After my last trip to The Iridescent Abyss, I spent the better part of the morning contemplating my options regarding what exactly I should do next. I had decided to name the place; I felt that “The Iridescent Abyss” had a nice ring to it, plus it was an accurate description of the weirdness of the locale.

I gathered my thoughts and thought about what exactly happened to me, how the sequence ended and how it affected me when I woke up. It was clear that going there in just a shirt and trousers was probably not a good idea if long-term survival and exploration was something I was aiming to do; the glass weapons the “Zhivaq” had, while more than a match for the thin clothes I had been wearing, couldn’t have been that durable. Perhaps a decently study set of clothes would reduce the likelihood of getting injured, or worse, during my travels there?

I reasoned that due to ceramic and glass making up the lions share of the weaponry material I had seen thus far, their weapons would probably break fairly quickly if they came into contact with a material that could resist them or cause them to bend or twist on impact. This theory was further supported by what I remember Kliviero telling me before our encounter with the Zhivaq at the end of the nightmare.

Did I have much to back up my assumption? No, not really…

Was it worth a shot, though, knowing what I knew at the time? Yes, absolutely!

So, I formed a plan in my head, a plan for my next trip to the Iridescent Abyss. However, the plan, would require a few modifications to what I was wearing and using throughout the day to make sure that the “stuff carried over from the real world” quirk brought the correct things over, plus some of those items were not currently in my possession.

The plan was rather simple; with what little I had to work with regarding how I got to the Iridescent Abyss in the first place, I wanted to minimize any possible snags. I would need to requisition a jacket, preferable as thick and durable as possible while also being light enough that it doesn’t impair my movement by much; something reasonably thick should, in theory at least, provide enough protection from an incoming glass or ceramic weapon that it had a decent chance of stopping the incoming blow or breaking the weapon.

However, the requisitioning of the coat would have to wait until later in the day; I had quite a few things which needed to be seen before I could consider testing this theory. So I decided to get up early and get my chores done nice and quickly to have as much time as possible to focus on the Abyss.

At around five in the morning, I entered the flat’s shared kitchen and lounge unit and got to work. I realize now that I have neglected to discuss much of the details regarding my living situation while I attended university; I felt it would be inappropriate considering the context to cover my accommodation before this point. The kitchen and lounge unit was not particularly spacious, easily large enough for a fairly simple kitchen, a pair of couches and a TV but was otherwise plain and uniform. The grey walls were pretty dull, but they went fairly well with the vinyl floor; the light wood complimented the light grey. On the opposite side of the room was a singular window, it was quite big, easily the size of a dining table, but it was far too dark to see anything with any real detail outside.

Unfortunately, I lived with some flatmates who were either unwilling or simply unable to keep the place even remotely clean. A few boxes left here and there after a party late last night, a couple of bits of rubbish left out, unwashed kitchen utensils, the list goes on. Unfortunately, I would need to get this all taken care of as soon as possible and, at this time in the morning, and I would be doing this alone. I didn’t mind, though; getting this all sorted early would give me some extra time to work with later and would keep them off my back, plus it would make the inevitable random appearance of housekeeping less taxing to deal with.

It took around an hour for the living space to be completely cleaned in its entirety; some of the pans were quite badly burnt, and the muppet using them hadn't filled them with boiling water to soften the burnt foodstuffs for removal later. But, after a fairly boring hour of work, there was nothing left in the room which could warrant a fine from housekeeping, though I was fairly certain they would find something to drop a fine on.

I walked over to the window and looked outside, catching the breaking of dawn as the horizon exploded in a wonderfully warm amber glow. Rays of sunlight illuminated the various blocky shapes of buildings, apartments and stores alike. A few cars were driving along what roads I could see, early morning commuters heading off to work in towns and cities a far away.

I had this gut feeling that there was something deeply wrong with the world around me, though I couldn’t tell what exactly was wrong. I couldn’t see anything that could make me think that there was a problem, but the clawing in my mind was far too loud and intense to be something purely sporadic and unfounded, at least as far as I was concerned.

