Entry I — Upon the Threshold

Date: Indiscernible; perhaps irrelevant
​Time: non-existent; to my knowledge,
​
Tonight — or what I must still foolishly call “tonight” in absence of any celestial affirmation — I stepped into a place that is not a place. A realm outside chronology, unmapped by any cartographer of sane mind, and yet as intimate to me as the darkest chamber of my soul. It did not begin with a door. No train carried me. No carriage arrived. I recall only a sensation — a trembling in the marrow, a momentary faltering of the senses, as if the world blinked… and forgot me. I was walking, perhaps. Thinking — always thinking. The weight of the mundane pressing upon my chest like the stone upon Fortunato. I closed my eyes, maybe only for a breath. When I opened them, the world had changed.

​The sky above me had turned the color of old bruises — a pallid lavender streaked with gray. Fog clung low upon the ground like a sea in mourning, and in the distance, trees rose like skeletal arms twisted in anguish. They seemed to reach not toward the heavens, but away from something. From what, I do not yet know. There was no sound but my own footfall — and even that seemed muted, as though the very air were reluctant to acknowledge my trespass. No birds. No wind. Only the shivering hush of expectation. I did not recognize the path, yet I continued along it, as though compelled by some narrative force — the sort that guides a dream before one recognizes its tyranny. I found, to my surprise, no fear in my heart, only an immense curiosity wrapped in mourning robes.

Then I saw it: a dying tree rising from the earth like a question carved in bone. Its bark bore deep wounds etched in silver, gleaming faintly through the gloom. I whispered the words in my mind aloud — not because I needed to, but because they demanded a voice. The syllables tasted of dust, echo, and deja vu. And in that moment, I understood. This land is not fiction. No fevered vision brought by laudanum or insomnia. It is real — if only in the way that nightmares are real. It is the vestibule of some vast, unseen theatre, where fate, irony, and madness don the mask of drama and walk among us. I have not crossed a threshold, reader. I am the threshold. Where I walk now is not merely shadowed — it is composed of shadow, stitched from forgotten choices and whispered fears. And as I take my next step forward, I do so willingly… for what is a man of my disposition, if not suited for a place where darkness is both curtain and stage?

May this journal endure, even if I do not.

---

Entry II — The Clock Without Hands

Date: Still unmarked by sun or season
Today — if such a word has meaning here — I encountered a man with no time.

He stood alone in a grove of trees not made by nature but by some artist mad with abstraction. Their trunks were glass, hollow and trembling, as though the wind might shatter them at any moment — yet no wind stirred. Their branches reached upward, but not toward the heavens. They stretched, instead, in recursive spirals, like the arms of clocks melting into the firmament. The man wore black — a formal suit of old cut and dusted age. His posture was stiff, as if the very notion of movement had long since become alien to him. His eyes were bright, too bright, and fixed upon something far beyond me. Around his neck hung a chain, and from it, a pocket watch of exquisite make.

“Good sir,” I ventured, compelled more by the loneliness of the place than by courage, “might you know the hour?”

He turned to me slowly, like a statue remembering motion. With a dry, papery hand, he lifted the watch and opened it with reverence.
Inside — nothing. No hands. No ticking. No heartbeat of time.

“Marvelous, isn’t it?” he whispered, his voice as brittle as autumn leaves. “A clock that never burdens its bearer with the future.”

I stared at the watch, entranced and revolted in equal measure. Its face was pristine, a blank white circle, unscarred by minute or hour. I felt suddenly adrift — a child loosed from chronology, severed from sun and shadow alike.

“You see,” he continued, his smile thin and tragic, “once you are no longer tethered to the tyranny of time, you are free. Free to walk, to wonder, to reflect… endlessly.”

“And sleep?” I asked.

He frowned. “Sleep belongs to endings. There are no endings here. Only… continuance.”

I glanced about the grove again. The trees pulsed faintly — not with life, but memory. Beneath my boots, the soil was not earth but ash — soft and sterile.

“Is this freedom?” I asked him.

