Breach of Reality

There are no more birdsong at dawn in Eldenrock. Nor laughter echoes through its darkened stone alleys—only the heavy silence of a town that seems to have forgotten how to breathe. The wind does not pass; it drags itself, slow, carrying with it the odor of dampness, rotting wood, and a subtle hint of decay. Eldenrock, isolated between tangled forests and hills forgotten by time, did not fall ill like a fevered body crying out for cure. No. It withered in silence, like a soul consumed by its own shadow.

Four months ago, people began to vanish. At first, no one cared much—wandering travelers, drifters crossing the streets in search of shelter, drunkards drowning in their own ghosts. Such losses were expected, tragedies too distant to touch the townsfolk. But then the familiar names came next—those who met daily in the market, at the church, on the slick stones. The venerable midwife who held dying hands. The guard’s youth, once vigilant but already weary. Three children from a forgotten quarter who never returned home. No one saw anything. No cries. No witnesses. Only the hollow space where someone had existed the night before.

At first, the town tried to ignore it. Pretended not to notice the absence growing among them like an open wound bleeding in silence. But looks darted away, gestures became guarded, meetings in the square dwindled. The unease, once muffled, became a tangible weight, a subterranean murmur that eroded hope.

The local barony, pressed by rumors threatening to breach the town walls, sent messengers to the capital. In response came the royal guards—men in gleaming armor as cold and opaque as their eyes. They patrolled in pairs, noted names, questioned neighbors with rehearsed questions, but found no answers. Not because they did not search, but because they could not. The truth lay beyond the reach of laws, beyond mortal comprehension.

As the missing multiplied, whispers took root. Low voices, stories murmured behind locked doors, shared fears on starless nights. Strange sounds were said to issue from the old dry well behind the church. Shrouded figures seen on the hills at dusk, their forms dissolving before dawn. Terrible nightmares plagued even the hardest skeptics—dreams where a child wept, trapped behind walls, suffocating beneath something unseen. The guards called it hysteria. The priest—the only one still celebrating Mass—declared it punishment, divine retribution for sins forgotten, acts of a justice no one remembered.

And so, while reason shattered, superstition blossomed. Salt crosses hung on doors, talismans of bone and withered herbs lined windows, tarot cards burned in makeshift bonfires before dawn. A desperate war on fear. Yet even the most fervent knew—or pretended to know—that it was mere tradition. Nothing real. Folklore to soothe anxious hearts.

Or so they wanted to believe.

On the forty-third day of autumn, everything changed. Normalcy was torn away and a dark veil descended upon Eldenrock. The guards called it “the discovery”—and the town would never be the same. Curfew fell mercilessly: six tolls, locked doors, shuttered windows, no candles lit. No voice raised above a breath. Night became forbidden ground, even the guards dared not venture beyond the walls.

Her name was Ila. A ten-year-old girl, daughter of a deaf craftsman, small and quiet as a shadow that dares not grow. That day she had wandered beyond town, near the ancient trees at the forest’s edge, collecting strange stones and leaf silhouettes as the sun bled out on the horizon. But she vanished before the last light died.

The search was long and frantic. Dogs nosing through the mud, scouts cutting through choking undergrowth, monks praying for her soul. Nothing. The forest seemed alive, devouring each footstep, refusing to return its prey.

Until the next morning, when a guard came running back, pale as wax, eyes wide, mouth a silent scream. He pointed north—toward the forest—and sobbed without control.

Three men went. Only two returned.

They found Ila. Impaled.

Not bound. Not fallen by chance. Impaled with a cruelty crafted to transcend time.

The tree itself was a twisted monster, branches like bony fingers extended in eternal vigil. Its trunk had been shaped—or grown—to spear. Dark wood pierced her abdomen like a dagger, tearing flesh and muscle, slicing organs and vessels, until it emerged between her shoulder blades like a macabre mast.

Ila’s entrails had been partially ripped free by the impalement, hanging from the trunk like viscous offerings. They dripped slowly onto the roots, staining the earth with a living blotch—a grotesque painting that seemed to move, to breathe. The roots around it lay black and slick, as though feeding on the child’s agony.

