The Beachhead of the Unseen

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There are no psychics. No true visionaries. No one who can peel back the fabric of the world and see what lies beneath whatever people claim to glimpse in dreams, séances, or last breaths. What we do have are feelings—those shivers after someone we love dies, that momentary sense of being watched by something that isn’t there. Feelings, not visions.

But on this day, feelings were enough to drive an army mad.

The hillside above the sea should have been just another battlefield—men scrambling, shouting, loading rifles, thrusting bayonets with the desperate logic of war. Yet the air felt wrong, as if it had been folded, pressed, and stretched. A kind of pressure built in the skull, a wordless suggestion that something immense was pushing toward them from behind the sky.

At first it was just confusion. Soldiers staggering as if drunk, blinking at shifting colors in the sunlight. Some swore the shadows under their hats were whispering. Others claimed the waves behind them were marching in formation. A few dropped their rifles and tried to crawl away from the very shape of the air.

Then the mass hysteria took hold.

Men charged in every direction, stabbing at invisible enemies, firing into the hillside, into the sky, even into the sand under their feet. They were not seeing visions; they were reacting to the absence of form—the sense of an invisible army pressing through the membrane of reality, a pressure the mind could not convert into meaning.

One soldier at the top of the ridge struck a match, jammed it into a powder charge, and screamed that he was lighting “the first flare of the counter-invasion.” No one questioned him. When the explosion tore open the hillside, the blast rolled outward like a breath from something incomprehensibly large.

There was no shrapnel. No crater. Just a shockwave—a sudden gulp of the atmosphere, as if the world had swallowed something and regretted it.

A boom followed, deep and resonant, like a colossal fist knocking on the doors of matter.

Some soldiers froze. Others fired wildly into the air, convinced an unseen enemy had arrived at last. The oldest sergeant, shaking uncontrollably, whispered:

“This ain’t the enemy’s beachhead… it’s ours.”

And in that moment it was clear: the human mind, exhausted from centuries of violence, superstition, denial, and longing, had finally ruptured. The unconscious had run out of ways to warn them quietly. If humanity refused to stop killing one another, then consciousness itself had changed tactics.

The men stopped aiming at each other.

They turned as one—

—and fired into the dark they could not see, but could finally, terribly, feel.