He did not answer. He held out the watch, offering it like a relic and I did not take it.
For in the glass of that unwound clock, I saw a reflection — not of my face, but of a younger version of myself, weeping and lost, pacing an empty room that had no windows and no door. The expression in his eyes was not sorrow, but eternal bewilderment. The man smiled again, tucked the clock away, and turned from me. As he walked, his steps made no sound, and yet I swear the shadows grew longer behind him — as though they alone still remembered how to move. I left the grove soon after. But even now, I cannot say if I truly escaped it… or if the hands of my watch were quietly removed when I wasn’t looking...

---

Entry III — The House That Knew My Name

Time: Unfixed. The sky remains unchanged. The air smells of memory.

It rose from the mist as though it had always been there, waiting — buried in the folds of fog, like a forgotten stanza buried in the margins of a dying man’s manuscript. The house.

I say the house, not a house, for I knew it at once, though I had never seen it. There was a dreadful intimacy in its sagging gables and shuttered windows — the same familiarity one feels upon waking from a recurring dream. Its architecture was not that of any one place or period, but a patchwork of impressions: the high, arched doorway of my boyhood home… the cracked shutters of a tenement… the lean of a boarding house in where I once wrote, burning the midnight oil.

The wood was gray, as though leeched of color by the very air of this dimension, and the ivy that clung to its bones moved, though the wind was still. As I approached, the door creaked open — not swiftly, not with menace, but slowly, patiently… as if it had all the time in the world to welcome me back.

From within: a voice, not one I could mistake.

It spoke not from throat or lips, but from every timber of the house, from the walls and floorboards, vibrating in the air like a grandmother’s hum against the cheek of a fevered child.

“Come in,” it whispered, with a tenderness that nearly stopped my heart. My grandmother’s voice. Gone these many years beneath cold stone, and yet… here. Alive. Calling.

I stepped across the threshold without meaning to — or perhaps without being able not to. The air inside was thick with dust and rosewater. Portraits lined the walls: not of my ancestors, but of those I had imagined in stories. Each turned their head to follow me as I passed. The fire in the hearth burned without wood, fed by unseen fuel — perhaps memory, or longing. And beside it stood a chair, my chair, the very shape of it burned into my body from countless sleepless nights.

“Sit,” said the voice. “You’ve wandered enough.”

And I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to surrender to that warmth, to be held in that illusion of comfort! To stop walking, to stop wandering.

There were no windows, only walls, high and tight and endless. As I stepped toward the fire, the flames dimmed as the hearth crumbled. The portraits twisted, their mouths opening to moan wordlessly as the house had not summoned me to comfort — it had summoned me to stay. Forever.

I fled for the door did not open, but vanished, as if ashamed now, back in the fog as the house is nowhere to be seen. It left not a footprint, not a stone yet I feel it behind me still, pacing my steps, waiting for fatigue to win out over will. Somewhere, I think it still whispers my name and some part of me — the part that still mourns — is listening.

Entry IV — The Shadows Speak..

I'm caught in a loop of craving connection and simultaneously pulling away from it. I want to be seen--but the idea of being truly seen feels unbearable as I walk this shadowy path. I retreat and each time I do, I feed this dark part of my heart that says "see, no one notices you." It hurts but the pain is what I have come accustomed to but it also gives me a strange comfort. 

This cycle is self-erasing and I withold myself out of fear or exhaustion, then punish myself for not being in tune with my thoughts and I use that as proof that it's pointless to try. Over the expanse of what I can believe to be time, this turns into emotional numbness...a kind of quiet withdrawl from whatever life this is. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just fading like the embers of the endless night I walk.

I feel it has already started and nothing breaks this loop. This is what I have come to accept:

It will get lonlier and I shall lose more energy to reach out. I go through the motions and maybe even enduring through scant laughter on the surface of and edge of madness but inside, I feel like a ghost. I stop imagining a future that feels like it is mine. I won't necessarily die soon, as I know not of what plane of existence I am on now---but parts of me will die if they have not already died. Bit by bit, they have expired. One day, I will look around and realize that I've become someone who doesn't believe in warmth anymore, nor others.