I figured that now that the sun was rising and that most of the early morning had passed by, that the universities library was probably open for research work; the library used to be open for the entire night but alas, due to some of the students being utterly incapable of just not stealing books which aren’t supposed to leave the library, it was closed from midnight to around six in the morning. Since I had nothing better to do, I decided it would be best to head off to the library for a few hours before the stores open later in the day; it would be better to do something useful than sitting around doing nothing after all…

It only took me a few minutes to reach the library building. Our university was large enough that the campus’s library needed an entirely separate structure to house the rather large volumes of literature required for the myriad of courses, topics and themes such an establishment offers for curious students and under-graduates. Since I was studying a history degree – specifically covering the medieval history of western Europe – I was a frequent visitor to the library, so much so that the security at the front of the establishment knew me on a first-name basis.

After waving a greeting to them and having a brief chat with the security staff, I entered the library building and ascended to the third floor, the history and humanities floor, to be precise. The entire floor appeared empty, entirely devoid of other students, odd but not unexpected at this time or morning to be more accurate.

But it wasn’t that it was quiet; it was that the entire building seemed eerily silent and still, frozen in time if you will…

The floor as a whole was ashen cold, so much so in fact that I could feel the hair on my arms and legs standing straight, and my breath was fogging up before me. No, something was happening, and it certainly wasn’t the library’s central heating playing up; the campus only installed the bloody thing a few weeks ago, and other people would have noticed the sheer chill by now, surely.

I felt a tingle around the base of my neck, confirming my suspicion that there was indeed something happening here that was far from a normal, insignificant technical issue.

With a surge of energy spurred on partially by fear, partially by curiosity, I approached the array of bookshelves at pace, sweeping between them, looking for the source of the chill. Maybe something like that weird statue thing I saw a few weeks ago in the real world had appeared; maybe something was here inside the library right now. I had to know more; I had to look further and find whatever it was.

I was running from row to row, looking down each one to see if anything was out of place, no matter how insignificant or trivial it may be.

While running around searching for anything unusual, I feel the temperature dropping further and further. Every footstep towards the eastern side of this library floor caused my skin to go numb slowly and my breath to fog up yet more. Each row of shelves brought forth yet more temperature drops, “Whatever is causing this must be close, only a few more rows away.” I thought to myself…

Then I saw it…

Around halfway along this row of shelves, I saw a figure, floating in the air with nothing to obscure it, staring intently at one of the books – specifically a book on the history of the British Isles from five hundred AD to one thousand AD – which it had somehow managed to levitate a few feet from its face. The body of This thing was covered by robes and armour not dissimilar to the figures depicted in the reflection pool gardens statues; all it was missing was the seax-staff, and it would be a near-identical match.

Its arms appeared human in nature and appearance, both outstretched but not in physical contact with the book before it, the fingers long and emaciated. Long blonde hair reached out from around its hood; the hair was so long that it could easily reach the figure's knees but was drifting aimlessly to its sides and rear.

While I stood there utterly motionless and without a sound, the levitating figure slowly turned its head to look at me. A violent jolt of chill raced down my spine with such force that I recoiled from the cold.

Its face was entirely covered by a marbled grey ceramic mask entirely featureless, other than the marbling and the cut-outs for the wearers' eyes. The things bright amber eyes, dotted at their centre with an abysmally dark black pupil which appeared to suck the very light and colour out from its iris, were fixed on me.

When it was looking at me, I noticed something was mounted on its mask. Just around the eye-brow ridge, I could see, clear as day, that a tapered baguette-cut amethyst was grafted into the mask. The gemstone had a very dull glow radiating from its core, not enough actually to illuminate the mask around it but enough to highlight the gem's location. When its eyes fixed on me, the light from the gem dimmed for but the briefest of moments, perhaps an attempt to conceal the gemstone’s presence?

Before I could even react to that thing noticing me, the figure yanked the suspended book towards its chest, its hair pulled tight to its body, and a bright amethyst flash erupted from the gem. The blinding light consumed all within my sight and was shortly followed by something which resembled a sharp scream of pain.

