Aster woke up the next day and decided, after careful consideration and against all available evidence, to ignore the fact that reality had apparently suffered a psychotic break in the middle of a grocery store.
This was not because the experience had felt especially harmless. Quite the opposite. Seeing a school of translucent, deep-sea monstrosities weaving through a Pick n Pay as if they’d come for half-price hake and household essentials was, on balance, a fairly persuasive sign that something in his life had gone medically off-script. Add in the robed stranger who’d appeared from nowhere to save him, and the whole thing had the shape of a psychiatric event with political ambitions.
Under other circumstances, he might have brought it up with Dr. Schultz.
Under other circumstances, he might also have had medical aid, disposable income, and a genuine appetite for hearing the phrase acute psychotic episode applied to his person by someone with a framed degree and access to sedatives.
As things stood, he had none of those.
So Aster had done what any rational, financially unstable man on the verge of a breakdown would do: absolutely nothing.
He filed the incident under Things We Are Not Telling The Psychologist Until We Can Afford To Be Committed.
But the feeling remained.
The universe had rung. He had declined the call. Now it was leaving voicemails.
By lunchtime, the day had decided subtlety was for cowards.
His phone buzzed with a bank notification. His salary payment had bounced.
That was the first blow. The bank confirmed it with all the warmth and urgency of a hostage note written by committee: payment failed, issue on employer’s side, please direct your suffering elsewhere.
So, Aster took it to work, where he walked into the usual post-capitalist theatre: six underpaid staff members standing in a damp corridor, trying to decide whether they’d been victims of fraud, incompetence, or simply the natural endpoint of trusting a man who wore too much cologne and referred to tax as “a mindset problem.”
His boss, according to Miriam from admin, had liquidated the company accounts, skipped town, and presumably fucked off to whichever tax-friendly corner of the planet accepted middle-management vermin and light financial crime. Dubai, probably.
By evening, Aster was unemployed.
By the time he got home through the rain, he’d been promoted again—this time from unemployed to homeless. His landlady, having finally exhausted whatever pity she’d once possessed, had dumped the remains of his life onto the pavement in two collapsing boxes and a black refuse bag. Most of it was wet before he reached the building. The rest got there shortly after.
There are, Aster reflected later, very few experiences more clarifying than standing in the rain at twenty years old, staring at your worldly possessions dissolve into gutter water while trying to decide whether this counts as bad luck, a personal failing, or just the visible mechanics of class society finally dropping the polite euphemisms. He’d gone with all three.
After that the evening became less a sequence of decisions and more a gradual administrative failure of the soul.
He tried to find shelter in a covered bus stop and got moved on by a security guard with a flashlight and a hero complex. Tried sleeping in the recessed doorway of a closed pharmacy and was informed by a woman in a Spar uniform that she had pepper spray, cousins in the police, and absolutely no interest in hearing his side of the story. Tried an awning behind a laundromat and discovered it was already occupied by a man who looked one bad day away from cannibalism and, in fairness, had probably found the spot first.
By the time Aster found the alley, he was soaked through, shaking hard enough to rattle his teeth, and so tired his thoughts had started slipping their leash.
The alley smelled of wet cardboard, mildew, and old regret. He slid down against the wall with a section of newspaper he’d found in a bin and arranged it over himself with the faintly humiliating seriousness of a man still pretending this qualified as a plan.
For a while he just sat there, knees pulled up, rain hammering the mouth of the alley, and tried very hard not to take inventory.
That lasted perhaps three seconds.
He had no job. No money. No flat. Mild hypothermia. Possible schizophrenia.
Somewhere beneath all of it, that old familiar conviction that this wasn’t random. It never was. Bad things didn’t just happen to Aster; they arrived with itinerary, purpose, and the quiet professionalism of debt collectors.
He let his head thunk back against the wall and closed his eyes.
The rain kept falling.
The cold gnaws deeper with every second, chewing through skin and muscle until it sinks right into the bone. He knew enough to know that was bad. Knew enough to know the dangerous part came later, when freezing stopped feeling like freezing and started feeling weirdly manageable. Warm, even. Like sleep.