The flesh at the wound was a chaos of texture and hue: flayed, shredded into rotting-silk strips, with deep, irregular lacerations as if inhuman hands had carved symbols into living flesh with bone knives. Twisted glyphs pulsed across the wound—strange, writhing signs, as if the tree itself served as altar to a forgotten cult.

Ila’s face was impossible to forget. Her eyes wide open—not glazed, but taut, as if still clinging to pain. Tears streaked her cheeks, rivers of dried blood glinting in morning’s muted light. Her eyelashes caked together, hardened by fear and despair. Her nose broken, off-kilter. Her jaw hung to one side—dislocated or shattered—in one final act of violence.

Her lips were split at the corners, as though something had forced her mouth open, tearing flesh to hold her scream agape—an eternal, silent cry. Her teeth were cracked, some broken, crushed by horror’s final blow. Her tongue… had been removed.

On the ground below, it was pinned with fine stakes of sharpened twigs, set into the soil with ritualistic precision. Among twisted roots it pulsed, as if carrying the girl’s suffering in a quiet corner of the wood. A damp, guttural whisper emanated from it—not human, not animal, but a breath from the earth’s own womb, as though the forest swallowed pain to spit it back in murmurs only the mad could hear.

And the symbol.

Carved into the earth in a viscous substance too dark for mere blood, a living stain that pulsed and writhed. An imperfect circle traced in worm-like lines, inward spirals swirling like vortexes of madness, and a sharp, straight line cleaving through it all, a rift across reality. It did not lie still; it breathed.

It was not just a mark. It was an invitation.

And a promise.

The men who witnessed that scene were never the same. One collapsed, buttocks settling into the damp soil. Another vomited uncontrollably in a spectacle of despaired frailty. Petrick, the third, stood frozen—eyes vacant. After that, he never spoke.

The girl’s body was borne in silence. No bells tolled, no prayers uttered. She was buried hastily in an ancient crypt beside Eldenrock’s cemetery. The air still reeked of recent rain, and the cold stones seemed to absorb the weight of the secret.

A sketch of the symbol was sent to the capital—an act of desperation in search of answers. None came.

But what truly haunts Eldenrock is not the impaled body. It is Petrick.

Since that morning, he neither sleeps nor eats nor responds. His brown eyes went flat gray and lifeless, as if drained of color by some unseen force. His skin shrinks each day, as though intent on fleeing the skeleton beneath. He sits, gasping for air, trembling under the weight of what he saw.

Today, they said he spoke. Whispered a phrase that shatters me:

“…the girl is crying…”

He spoke not in fear or despair but as if stating a simple fact, like one who notes the rain.

Those words pursue me like a slow poison.

I could not ignore them. I grabbed my lantern and went to the cemetery. The town lay dead—not empty, but dead. The houses made no sound; even windows stood still. The wind trailed me like a shadow that could not be left behind.

At the cemetery gate, I hesitated. Cold, clammy iron, slick as sweaty flesh. My touch made me retch. When it groaned open, the world behind me twisted as though I crossed a threshold into something older and angrier.

The cemetery was no longer mere stones and rotting crosses. It was a field of presences.

Then I saw the light. The gravedigger’s cabin, supposed to be empty, breathed a flickering yellow flame. Light escaped through its warped boards, dancing as something alive writhed within—whispering forbidden secrets.

The door creaked. A small silhouette crossed the curtained window like a motionless child.

I did not flee or scream. I froze.

Then the old gravedigger appeared—lantern in hand, hollowed eyes, bony fingers clutching the light as though it were a shield against the world itself.

— Who’s there? — his voice crumbled like dust.

— Lieutenant Leonard. I’m here for the girl, — I replied, gripping the remnants of my courage.

He said nothing. He only lowered his head and pointed the lantern toward the stone path leading to the crypt.

— Then may God forgive you… — he murmured before turning and vanishing into darkness.

I walked that path, each step a tremor on the spine of something dormant—something that did not wish to be awakened.

Behind me, the forest closed in like a maw.

And the crying began again. Low, damp, rising from the earth.

Childlike.

As if the very night wept.