There are places beyond sight, beyond time, beyond reason.
Places where reality bends, where dimensions bleed into each other like ink on water.
I have walked those paths. I have seen what should not be seen.
And I have returned… but not unchanged.

This is the story of the Fractured Veil—a world between worlds.
A place where thoughts take shape, where time is a liquid, where the very laws of existence are mere suggestions.

Few have entered it.
Fewer still have left.
And none have remained the same.

The Road That Led to Nowhere

I had no intention of entering the Fractured Veil.

But fate—or something far older—had other plans.

It began with a door.

A door that should not have existed.

It stood in the middle of an empty field, a towering thing of dark metal, covered in symbols that changed when I wasn’t looking.

I had seen many strange things in my long life, but never had I seen a door that whispered.

“Come inside.”

Not a command. Not a plea.

A simple invitation.

And against my better judgment…

I accepted.

The Place That Had No Rules

The moment I stepped through, the world unraveled.

I was no longer in the field.

I was no longer anywhere.

The ground beneath me was a shifting mosaic of colors, flickering from stone to sand to water to nothingness.

Above me, the sky moved—not in the way clouds drift, but in the way thoughts change.

One moment it was a golden spiral, spinning endlessly into itself.
The next, it was a sea of shattered mirrors, each shard reflecting a different version of me.

Then, I looked forward…

And saw the beings.

The Architects of the Unmade

They were not human.

Not gods.
Not spirits.
Not creatures in any sense I had ever known.

They had no fixed form.

One moment, they were towers of glass, filled with flowing ink.
The next, they were floating ribbons of silver, weaving in and out of existence.

And when they finally spoke, I did not hear words.

I heard concepts.

Ideas.

A voice that was neither sound nor thought, but both at once, filling my mind with truths that had never been spoken.

“You are not meant to be here.”

“And yet, here you are.”

“An anomaly within an anomaly.”

“What will you become?”

I steadied my grip on my staff.

“I am Merlin.” I said, forcing my voice into existence. “And I seek to understand.”

The beings shifted, their forms twisting into something almost humanoid, but not quite.

“Understand?” they whispered, their voices shaping and reshaping the air around me.

“Then you must witness.”

And suddenly—

I was everywhere at once.

The Visions of the Fractured Veil

My mind split into a thousand selves.

I saw a world where I had never existed.
A reality where magic was never born.
A dimension where I was not Merlin, but something else entirely—something with wings, something that sang the fabric of the universe into being.

I saw civilizations rise and fall in the same breath.

I watched as a single thought became an entire world, only to collapse back into nothing the moment it was forgotten.

And I understood.

This place—this Veil—was not a prison.

It was not a realm or a kingdom.

It was a mistake.

A place that never should have been.

The Door That Would Not Open

I tried to leave.

Tried to turn back to the door that had brought me here.

But there was no door anymore.

Just the endless shifting of reality, a world that had no walls, no edges, no exits.

“There is no leaving.” The beings whispered.

“Not unless you become something else.”

I turned to them, my grip on my staff tightening.

“Then tell me,” I said, my voice steady despite the chaos, “what happens to those who stay?”

The beings did not answer.

They showed me.

And what I saw shook me to my core.

The Ones Who Stayed

Figures moved through the Veil.

But they were not like me.

They had once been people—travelers, wanderers, those who had strayed into this place just as I had.

But they had been here too long.

Their forms had unraveled.

Their thoughts had shaped them into things beyond recognition.

One was a storm of floating eyes, each blinking in and out of different timelines.
Another was a song that could never be finished, trapped in a loop of its own making.
And one—one was nothing at all.

Just an echo of a person who had been forgotten.

That was the final horror of the Veil.

To stay was to become.

And to become was to lose yourself.

Forever.

Merlin’s Escape

I turned to the beings, my mind racing.

“You claim there is no way out.”

“And yet, you have never met me before.”

For the first time, they hesitated.

Because they knew what I knew.

I was Merlin.

And I had broken greater barriers than this.

I reached deep into my magic, into the ancient knowledge I had gathered across time, and I spoke a word that had not been spoken since the dawn of reality.

A word that meant exit, boundary, return.

The Veil shuddered.

The colors blurred.

And then—

The door was before me again.

But it was not just a door anymore.

It was a choice.