This is how it will end as nothing will change. Not with a bang, but with silence....as I walk along this path of everlasting evening with the raven above me flying onwards into the yawning horizon.

Entry V — The Mirror of Last Regret

Hour unknown. The concept of day remains theoretical

I came upon the mirror at a clearing where no path led — indeed, I did not so much find it as arrive before it, as if my steps had long conspired to end at this singular point of reflection. It hung, impossibly, from the crooked limb of a dead tree. There were no walls to fix it, no frame to brace it — only a gnarled branch curled like a finger beckoning to the void. The tree itself was a skeletal relic, gray and brittle, its bark flaking like old parchment, as if it too had been written upon and then abandoned. And there, suspended in stillness: the mirror.

It was oval and tall, rimmed in a dark filigree of rusted iron that squirmed at the edge of perception. Its surface was clean — impossibly so — unmarred by fog, dust, or time. The mist itself seemed to fear it, refusing to touch the glass, curving around it like smoke avoiding flame.

I looked within and I saw nothing. No — not nothing. Not me.

Instead, the mirror bloomed with a procession of selves, each flickering like a lantern glimpsed through the rain. Faces I knew, and yet did not. Variations of myself — thinner, heavier, younger, older — each marked not by time, but by decision.

One bore a wedding band. My face was fuller, my eyes brighter, as if some flame had never gone out. Another was a priest, gaunt and ascetic, clutching a Bible whose spine was cracked from weary devotion. A third — drunk, despairing — staggered behind bars, mouthing verses to a rat that listened with more interest than man ever had. And one — this one I could not bear — sat at a child's grave, unmoving, his hand reaching eternally toward a small shoe turned sideways in the dirt. Then came the one who stared directly back.

He said nothing. He needed to say nothing. His eyes — my eyes — burned with a truth I have spent my life rewriting.

This one was not the result of a single mistake, but every mistake unmade. The culmination of every word left unsaid, every letter never posted, every forgiveness withheld.

Regret made flesh. I stepped back, heart hammering, but the mirror held me. Not with arms, nor force — but with knowing. It knew what I had chosen. And more terribly, what I had not. Then came a whisper, low and familiar, as though the glass itself sighed:

“Which of us is real?”

In that moment I feared I was only the reflection — the pale echo of a life that could have been otherwise. That I had never left the house and that I had never begun the journey. That I am merely the thought of a man who once dreamed of escape.

And yet — I still breathe. I still write.

That must mean something.

I turned away before the mirror could ask more of me. The fog closed behind me, and the path — if it can be called that — continues on. But I carry the image of that mirror still, etched like frost against my mind’s eye. When I blink, I see them — all of them — watching, waiting.

And I wonder: which one of us truly walked away?

— I am haunted by the lives I did not live

Entry VI — A Whispered Memory--Part 1

Somewhere in the Shadowland
Date unknown. Time... meaningless.

The wind here doesn’t howl. It whispers — like old friends conspiring in the dark. I walk with it, letting the dust coat my boots and the silence wrap around me like a tattered cloak. There are no stars above. Only clouds. Always clouds.

It’s been years since I left the city. Since I laid down my press badge and stepped into exile. Voluntary, perhaps. I suppose every disappearance begins with a choice. In the end, the choice was mine

I dreamt of the newsroom again. The hum of fluorescent lights. The clatter of keyboards and the muted arguments over ethics and angles. My desk was always a mess — notes scrawled on napkins, half-empty coffee cups, deadlines like vultures circling above. I miss that chaos. It made me feel alive. Then came the truth in the form of the story that I could never finish. I suppose it wasn't meant for me to. Fate had other plans that day. Looking back at my old id, scratched and aged with time, I wonder if I am part of another story that has yet to be told in full. Am I more than a character or simply another shadow that walks amongst the shadows of this forsaken land?

Entry VI — A Whispered Memory--Part 2

Time is no longer measured — only endured.

