I didn’t notice it at first — the presence. It was subtle. Quiet. Almost polite in its arrival. But something changed in me during that time in Salem, something I didn’t fully understand until much later. It didn’t begin with fear. It began with fatigue. Fog. A strange numbness behind the eyes. My perception had always been open, sensitive, even as a child, but suddenly it was like a doorway had been flung wide without warning. My third eye, once a gentle inner lens, had flipped open too far — flooding me with input I couldn’t filter.
Only afterward did I come to realize that something had attached itself to me during that time. It wasn’t malevolent in a theatrical sense. It didn’t throw objects or speak in riddles. But it did watch, and it fed — not on attention, but on energy. It was cold, indifferent, and calculating. Not a being of emotion, but of pattern. Something ancient, perhaps, or maybe just opportunistic. A parasite born from the residue of a place layered with psychic history.
It clung to me not with force, but with resonance — latching onto moments when my field was open, frayed, or trying to expand too fast. And in doing so, it scrambled my inner signal. I found myself flooded with imagery, detached from my emotions, questioning what was real and what was distortion. The being was like noise inside a clear frequency, threading confusion through clarity.
Its form, when I think back, was not fully formed. It was more like a tangle of light and shadow, something that curled in on itself, hard to locate and harder to name. I sensed its presence through subtle chills, strange dreams, and the feeling of being observed even when I was alone. It didn’t belong to water like some of the intelligences I’ve encountered. This one moved through air and thought, more akin to fog than flow — a drifter between dimensions.
Eventually, it left. Or maybe I cleared it. Maybe it simply lost interest. But it left behind a residue — a psychic scar and a sharpened sense of how delicate perception can be. Eventually, one of the elder witches performed a clearing spell and my vision returned.
Now I know how to protect my field.
Now I know what to watch for.
And now, when I sense distortion creeping in,
I remember Salem.
And I remember the thing that once came to listen.
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