It took a few seconds before the scream, and the blinding flash had dissipated, my senses returning to normal shortly thereafter. The figure had seemingly vanished into thin air, not unlike The Statue did when I saw her not too long ago in the real world. Still, unlike The Statue, who left no evidence of it even being in the real world in the first place, this thing left a startling trace of evidence behind to prove that it was actually a real thing. The book it was reading had entirely vanished with it. The slot in the shelf where it once sat was empty and cold to touch.

Now that I had a moment to look around and take in the world around me, now that this abyssal entity had abandoned the area in spectacular fashion, I could immediately feel that the air was actually quite warm. The air smelled and even tasted of static. I could almost touch the jolts of energy arcing from my fingertips. Heck, not far away from me, I could hear the muffled sound of quiet, careful footsteps from another student walking around the bookshelves looking for research material.

I searched around wildly, trying to find any trace of the figure or the missing book. The notion that something appeared to be from the Abyss could reach over to the real world and casually take items back with them would imply that I wasn’t just crazy, and this wasn’t all in my head. I searched the rest of the shelf, trying to see if maybe the book had simply been misplaced on the shelf, though much to my dismay, I still couldn’t find it.

I turned away from the shelf and headed to the end of the row, only to walk at pace along the rows of bookshelves, peering down each one in a desperate attempt to find where the figure had gone. I must have looked like I was in the midst of a psychotic episode when I leaned around each shelf, sweeping my view across the contents then moving on to do the same thing with the next row.

After around five or so minutes of frantically running around the floor, I was, unfortunately, unable to find any evidence that the thing had simply relocated to somewhere else nearby. Whatever it was, it must have entirely removed itself from the fabric of reality at a whim, a rather concerning precedence considering the nature of the Abyss as it appeared so far; what if there were more of these things and what if their intentions were malicious?

I would have more time to worry about this later, and it was far more important that I kept a sane head on my shoulders rather than worry about hypothetical concerns such as that. As an attempt to calm myself down while also assuring that the thing was gone from the library, I decided to gather some historical documents and perform some research while I was there; I already needed to go through quite a few documents in the first place, so this would clear me of a necessary task for later.

For the next couple of hours, I would remain on that floor of the library, reading various texts and documents from the medieval era, mostly about castles and how they were built and administrated. However, no matter how much I focused on my reading, I could never quite shake the feeling that something was watching me, that and a desire to learn more about who or what the floating figure was and how it got here…

Around three hours passed by, I had taken a considerable quantity of notes from a small pile of books and documents, which I had collected and stacked up by the side of the table. While I took many research notes from the reading material I had amassed, I had also done a lot of thinking about the figure, so much so that I had created a few mind-maps and theories about what it was and how it got here. However, none of those notes was based on anything other than pure speculation, so most of the notes were discarded.

It was now approaching midday, and the library was starting to get busy but not quite as busy as it normally was at this time of the day. Hell, some of the regulars were nowhere to be seen, and nobody had come to pester me about the number of documents I was going through on my desk. I overheard some of the guests mention that they were ‘getting chills’ while walking around this floor, though I myself felt no such chills. This piqued my curiosity which, after I had gathered my notes and returned the books and documents I had taken to their respective homes in the library, prompted me to perform another quick look around the floor. Unfortunately, I was once again unable to find the source of the reported chills, but I had a pretty good guess for what was causing them.

Leaving the library, I overhear security briefly discuss the possibility of a heating or ventilation issue on the third floor of the building; apparently, a lot of complaints had been filed over the last few hours about the temperature being oddly cold up there, one even mentioned calling a plumber to check the heating system. This heightened my concern yet further; if so many people had also felt the chill up there, then there was definitely some form of lasting effect looming over that part of the building due to whatever that floating figure was doing up there.