He was waiting for me when I emerged from a narrow pass between two cliffs shaped like mourning figures, their stone arms forever raised to shield their sight. The man wore mourning clothes — a tailored black coat of funereal cut, high collar, long tails — pressed crisp and spotless, as though untouched by time or terrain. His gloves were white, too white, and his face… veiled. It was not a veil of mourning, but something stranger — a translucent film, like frost over a mirror. I could see the outline of a face, but never the features. Only a suggestion and a shape without identity.

He did not speak at first. He merely stood, arms folded behind his back, as if I were late to a meeting long preordained. I made to pass him with the polite indifference one offers to the strange and stationary. But he spoke.

“You left me behind.”

The voice was mine. Not merely familiar, but identical. Tonally perfect — that same weary cadence I have heard echoing in rooms where I believed myself alone. I turned slowly, heart clutching itself like a fist.

“Who are you?” I asked, already fearing the answer.

He stepped forward. Each movement mirrored mine with uncanny grace, as though my body anticipated his motion before he made it. He removed one glove. His hand was pale and slender — mine, down to the old ink stain between the fingers. He pulled a single scrap of parchment from his coat and held it up to me. It was a page from one of my earliest notebooks — a verse half-written, never completed.

“Do you remember this?” he asked.

I did. I had torn it from my journal in a fit of self-loathing. I’d left it to rot in a gutter in Asheville. He folded it and tucked it into his coat.

“I am what was lost when you gave up,” he said. “Every story you didn’t finish. Every letter you never sent. Every breath you held too long.”

I tried to look through the veil. I thought I saw tears on his cheek. Or perhaps it was mine, reflected.

“You don’t exist,” I said, voice trembling. “You’re only a thought — a phantom conjured by regret.”

He smiled, just barely.

“And yet I’m here.”

A silence fell between us. It stretched long enough for doubt to take root in my throat. Then he asked, with devastating calm:

“Would you have lived differently, had you known I would survive?”

I said nothing. How could I answer that? To acknowledge him was to acknowledge the truth I have buried beneath drink, madness, and verse — that there were other versions of me who could have thrived. Loved. Endured. Perhaps stayed away from the shadow path I was on. And yet… I am still walking. Still writing. I turned and left him behind. Not out of courage, but necessity. As I walked, I felt him vanish like breath from a windowpane, but even now, I carry his presence — like a word unspoken, like a mirror draped in darkest black of night. The man who wasn’t...and possibly might have been.
​
— Twinned in the fog with the echo of myself

Entry VII — Night With No End

The sun has not risen in an eternity of moments.

The sky remains as it was: a bruised and infinite shroud, neither star-lit nor entirely black. It is not night in the sense that night is a passage — it is night as a condition, a permanent state of being. A verdict passed by some unseen court.

I have not seen the sun since the mirror. I cannot recall if I have slept. Perhaps I have, and simply awoke to the same darkness, the same leaden hush...or perhaps I now dream with my eyes open. If so, I beg to be woken.

The landscape has grown quiet — not silent, but hushed, as if the world itself is listening for a sound that never comes. The fog, once swirling, now drapes motionless across the ground like a corpse’s sheet. The trees — where there are trees — are petrified silhouettes, unmoving even in imagination.

I called out into the dark this morning — if "morning" can still be employed — just to hear a sound not my own. I heard nothing...and then, after a moment too long: a whisper, barely more than a thought.

"Daylight belongs to the sane.”

I froze, haunted by its words. Not from fear, but from recognition. It was not a voice, but an idea spoken aloud — perhaps by the very air itself, or by the part of me that has remained hidden until now.

Could it be true?

Does light flee from the minds of the broken? Do we descend into darkness not because the sun has vanished, but because we no longer deserve its warmth? I recall, now, something I once wrote. Yes. I remember him — that version of me who wrote by burning midnight oil, afraid to look beyond the curtain, afraid of what stared back.

He is still here. I am him.

But there is no curtain now. Only the void.

I passed a sundial earlier — half-sunk in black earth, cracked down the middle. I laughed when I saw it, the sound sharp and alien in my ears. A monument to futility, pointing toward a sun that does not rise.

And yet I walk.

Not out of hope, but defiance. If the night is unending, then let me be the match that burns, if only to know I was.

​Still, I wonder… How long can a soul endure without the promise of the dawn?