To leave… or to learn what lay beyond.

I hesitated.

And that, traveler, is where you must decide.

Would you step through?

Or would you stay?

A Door That Was Not a Door

I stood before it.

A door, yet not a door.

It pulsed, flickered, and shifted between states of being—solid one moment, a mere outline the next, then something else entirely.

Through it, I could see a hundred different possibilities, a cascade of realities unfolding in ways both beautiful and terrifying.

One version showed me stepping through, never returning.
Another showed me turning away, forgetting all I had seen.
A third showed me becoming something… unrecognizable.

And then there was the fourth possibility.

The one I could not yet see.

The one that waited for me to decide.

“This is not a path that can be walked backward.”

The beings of the Veil whispered behind me, their voices rippling through the fabric of existence.

“Once you step through, Merlin, you are changed. Whether you return or not, the part of you that enters will never be the same.”

I took a breath.

“So be it.”

And I stepped through.

The Beyond That Should Not Exist

The moment I crossed the threshold, I ceased to be.

Not in the way of death, not in the way of disappearing—but in the way a flame stops being a flame when it becomes light and heat.

I had become something else.

And I saw.

I saw the foundations of reality, laid bare before me.

The threads of time, weaving through the cosmos like a tapestry spun by invisible hands.

The gears of fate, turning in patterns that no mortal or god had ever fully understood.

The raw, unfiltered essence of thought itself—not confined to the minds of creatures, but floating, infinite, shaping the very structure of existence.

This was not another world.

It was the space between worlds.

The place where realities were born, and where they died.

And I was not alone.

The Watchers of the Rift

They were waiting for me.

They had no faces, no voices, no names.

They were not gods, not mortals, not concepts as I had understood them.

They simply were.

They drifted through the void, studying me, their presence wrapping around my mind like a question that had not yet been spoken.

Then, all at once—

They spoke.

“You do not belong here, Merlin.”

“And yet, here you are.”

“A traveler. A witness. A mistake.”

Their words were not spoken aloud.

They appeared fully formed in my mind, as if they had always been there, waiting for me to understand them.

“What is this place?” I asked, my own voice echoing without sound.

One of the Watchers moved closer—though movement did not exist here, not as I knew it.

“This is the Foundation. The Deep Script. The Weaving of All Things.”

“You stand outside time, outside existence, outside the reality you once knew.”

“And you should not be here.”

The Choice That Should Not Be Given

I had many names across history.

Sorcerer.
Wanderer.
Seer.
Fool.

But never before had I been called a mistake.

“Then why allow me here?” I asked.

The Watchers shifted, their forms flickering between possibilities.

“Because you are the first to arrive by your own will.”

“All others have been taken. Stolen. Absorbed into the Veil against their knowledge.”

“But you… you chose this.”

“And choice… is dangerous.”

The sky—or what passed for a sky in this endless nothingness—shuddered.

The Watchers turned as one, looking toward something unseen.

“It is coming.”

A pulse rippled through the space around us, and I felt it—a presence, vast and hungry, stirring at the edges of creation.

Not a being.

Not a force.

Something worse.

The Watchers turned back to me.

“You must choose, Merlin.”

“Leave this place, and forget what you have seen.”

“Or stay, and face what comes.”

The air trembled, the weight of an unknowable presence drawing closer.

And I knew.

If I left now, I would never return.

I would never know the truth of this place, the truth of what lay beyond.

But if I stayed…

I might never leave.

The Shadow at the Edge of Reality

Before I could answer, it arrived.

The presence that had been waiting.

It did not appear so much as it became known—a force so fundamental to reality itself that I realized it had always been there, lurking just outside perception.

It spoke.

And I have never before—or since—heard anything like it.

“You are out of place, Merlin.”

“You are not meant to know.”

“But now you do.”

The Watchers did not move.

They did not answer.

They simply waited.

Because the choice was mine.

To leave, and forget.
Or to stay, and understand.

Even knowing the risks, even knowing what might happen…

I had to know.

“Then show me.”

The Watchers turned to the presence.

The presence turned to me.

And in the span of a single breath—

I saw everything.

The Moment That Lasted Forever

The instant I spoke the words, “Then show me,” the universe shattered.

Not in the way glass breaks.

Not in the way time skips.

