not exactly. But I've felt it. Like static at the edge of your thoughts. A presence that shouldn't be there, but is."

He glanced at the screen again—at that word:

Den Gi

And whispered: "And I think someone has already crossed over."

"And I think someone has already crossed over."

Lucas's voice hung in the dim room, barely above a whisper.

William stared at him, the tension in his jaw tight. "You mean like—now? Someone's here from that place?"

Lucas didn't look away from the screen. "We've already seen hints of it. We just didn't know what we were looking at."

He turned toward William, eyes sharpened by sleeplessness and obsession. "You remember what Ryunosuke said? About the girl?"

William blinked. "Lilith?"

Lucas nodded. "Emily saw her, too. Violet eyes. Knows things she shouldn't. Shows up when nobody's looking, and disappears just as fast. We thought she was hallucinating like she had some dream."

"But she wasn't," William muttered, realization dawning.

"No," Lucas said. "She wasn't."

He walked back to the wall and flipped through a binder, pulling out a page with a printed photo—grainy, still from security footage. A silhouette barely caught in frame. Standing on a rooftop, long coat, eyes reflecting light like they were glass.

"Ryunosuke didn't capture it well, but this? This isn't a trick of the camera."

William took the photo, eyes narrowing. "So you're saying… Lilith's from Den Gi."

Lucas tapped the table once. "It lines up. She matches the figure in those old texts—the one who crosses over when the veil thins. And her name, Lilith? That's not just coincidence. In multiple traditions, that name is linked to chaos, exile, something foreign."

William swallowed hard.

"That means she's not just some mystery girl…"

Lucas finished the thought.

"She's evidence."

They stood there in silence, the only light now coming from the monitor's eerie glow.

William looked out the window, the quiet street stretching into suburban emptiness. The streetlight flickered once.

"You know what scares me?" Lucas said after a long pause.

William didn't answer.

Lucas stared into the dark.

"She's real. And that means everything else might be, too."

The monitor let out a faint click—a static stutter in the audio port.

Neither of them moved.

Neither of them spoke.

Outside, the night watched them back.