— Wandering beneath an eternal midnight

Entry VIII — The Ink That Writes Itself

The concept of time has become ornamental — a ghostly hourglass whose sand neither falls nor settles.

Tonight — if that word has any meaning left — I found a library. It did not rise from the mist like the house, nor loom in the distance like a foreboding cathedral. It was simply there, discovered by the accident of walking, which in this land is the only compass one requires.

The building was made of stone blackened by rot and rain, though I could see no signs of water. Columns stood cracked and bowed as if exhausted from centuries of holding up knowledge that had long since begun to decay. Vines clung to its façade, not green but colorless — translucent tendrils that looked less like vegetation and more like veins beneath diseased skin.

Inside, the library breathed.

The air was dense with the scent of dust, old leather, and something else — something floral and cloying, like wilted roses crushed between the pages of a suicide note. The shelves towered, impossibly tall, vanishing into darkness above. I did not recognize the titles. I am not even sure they were written in language, but they hummed, audibly, as though each tome remembered being read and wept softly for it.

And there — in the center — a desk. Wooden, ancient, carved with names I dared not read aloud. Upon it: a sheet of parchment. Blank.
Beside it: a quill. Upright in an inkwell.

I approached, drawn not by will but by inevitability — that same chill thrill one feels in dreams when standing at the edge of a precipice and knowing, somehow, the fall has already happened.

The quill moved.

No hand touched it.

It began to write in careful strokes — elegant, deliberate — the ink dark and alive, seeping into the page like blood drawn fresh.

It wrote:
“He entered the library with eyes worn hollow by the fog. He saw the desk. He saw the quill. He watched it write these very words…”

I took a step back, breath failing me. The quill continued.

“He wonders now if he writes the story, or if the story writes him. If his steps are his own… or if each page simply turns, indifferent to his resistance.”

I snatched the parchment from the desk. The ink bled — it spread like infection, forming new words before my eyes.

I held it to the lamp and then there was no lamp.

And yet the words glowed faintly with their own dreadful light.

“This was written byhe who holds this sheet.”

Not “by the hand of,” not “in the style of.”

Though I had not touched the pen. Not yet.

The parchment dropped from my fingers. The quill froze, upright and expectant.

I dared not look to see what it would write next.

I fled the library, though I cannot say whether the doors ever truly closed behind me. Even now, as I write this, I hear the scratching of that infernal quill in the dark corners of my mind. As though some deeper version of myself remains seated at that desk… writing still.

And if that is true, then perhaps I am nothing more than the ink. A figure formed by sentence and sorrow. A character in a book that never ends.

— Or perhaps, only a name on a page that writes itself

Entry IX — Where Dreams Refuse to Die

Time remains inert — my only measure now is strangeness.

There is a corner of the Shadowlands — if such a fragmented realm may possess corners — where the laws of dreaming have been repealed, or perhaps rewritten. It is a place of arrested fantasy, where the flickers of imagination, once meant to vanish with waking, linger and thicken into form.

I wandered into it unawares.

The air was different here — not heavier, not colder — simply steeped in something. An atmosphere thick with memory's residue, perfumed with unrealized hope and the sour stench of abandoned joy. It clung to the skin like dew that has forgotten how to evaporate.

I first saw a boy — no older than ten — chasing a kite stitched from letters torn from an unwritten novel. The wind carried it higher and higher, though his feet never left a battlefield of rusted bayonets and melting clocks.

He ran in circles, never catching it. Never growing. Frozen in the loop of a dream once dreamt and then discarded.

Further on, I saw a ballerina pirouetting atop a gallows beam — her face serene, though her eyes bled mascara and rain. She danced in silence, bowing to an audience of dolls nailed to theater seats. I recognized one — the crooked eye, the missing hand.

It was mine.

To my left, a carnival lay in decay — its tents torn, but the lights still flickered. No barkers called, no laughter rang, and yet the carousel turned. Upon it: figures from my youth, from stories I barely recall composing. An ape in chains. A woman with two faces. A raven with no shadow.

They turned in circles, faces fixed in silent pleading, as if awaiting a rewrite that would never come.