It shattered as if I had never existed in the first place—as if my very presence in reality had been a fragile illusion, and the mere act of seeing beyond had torn it apart.

And in its place…

I saw.

I saw the script upon which reality was written, letters shifting, rewriting themselves before my eyes, endless permutations of cause and effect spiraling into infinity.

I saw the first breath of existence, the moment where something became more than nothing, where thought became matter, became law, became truth.

I saw worlds unborn, their fates hanging in a delicate balance, waiting for the right hand to tip the scales.

And I saw the ones who had come before me.

The Others.

The ones who had stood here, who had dared to ask the same question I had.

But unlike me…

They had not survived the answer.

The Unraveled Ones

They drifted through the void, figures of light and shadow, their forms broken, unfinished, eternally shifting between states of being.

Not dead.
Not alive.
Not gone.

Merely forgotten.

Their eyes—if they could be called that—turned toward me.

They did not speak in words.

They spoke in fragments of lost thoughts, echoes of choices unmade, whispers of fates unwritten.

“I was…”
“I knew…”
“I sought…”
“But now…”

They did not remember who they had been.

Because to see this place is to be consumed by it.

“You are not like us,” one of them whispered, its voice a thread barely holding its shape.

“You still have form. You still have… you.”

I gripped my staff. For now.

But I knew that if I stayed too long…

I would become like them.

Lost.

Unraveled.

A thought without a thinker.

But still…

I had asked to see.

And I had not yet seen enough.

The True Nature of the Watchers

I turned back to the Watchers, the beings who had brought me here.

“You knew,” I said.

“You knew what this place does to those who look too long.”

They did not deny it.

“We are here to observe.”

“To guide.”

“To contain.”

“This knowledge is not meant for the mortal mind.”

“Yet you asked.”

“So you were shown.”

“And now, Merlin, you must choose.”

Their forms flickered, stretching impossibly, folding through dimensions I could not comprehend.

“Do you leave, and forget?“

“Or do you stay, and become?”

I glanced back at the Unraveled Ones, those who had chosen wrongly, those who had asked the same question I had, but had never walked away.

I could feel the weight of knowledge pressing against my mind, a force so immense, so absolute, that it would break me if I let it.

I was not meant to hold all of this.

And yet…

There was one last thing I needed to understand.

“The Presence,” I said. “The thing that came before. What is it?”

The Watchers did not answer.

The void shifted.

And the Presence returned.

The Voice That Never Spoke

It was everywhere and nowhere, a shape too large for reality to hold, a presence that did not belong within the framework of existence.

It did not move toward me.

Because movement did not exist for something that had never needed to move.

It did not speak to me.

Because speech was a construct of lesser things.

And yet, I understood its meaning.

“I am the First.”

“I am the Last.”

“I am the Shadow of the Beginning and the Echo of the End.”

“I am what you cannot name, what you cannot grasp, what you cannot hold.”

“And now, Merlin, I ask you.”

“What are you?”

The question was a weight against my very being, a force pressing into the core of my existence, demanding an answer.

I could feel the truth unraveling in my mind—the knowledge that no human, no sorcerer, no god had ever been meant to understand.

This was it.

This was the point of no return.

If I answered, I would cease to be what I was.

If I refused, I would be cast back, empty, stripped of what I had learned.

The Watchers did not intervene.

The Unraveled Ones did not whisper.

The Presence did not move.

The choice was mine alone.

I gripped my staff, feeling the wood beneath my fingers, grounding myself in the only truth I knew.

“I am Merlin.”

“I am a wanderer. A seeker. A witness.”

“I do not shape reality. I walk through it.”

“And I will not be consumed by it.”

Silence.

A silence so deep it devoured all things.

Then—

The Presence vanished.

And I was falling.

The Return to Reality

I awoke in the same field where it had begun.

The sky was unchanged.

The wind whispered through the grass.

The door was gone.

But I knew, in the depths of my being…

I had not returned unchanged.

The knowledge still lingered, just at the edge of my mind, waiting.

The Watchers had given me a choice.

I had chosen to leave.

But they had never said I would forget.

And as I stood there, staring at the empty space where the door had been, I knew—

One day, the Veil would call me back.

And when it did…

Would I be ready?

Would I answer?

Would I dare to look again?

That, traveler…

Is a question I have yet to answer.