Aster curls tighter against the wall, shivering so hard his ribs ache, newspaper crumpled over him like it could make a damn difference. The rain drums harder as if the whole sky has decided to finish the job personally.
His fingers are numb. His thoughts are going the same way—sluggish, slipping sideways.
Aster breathes out slowly and feels the pull. Feeling how easy it would be to just let go. Drift. Sleep.
His mind, bless its shrivelled heart, still screams at him to stay awake. But the voice is distant now, like someone shouting through a wall.
And then.
Colours begin to flicker at the edges of his vision—soft blues, lurid pinks, periwinkle. Myst starts creeping in. The alley walls warp like a heat haze.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Of course it does.
Aster watches, hollow-eyed, as the world tilts off its axis.
Well. Looks like we’re back here again.
The shapes shift, breathing in the neon fog. It’s pretty, in that way hallucinations are—pretty and completely insane.
A hand clamps hard around his shoulder and yanks him violently back from the warm slide toward death.
Aster jerks, heart detonating in his chest as he scrambles away from the figure, half slipping in the rain-slick filth.
It was him.
The robed man.
The one from the store. The one who shouldn’t exist.
“You can see me,” the man says.
Aster’s throat is dry, the words scraping out of him.
“Oh, I see you, all right.” His laugh comes out cracked and bitter. “I’m the only one who can—that’s usually how hallucinations work.”
The man’s cyan eyes glimmer with some ugly mix of relief and frustration.
“I’m not a hallucination.”
Aster barks out a wet, joyless laugh. “Sure you’re not. Monsters, fairies, Santa Claus—pick your delusion. Which stage of psychosis is this, by the way? Early? Mid? Or the grand finale where I start hoarding my own excrement? Oh right.” He smacks his forehead “I’d need a house for that first!”
Lightning flashes overhead—green, sharp and violent—cutting jagged streaks through the sky. Shapes writhe in the clouds, too big, too fluid, moving like shadows that refuse to settle into anything sane.
The ground shifts under him. Soft. Wrong. The pavement crawls with roots now, slick and pulsing like veins. Plants push up through the cracks, their colours too bright, too hungry.
Aster swallows thickly. “Yeah. This is fine. Totally normal. Nothing wrong with thinking you’re in Avatar with bonus LSD effects.”
The man steps closer, eyes flashing. “Listen to me. I know it’s hard to accept, but you’re not crazy. I’m real. And I’m here to help you.”
Aster stares at him, the bitter edge returning sharp enough to cut. “Help me? Sure. You and the tooth fairy gonna tag-team my rent next? Or maybe Santa will spot me a job application while you two slay the monster huffing away my bank balance?”
The man’s face tightens, urgency bleeding through the practiced calm. “If you don’t listen, you’re going to die here. Tonight. You’re standing on the edge, and if you let go, that’s it. Game over.”
Aster’s laugh collapses in on itself, strangled and raw.
“Oh, and what if I do listen? What then? You finally convince me this is real, and next thing I know I’m knifing mall Santas because you told me they’re demonic spies? Is that where this trip ends?”
The slap rings out sharp and clean, cutting through the rain like a gunshot as Aster’s world explodes sideways.
His head snaps to one side, cheek stinging hot against the cold. For a second the world freezes. Even the rain seems to hesitate.
Then the man’s voice—harder now, stripped of the soft sell.
“I was a friend of your father’s. Howard. He made me promise I’d help you when the time came. And that time is now.”
His cyan eyes pin Aster where he stands, making sure every word lands.
“I’m here to save you. But I need you to believe me. Right now. Or you’re done.”
Aster stands there breathing hard, cheek burning where the slap landed.
His brain short-circuits.
Howard.
His father.
No one says that name anymore. No one even remembers.
His heart stutters. He wants to laugh, wants to call bullshit, wants to demand to know how the hell a hallucination managed to rifle through the one locked filing cabinet in his head he never opened for company. But the slap is still there, stinging with all the stubborn physicality of a thing that refuses to be imagined, and his knees suddenly feel like they’ve forgotten their job.
Hallucinations usually had the decency to be symbolic. If his mind was finally cracking, surely it could have managed something with a bit more dramatic flair than mysterious cyan-eyed stranger casually name-dropping your dead father in an alley.
