It should be noted that there was one event in particular that occurred sometime before my nightmares began, an event that, to this day, I am still struggling to provide an accurate explanation for.

Before I address the event specifically, I shall provide some context. I was an active member of a small unofficial group at the university I studied at, which spoke at length about politics. Discussions would occasionally get heated, but it was usually nothing more than some harsh language here and an insult there, nothing compared to the vitriol that can be seen in mainstream political discussion nowadays, I can assure you.

In other words, there is no reason for me to believe that something bad could happen or was even capable of happening in the first place; we're a tight-knit group after all, so if something did happen, whoever did it would be booted immediately. This might seem like a strange thing to say, but after I explain what happens next, I am fairly sure the reader will understand why this point is so important and makes what happens next so much more bizarre.

Where I lived in the city, a place that remains unnamed for now, required me to walk around a mile to get from my residence - a block of flats - to the main university campus. Nothing outside of what I could do, I wasn’t exactly fit, but a mile walk was easy, even in the chill wind of early autumn that snared the narrow streets and tight side-walks I would often find myself walking down. It wasn’t exactly cold, it was actually quite warm, but the air itself had a barbed chill that warranted the wearing of thick thermal clothes, such as my heavy black trench coat.

It was quiet out that afternoon, a token few cars were driving around and a couple of students walking to and from the main campus; heck, I can even remember tutting to myself as a pair of students studying economics passed me by, chatting about how little of a toss they gave about the course. In layman's terms, just an ordinary day...

Or so I thought...

Around two minutes away from entering the campus, I go around a corner store and walk down a narrow - and terribly uneven for the record - concrete slab pathway adjacent to a two-way road. A few cars drove past me while the wind died down for a while, my body was warm, and my neck was sweating slightly from the warmth of my over-prepared attire, heating me far more than necessary.

I took a few more steps when suddenly I felt something strange happen to my back; within a few moments, my entire spinal column had gone icy cold and numb, so much so that the numbness began to tingle and burned my nerves. I could feel the outlines of my ribs spreading the coldness around my chest, my lungs tensed, and my stomach knotted; worse was still to come, though, as the chill slowly progressed up the back of my neck.

I tried to brush it off; maybe an especially nasty gust of cold air had travelled down the street, the tight rows of structures and the lack of foliage causing a funnelling effect of sorts, and I just so happened to find myself in its path...

I took a few more steps forward; I must have been around ten meters from the shop corner; the numbness and freezing sensation began to cause physical pain, my back now wracked with what felt like hundreds of individual jolts of electricity coursing through every cell and every nerve ending. My mind could only think of one thing, one thing which surged around my frozen neck and was in the process of dominating every last thought going through my mind.

You need to turn around and look behind you right now.

I continue to try and fight the urge, “this is getting silly”, I must have thought; I’m clearly just having some kind of “moment” if you will, there is nothing behind me; why would there be something behind me?

It was at that moment that something happened to me; while something chilled my back, my shoulders and my neck to their core, I could still feel my skin; it wasn’t a complete and total numbness and lack of feeling, so to say, I could feel my coat weighing down on me and the straps of my backpack weighing down on my shoulders. It was at this point that I could also feel something that felt like a pair of hands crawling up the back of my neck; I could feel each digit digging into my skin, wrapping around my neck and my jaw as if somebody, or something, was reaching out to turn me around forcibly.

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By now, I was sick of this bullshit, “Fuck it!” I must have thought, understandably concerned by what was happening to me, I caved in to the urge and turned around to look behind me.

I could see something jet black writhing and floating idly in a sprawling mass drifting gracefully in the air, easily seven or so feet off the pavement. As my eyes focused, they noticed that this strange mass appeared to be hair, hair connected to something that looked like… A face?

I couldn’t see it in its entirety, but I could make out an object that appeared to be half a human face peeking around the corner around seven feet off the pavement, watching me with its warping and twisting deep blue eyes that seemed to pulse with life. Its skin was a disgusting sterile white with a black marbling effect covering its surface; its entire cheek was missing revealing the insides of its jaw; its ear was long and pointed like how an elf’s ears appear in fiction.

It, whatever it was, appeared to be female, judging by the layout of its facial features and the length of its hair, but that was nothing more than a wild guess at this time.

A blocky mass, one I quickly identified as a hand, was wrapped around the corner around a foot below the “face” presumably, it was using the hand to pull itself around to watch me. The fingers bore short but visibly sharp nails that glistened slightly in the dim glow of the afternoon sun. Even at this range, I could see the tapering and bevel of its nails, almost as if they were forged and sharpened like weapons of war rather than normal body parts.

Whatever this thing was, it noticed that I had turned to face it, prompting it to violently pull itself back around the corner with a deathly silence, there was no crunching of leaves or even the sound of something that large - and presumably heavy - moving away at pace. I remained standing there, frozen in time and place, thoroughly perplexed by what I had witnessed with my own eyes.

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A car drives by at a considerable speed - far more than the limit - causing me to jump and come to my senses. Baffled by what I had just witnessed, I managed to convince myself to approach the store corner, utterly convinced I would walk around and see a balloon or something that would explain what I saw, let alone what I felt.

Rounding the corner, there was nothing that came even remotely close to what I had seen; what restaurants down the road I could see had no customers that carried such an item either. I must have looked like a madman, walking down the road and peaking into every single shop, bar and food joint I came across, checking every last one, but to my dismay, there was nothing.

I had genuinely just seen something that was not “real”, so to speak, there was no other conclusion that could explain it other than outright magic or an extremely elaborate prank, one far too complex to pull off to be worth the effort.

Understandably freaking out and greatly concerned about my own sanity by all of this, I decided to go back to my flat to cool off; as far as I was concerned, I must have been severely overtired, and my mind was actively playing tricks on me, nothing that a good mug of tea and a lay down couldn’t fix surely...

The rest of the day was rather uneventful, other than the lack of a phone call or even text message from the social event asking where I was since I was a regular there; I had told them earlier that day that I would definitely attend the event I found it unusual that they hadn’t gotten curious about my whereabouts.

The only other thing I remember happening that day was burning my tongue on some pasta sauce that was far too hot when I tasted it; in other words, the rest of the day was tranquil and uneventful.

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I wake up the next day and go about my morning routine, sorting out some breakfast, watching the news, having a shower and playing some video games; I used to play a lot of warframe while I was at uni at this time. Sometime around the middle of the day, my mobile phone started to buzz; I had received a text from another regular asking me if I was “okay and safe”.

The unusual choice of words aside, I responded immediately, telling him I felt sick the day before, a blatant lie of course, and that I had to dip out at the last moment. He got back to me, relieved that I was safe, only to inform me then that a massive fight broke out at the event; some new people showed up shortly after it started and stirred trouble, attacked another member, and a brawl kicked off.

Then it hit me...

If I hadn’t had that encounter with whatever it was the day before, I would have walked into the event around the time this group must have shown up. Whatever it was, it stopped me from going in and getting hurt.

At this point in my story, the reader might, understandably so mind you, be asking, “Okay, what the heck just happened and why does this matter to the rest of the story?” Without giving too much away, this isn’t the last time this specific entity appears; heck, it isn’t even the last time it shows up in the real world either. What makes this so fascinating is that this event predated the beginning of my trip into insanity by three entire weeks, making it the first encounter I would have with the unknown and partially why I decided to tell this story.