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It started when I was a child.

At first, they were just shadows—strange flickers at the edges of my vision, shifting like heat haze in places where no warmth should be. They crawled along the walls, stretched through the cracks in the floor, clung to people like second skins. No one else seemed to notice. No one else reacted when a tendril of blackness coiled around a chair leg or when a shape darker than night slithered across the ceiling.

But I saw them.

And I learned quickly that they saw me too.

The first time I truly understood, I was thirteen. I watched one of the masses reach toward a stray dog, its liquid tendrils sinking into the animal's flesh like tar. The dog screamed—a sound I will never forget—as its body convulsed. Its fur blackened, its legs stretched too long, bones twisting, reshaping.

And then it stood still.

Not dead. Not alive. Just… something else.

I ran home that day, locked my door, and didn't sleep for three nights. But when I finally worked up the courage to step outside again, I saw them everywhere.

The phantasms.

Black, writhing things that moved between people and objects, their amorphous bodies shifting like smoke yet solid when they chose to be. They could touch, press, mold. And worse—they could fuse.

A man on the subway one morning rubbed his arm absently. I saw a sliver of darkness slide beneath his skin, burrowing deep. Days later, I saw him again, but his arm was no longer the same. The fingers were too sharp, the flesh stretched too tight, the bones beneath moving like something not entirely human.

No one else noticed.

No one ever noticed.

I tried to tell myself I was imagining it. That I was sick. That I was hallucinating. But when I watched a woman lean against a railing, only for the black mass wrapped around the metal to drag itself into her spine, I knew.

This was real.

They weren't just parasites. They weren't just watchers. They were something else entirely.

And they were changing us.

The more I paid attention, the more I saw—how the world was no longer as it should be. How the people around me were slowly becoming something else, piece by piece, limb by limb. Some of them looked the same, acted the same. But there were always little things—hands that bent the wrong way, voices that carried an unnatural echo, expressions that flickered just a little too fast, as if the skin itself was struggling to keep up.

But no one screamed. No one ran. No one questioned why their bodies no longer felt like their own.

Only me.

And so I walk, every day, through a world that no longer belongs to us. Through streets where shadows breathe, where door handles ripple, where the very walls shift when no one is looking.

I walk among people who are no longer people.

And I wonder—

When will it be my turn?