The man just watches him, breathing steadily, like he’s been expecting the reaction.
“You’re in the Astral Plane,” he says, voice smoothing out again. “It’s real. It’s right here, wrapped around your world. Most people can’t see it. Currently, you can.”
The man’s face doesn’t change. His eyes just lock tighter onto Aster.
And something inside Aster wobbles.
Because if this is madness, it’s putting on a hell of a performance.
He drags a hand down his face, palm scraping over the sting of the slap—real, burning, physical and mutters, almost to himself, “God, I’m actually considering this. That’s where I’m at. Slapped by a ghost and now I’m taking advice from it.”
The man's shoulders drop just a fraction, less tense now, like he knows he’s got a foothold.
“Aster. You’re slipping. Fast. If you don’t act now, this is your last stop. I can’t force you. But I’m offering you a way through. You just have to trust me.”
Aster squeezes his eyes shut. His hands tremble at his sides. Everything in him is screaming to call this what it is—hallucination, psychosis, brain death, some last biochemical fireworks display put on by a dying nervous system. But beneath that there’s the other voice. The ugly one. The desperate one.
But what if?
What if this is real?
What if this is the first goddamn hand stretched out to him in years?
The slap still burns.
The rain keeps falling.
And his own voice comes out wrecked, bitter, but still standing.
“I’m listening,” Aster mutters, though every inch of him wants to bolt. “But I swear to God, if you tell me to sacrifice a goat or join a cult—”
The man lets out a breath that might almost be a laugh.
“No goats. No cults.”
His cyan eyes sharpen. “Just a choice. And you have to make it now.”
He talks straight through Aster’s scoff, like there’s no time left to waste.
“You’re on the Astral Plane. This world has more influence on yours than I can explain right now. Just know this: you’ve been infected. A parasite, feeding off you, dragging you toward death. And it’s set to finish the job on your twenty-first birthday. Three weeks from now.”
Aster blinks. “Great. Add tapeworm to the list. What’s it feed on? My self-esteem?”
The man ignores the sarcasm and presses on.
“I’ve been shielding you, keeping the worst of it off. But it’s getting stronger. And I can’t hold it back much longer. If you want to survive—really survive—you’ll need to cross over yourself and find me.”
The words come fast now, clipped and urgent, like he’s racing a clock.
“There’s a house. Three blocks from here. Number Seven Heart Lane. Keys are under the third brick on the fourth step. I won’t be able to reach you again after this—you’ll be on your own.”
Aster’s head is spinning, but the man barrels on.
“I’ve left instructions there. A recipe for an elixir to help you cross over properly. Supplies. Enough to get you started. If you gather the ingredients and follow what I left, I can explain the rest. But right now”—his voice sharpens like a blade—“wake up.”
The alley starts to blur around him, colours smearing into each other like wet paint. The world tilts, slips sideways.
Aster blinks.
Once.
Twice.
And he’s back.
Flat on the ground. The cold bites so deep it feels like it’s chewing on bone. The warmth from before is gone. Nothing left but bitter wet chill and the heavy weight pressing down on his chest.
His thoughts are sludge, but somewhere deep in that old rotten place where instincts live, something stirs. Something ugly and primal that whispers:
Don’t ignore this.
He lies there dazed, too sluggish to move. The fog in his brain pulls at him, trying to drag him back under, back into that dangerous warm half-sleep that feels too much like dying.
But the man's words are still there, coiled in his ears like smoke.
Cross over. Find me.
With a groan, Aster pushes himself upright, limbs heavy and trembling. The alley is still here. No mist now. No roots. No impossible colours. Just the wet stink of garbage and the too-loud rush of rain.
The cold digs deeper, but his heart is pounding hard enough to remind him he’s still breathing.
Aster rubs at his cheek.
It still burns.
That’s real.
Too real.
His laugh comes out cracked and far too close to a sob. The line between real and not real has officially clocked out for the evening.
But his body is already moving before his mind catches up.
He doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s the last flicker of sanity. Maybe it’s just desperation’s final twitch.
His voice is hoarse when he mutters it aloud, like saying it might anchor him.
“I’m not crazy.”
Even to his own ears, the words wobble.