No one noticed the moment the world slipped.
That was the first lie history told itself.
At 2:17 a.m., when the city of Ranagangi was asleep beneath flickering streetlights and unfinished prayers, something arrived that did not belong to this world. It did not tear the sky or split the earth. There was no explosion, no scream, no divine announcement. Reality simply… miscounted itself.
A presence stood where nothing should have been.
If anyone had been awake—if anyone had truly looked—they would have felt it before seeing it. A pressure behind the eyes. A subtle nausea, like remembering a dream that never happened. Dogs three streets away whimpered and hid. Security cameras glitched for exactly seven seconds, recording frames of empty space where the air bent inward, as if embarrassed to exist.
And then it was gone.
Or rather, it decided not to be seen.
---
Arnold Vale woke up with blood on his hands.
He sat upright in his narrow apartment, chest heaving, heart hammering like it was trying to escape jurisdiction. The ceiling fan spun lazily above him, clicking once every rotation, mocking his panic with mechanical patience.
Blood.
Not a lot—but enough.
Dark, sticky, real.
Arnold stared at his palms under the weak yellow bulb beside his bed. His fingers trembled as he turned them over, searching for cuts, bruises, any sign of injury. There were none. His skin was unbroken, clean except for the crimson stains that should not have been there.
He swallowed.
"Not again," he whispered.
The dreams had been coming for weeks. Always the same pattern, never the same details. Streets that didn't exist. Symbols that hurt to remember. Voices speaking in languages that felt older than sound. And the feeling—always the feeling—that something was standing just behind him, close enough to breathe him in.
But this was the first time the dream had left evidence.
Arnold stumbled out of bed and rushed to the bathroom. The mirror reflected a young man in his early twenties with sunken eyes and a face that hadn't known proper sleep in months. He turned on the tap and scrubbed his hands furiously.
The blood refused to wash away.
It smeared instead, thinning but never disappearing, like it was soaked beneath the skin.
His breath hitched.
"That's impossible."
The mirror rippled.
Just slightly.
Arnold froze.
For a fraction of a second, his reflection didn't copy his movements. It smiled when he didn't.
Then everything snapped back to normal.
The water ran clear. The blood was gone. His hands were clean.
Arnold staggered backward, nearly slipping on the tiles.
"Okay," he muttered, forcing a shaky laugh. "Okay. Sleep deprivation. Stress. That's all."
But his reflection watched him with a patience that felt learned.
---
Across the city, deep beneath a government complex that officially did not exist, alarms lit up a room buried under twelve layers of clearance.
Red lines spiked across massive monitors. Reality deviation indexes surged past acceptable thresholds. Analysts froze, fingers hovering uselessly over keyboards.
A woman in a dark coat stepped forward.
"Confirm the reading," she said calmly.
"It's… it's not a spike," a technician stammered. "It's a subtraction."
The woman's eyes narrowed.
"Explain."
"Something was here," the technician said. "And now the system says it never should have been."
Silence swallowed the room.
The woman straightened. "Activate the Sinners Division."
A few heads snapped up at the name.
"Ma'am," someone protested, "that protocol hasn't been used since—"
"Since the last time the world lied to itself," she cut in. "And it's lying again."
She turned toward a single screen displaying a city map. One location pulsed faintly.
Ranagangi.
"Find the anomaly," she said. "Before it remembers what it is."
---
Arnold left his apartment just before dawn.
The air felt wrong outside—thicker, heavier, like the city was holding its breath. People passed him on the street, faces blank, eyes glazed with routine. None of them noticed the cracks between moments, the way shadows lagged a heartbeat behind their owners.
Arnold noticed.
He always did.
That was his curse.
As he walked, fragments pressed against his mind—images that weren't memories, emotions without origin. A burning crown. A blade made of absence. A voice whispering a name that was not his.
Pseudo.
The word echoed without sound.
Arnold clutched his head, stumbling.
"Don't," he muttered. "I don't want to know."
But knowledge did not care about consent.
When he looked up, he realized he had stopped in front of a building he had never seen before.
It stood between two familiar shops like it had always been there. Gray concrete. No sign. No windows on the ground floor. The door was open.
Warm darkness breathed from within.
Every instinct screamed at him to run.
Instead, he stepped forward.
The moment Arnold crossed the threshold, the world behind him forgot he existed.
---
Far above, unseen by any god or system, something stirred.
It did not have a form.
It did not have a name.
But it was watching.
And it was smiling.
Because the story had begun.