The Black Veil Report

The first signs of collapse weren’t loud. They whispered from beneath the city—small tremors, missed data pings, and faint signals intercepted from long-decommissioned satellites. The agency dismissed them at first. But when the lights in Sector 9 flickered out and didn’t return, they sent in a recon unit. None came back.

That was when they called me in.

My name’s Agent Dara Finch, independent analyst and field operative, working off-grid since the Thorne Catastrophe. They handed me a slim black file, sealed with a clasp like a coffin nail. On the front, printed in red block letters, were the words:

THE BLACK VEIL REPORT

CLASSIFIED — LEVEL A

I opened it in the back of a rusted transport ship en route to the last known coordinates of Sector 9. The air stank of ozone and burnt circuitry. Inside the file: grainy images of twisted metal corridors, scribbled logs from panicked operators, and a single phrase repeated across three different reports:

> "The Veil is waking."

Sector 9 had been abandoned for nearly six years after a reactor leak made the lower levels uninhabitable. It wasn’t uncommon for abandoned sites to draw scavengers or rogue AI clusters. But this… this was something else. There were references to lightless figures in the surveillance feeds, rooms icing over without temperature drops, and technicians speaking in tongues moments before vanishing. The anomaly was growing—and learning.

I landed at dusk. Sector 9 was a hollow corpse of steel and silence. The entrance gate had been forced open, its edges corroded not by time but by something that felt… intentional. The only light came from my shoulder beacon, casting long shadows against the wreckage.

The deeper I went, the more reality thinned.

The air grew dense with static, my comms failing one by one. My scanner flickered and began spitting out symbols that didn’t match any known language. Then I heard it: a soft hum, like a voice vibrating just below human hearing. Not speech exactly—more like a suggestion. It lured me deeper.

Sublevel 3 had become something else entirely.

The walls pulsed, no longer metal but something that seemed to breathe. Lights drifted in and out of view, like stars caught in a current. That’s where I found what remained of the recon team: not bodies, but outlines scorched into the floor, their gear melted and fused into the walls.

I activated my recorder.

> “Agent Finch, Entry 03. Subject: Black Veil. It’s not a veil. It’s a membrane—thin, but layered. Something lives beneath it, and it's pressing through.”

That’s when I saw it.

The veil wasn’t metaphorical. It was real. A shimmering, black curtain stretched across the far wall, rippling with movements behind it—shapes that weren’t quite humanoid, but close enough to terrify. They watched me. I knew it without seeing eyes.

Suddenly, the veil opened.

I was pulled forward—not physically, but in the way dreams drag you deeper despite your will. My mind screamed, but my feet moved. I crossed the threshold.

And then…

Silence.

I was nowhere. No floor, no air, no body. Just thought. Across a void that stretched endlessly, voices unfurled like vines.

> “You cut us from your world.”

> “You sealed the rift.”

> “We remember.”

They called themselves The Chorus, an intelligence that had once lived parallel to ours. According to them, human experiments into quantum thresholds had severed their realm—killing millions of their kind. The Black Veil was their attempt to reconnect, to rebuild the bridge we had torn down.

But they were no longer interested in coexistence.

> “You buried us in darkness. Now we pull you in.”

When I woke, I was back at the surface. No memory of how I got there. The veil was gone. But something had followed me. I felt it in the air, in the flickering of streetlights as I staggered back to my transport. I looked into the lens of my recording drone and saw my eyes flicker—just for a second—with a glint of the same black shimmer.

I filed my report, unredacted.

The agency buried it within hours. Denied my access. Canceled my credentials.

But I kept a copy.

The Black Veil Report is not a warning. It’s a countdown.

Whatever I saw… whatever returned with me… it’s spreading. Not fast, but deep. It whispers through code, leaks into signal towers, and infects systems once thought secure. It doesn’t want conquest.

It wants replacement.

I’ve gone underground again. Off-grid. But every night, when I close my eyes, I see the veil—rippling, growing thinner. I hear The Chorus.

And I know:

Next time, it won’t be a whisper.

It’ll be a scream.