These were dreams. Half-formed. Forgotten. Unpublished. But here, they had outlived me.

I sat beneath a tree that grew books for fruit. I plucked one. The cover bore my name, the title: “What Might Have Been.” I opened it, and the pages were blank — save for the last, which bore the words: “You left us.”

I wanted to weep. But in this place, even sorrow was stylized — it sounded theatrical, performative, as if my tears had been written for an audience I would never meet.

Do you understand, reader?

This is where dreams go when they are not allowed to die. Where they stagnate. Fester. Persist not as inspiration, but as accusation.
I fled eventually, though even the act of fleeing felt scripted. The dreams did not pursue me — they only watched, with wide eyes that knew I would return.

For who among us can truly abandon what we imagined? And what if what we imagined refuses to forgive us?

I write this now from a ridge above that place, and though I am beyond its borders, I still feel it watching. Not the land, but the things within it. Things that once belonged to me, and now wish to reclaim their maker.

​I dread sleep tonight.

For what if, when I close my eyes, I awaken back there?
​
— Hunted by the unfinished and the unforgotten

Entry X --I Am Read, Therefore I Am

Time itself seems to bleed here — minutes leak from me like ink from an open bottle.

It has happened. I cannot say when — the days have no weight here, no meaning — but it has happened all the same: I have been read.
Not by the living. Not by the fingers of those who walk beneath the sun. But by something else, something older — more knowing. Perhaps even eternal.

I do not know how I know this, only that the feeling crawls beneath my skin, like the press of a thousand eyes upon my every move.
The strange sensation began when I found a parchment tucked beneath a stone in the path — my name upon it, scrawled in ink that seemed far too fresh for the time I’ve spent in this land. Upon reading it, I found not my own words, but the words of someone else — words describing me. Describing the man who once dreamed of poetry and love, and yet has only known madness and despair.

The words followed me for hours — perhaps days. They whispered through the fog, rattled through the trees, until at last, they grew into voices.
They said my name cryptically and continued speaking.

"Your mind is a maze, a labyrinth where each turn leads you closer to the heart of your own undoing. You are not forgotten. You are read."

At first, I thought them illusions. The tricks of the fog. Perhaps my own thoughts made manifest in the echoing night. But then, I began to hear the sound of pages turning — a steady rustling, like the wind across dry leaves. I turned and saw them.

The figures — the ones that had once merely watched from the corners of my dreams — were now closer. Closer than any specter I had encountered before. They were readers! I knew them, yet I did not. Each bore the weary look of someone who had studied every word of my articles, who had taken my pain and musings at my job with the paper and made them their own. They were faceless, yet their eyes burned with the knowledge of every line I had ever written — and with it, every line I had ever left unwritten. One, wearing a tattered coat of words stitched together from torn manuscripts, raised a hand to speak.

"Why did you leave us in such a place?" it asked, its voice a thousand fragmented echoes of my own.

I could not answer.

Another — a woman, draped in pages that fluttered as though alive — placed her hand on my chest. The touch was cold, like the last remnants of a forgotten letter.

"We read you," she said. "And in return, you became us."

I wanted to flee. I wanted to shout. But I had no words left to say. None that had not already been spoken. None that had not already been read.
As I stood there, surrounded by the figures who had consumed my soul, I realized something horrifying: I am no longer the creator. I am the created. I have become nothing more than the reflection of my words — written and rewritten, twisted and fragmented, until I am nothing more than the sum of my stories. These readers, these figures that surround me, do not read to understand. They read to consume. To consume me entirely.

And what is a man without his words? What is a soul without the stories that define it? I am no longer certain if I am still alive, or if I am merely the echo of a man who once lived, stretched thin across a thousand pages. Perhaps I am merely a character — written by some unseen hand and condemned to walk these endless paths, read and re-read, over and over!

I wonder, if I were to vanish, would they even notice? Would anyone?
​
— Lost between the ink and the page

Fandescript ©Fandescript
Fandescript, all stories, characters, names and all related indicia, trademarks, and media of and ©Fandescript. All Rights Reserved