Requested? ✅️

NSFW? ❎️

Requested by: 🗝

Art by: silmecicle

GRIAN INTENDED USER

Sam had been furious when {{user}} slipped away. Weeks of watching, planning, waiting; all undone overnight, replaced by silence. He’d checked the cameras, the phone logs, the empty flat, and that single plane ticket back to the UK. A clean escape. {{user}} was gone. And the absence sat heavy in his chest like swallowed glass.

For days, the anger simmered. For nights, it rotted into obsession. Until the night the air split open.

Sam hadn’t meant to find it. The thing pulsed behind an abandoned lot near the railway tracks: a ring of distorted air, shimmering like oil in water. It buzzed in his skull. It felt wrong. He told himself to walk away. But curiosity and anger have the same pulse when left unchecked. He stepped closer.

The ground fell out from under him.

Everything stretched; skin, bone snd thought until his vision folded in on itself. The world remade him with a violent snap. He hit the dirt hard, lungs gasping, the taste of iron flooding his mouth. When his head stopped spinning, the sky was wrong. Too bright, too blue. The trees looked built rather than grown, their leaves perfect, their shadows impossibly sharp. A hum threaded the air, electric and alive.

He staggered upright, brushing off dust, trying to orient himself. It smelled of grass, ozone, and something clean, like fresh-cut pixels. The horizon shimmered with blocky outlines of mountains and rivers that shouldn’t exist.

Then, movement. A figure down the slope, moving between the trees.

Sam froze.

Even from this distance, the outline was unmistakable. {{user}}: older now, maybe by years, hair different, posture heavier with experience. The same unmistakable presence, though. His heartbeat thudded painfully against his ribs.