The old house groaned around Elias like a dying beast. It was his inheritance, a final, cryptic gift from a great-uncle he’d only known through hushed family stories. Alistair had been a cartographer, they said, but his maps were not of any known land. They were charts of sleep, of madness, of the spaces between heartbeats. The air in the house was thick with the scent of dust, decaying paper, and something else… something faintly metallic and cold, like winter ozone.

Elias was in the attic, a cathedral of forgotten things draped in veils of cobweb. His task was to sort, to discard, to erase the eccentric old man’s life. In a heavy sea chest bound with iron, beneath moth-eaten bolts of canvas, he found it. Not a map, but a sphere of polished obsidian, no larger than his fist. It was impossibly black, drinking the weak light from the grimy window. It was also cold, a deep, cellular cold that seemed to leach the warmth from his bones.

He held it up, turning it in his hand. Its surface was flawless, a perfect mirror to a world of shadow. But as he stared into its depths, the reflection of the cluttered attic began to…waver. The edges of the stacked trunks blurred, the rafters seemed to bend inward, and the dust motes dancing in the sunbeam slowed, then stopped, hanging in the air like frozen stars.

A whisper slithered into his mind. It wasn't a sound that entered his ears, but a thought that wasn't his own.

See.

Compelled by a force he didn't understand, Elias pressed the sphere to his right eye, closing his left.

The world shattered.

The attic was gone. In its place was a landscape of impossible geometry. The air itself was a lattice of shimmering, violet threads, pulsing with a slow, silent rhythm. The forgotten objects of the attic were still there, but he saw their true nature: the old wooden chest was a writhing knot of petrified life, its rings of growth coiling and uncoiling like sleeping serpents. The discarded portrait of a severe-looking ancestor was a screaming mask of silent, eternal anguish, its painted eyes black holes of despair.

He could see the lines of energy that bound the world together, the echoes of every word ever spoken in this room still vibrating on the air, the faint, silver-blue trails of memory clinging to every surface. It was terrifyingly, breathtakingly beautiful.

Then he saw the other thing.

It was in the far corner of the room, huddled where the roof slanted low. With his naked eye, there had been nothing but shadow. Through the obsidian sphere, he saw a creature made of torn fabric and stolen whispers. It was vaguely humanoid, but its limbs were too long, its joints bent at angles that nature would never allow. It had no face, only a smooth expanse of what looked like bruised twilight, but Elias felt its attention on him as a physical weight. It was feeding on the house’s decay, sipping the sorrow from old memories, growing stronger in the silence.

Elias’s breath hitched, a tiny, pathetic sound in the vast, vibrating silence of this new perception.

The faceless head of the creature tilted slowly, a gesture of dawning awareness. It had noticed him. It had felt his gaze upon it.

The whisper in his mind returned, no longer a suggestion, but a shriek of cold, ecstatic dread.

It sees you back.

The creature began to unfold itself, its long, spindly limbs detaching from the shadows with a sound like tearing silk. It did not move towards him in the physical space of the attic. It began to pull itself along the shimmering violet threads of the world, a spider on a web that only Elias could now see. And with every movement, the cold in the room intensified, a creeping frost that wasn't just on his skin, but inside his very soul. He tried to pull the sphere away from his eye, to break the connection, but his hand was frozen, locked in a rictus of terror. He was just a statue, a witness to a truth that was never meant to be seen, as the thing from the corner reeled itself in, coming to greet the eye that had dared to look.