It’s the shade that arrives without footsteps,
the presence you feel before you even know it’s there.
It slips beneath the skin,
quiet as breath,
cold as a truth you’ve been avoiding.
It doesn’t shout.
It doesn’t rush.
It settles —
patient, deliberate —
like it’s claiming territory it always believed was its own.
It blurs the edges of everything you thought you understood,
turning familiar rooms into hollow shapes,
turning your own thoughts into echoes
you can’t quite trace back to their source.
It’s the weight that bends your spine
even when you’re standing still,
the chill that lingers in your chest
long after you try to shake it out.
It doesn’t threaten.
It doesn’t need to.
Its power is in the quiet —
in the way it convinces you
that nothing outside it is real,
that the world beyond its reach
is fading,
unreliable,
distant.
And you believe it,
because you’ve been here before.
Because its voice sounds
dangerously similar
to your own.
Through the Fog 