After leaving the library, I headed off into town. By now, practically the entirety of the town’s innumerable shops had opened for business, including several clothing stores. I would peruse the stores for a while and choose a suitable jacket for my experiment. I bought a charcoal black long fabric trench coat with an internal lining and several inside pockets; this thing, while a touch heavy by jacket standards, provided me with plenty of space to carry things while also providing a decent amount of material between me and a potential threat. As a bonus, it also looked pretty decent as well, the construction and finish were good, and the quality of the material was above average.

After perusing the various other stores in the town for a while, I decided to return home and continue plotting and planning my return to the Abyss. I eventually worked my way back to my flat, opened the door and entered the flat properly, only to be hit by yet another devilishly cold chill to the air.

I had originally figured that the chill was simply something akin to a coping mechanism fabricated by my mind to help me comprehend and deal with the oddities I had been experiencing for the last few nights. However, this would utterly fail to adequately describe why other people had also been feeling the clawing cold as well. I entered my room within the flat and sat on my bed, pondering what I had encountered today, what exactly it meant and what I should feel about it.

I decided that the first thing I should do, now that I was back in my flat, was to prepare a notebook for the upcoming nights. I planned to test if I could write something in my notebook in the real world and see if the written literature appeared in the Abyss; should the text appear, then I could theoretically take notes in the Abyss and then dissect the literature once I wake up the next day, assuming it’s a two-way process rather than one-way.

Most of the things I wrote down were entirely random in nature, a few quotes from some books I had in my room, a couple of simple questions, both literature and mathematical, to test if transferring information through this written medium was even possible.

While I prepared the notebook, a thought came to mind. It was clear that I would have to take further precautions regarding the Abyss and its denizens, especially if they can travel from their world to my own on a whim as the floating library figure could. Worse yet, if they could take items with them and if they could do this intelligently, in other words, they can arrive where they want and take what they want, that could mean that I would need to keep my Abyss related plans and items in my possession at all times or somehow secure them; what’s to say that an entity couldn’t just manifest within my room and steal my notebook while I wasn’t there for instance.

I am already keenly aware that the previous statement sounds both entirely ridiculous and utterly unfounded, but this far into the nightmares, after seeing as much as I had and hearing entirely separate individuals flagging up identical issues to what I had experienced both in public and in private. Let's just say that at this point, in my mind, all bets were off.

Now that I had my coat and my notebook prepared, there was little else I had planned for today other than playing some video games with some of the other members of the political society and just chilling out for the rest of the day.

I sat down at my computer and load up some communication applications and a couple of games to mess around with. I distinctly remember being an avid player of Warframe while I was at university. I would usually stay up long past midnight running missions with my friends. It was a fun memory to think about, but not exactly something that could persist in the current nightmarish climate. While my friends were online and we did mess around a bit, there was an odd tension in the air while we spoke, I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was, but it was definitely there.

I spent a good chunk of the middle of the day running around shooting stuff in a virtual world, and it was nice to be able to unwind and forget the reality of my situation for a short while, as fleeting as that moment may be.

The hours passed by in what felt like minutes, and the sun was slowly crawling its way towards the horizon; my friends had hopped off for the day for a break from the fairly high-intensity gaming we had been doing. The chill had sadly not disappeared as time had passed by. Much to my dismay, it hadn’t even ebbed away by even the smallest of measures.

Since it had been quite a while since I had breakfast, I decided now would be a good time to go and cook my lunch. I preferred having a hot dinner around the middle of the day if I could and cold lunch, mostly snacks, for tea later in the evening. I put my computer to sleep, got up and left my room. Oddly enough, the corridor outside my room felt warm at first, only to rapidly plummet as I stood there for a moment. Perhaps the chill was following me around?

No matter. The chill, while annoying, prompted me to change my plans for a hot dinner. Rather than some pesto and some chicken dippers on the side, I would instead prepare a mild chilli; the heat from the spicy rice dish would suitably contrast the unusual coldness clinging to me.

The chilli didn’t take too long to cook, the rice being the most annoying and time-consuming part. As for the sauce, since I was a student at the time, tinned would have to do a less than optimal solution to the problem, but it smelt good and tasted great, so I didn’t exactly have ground to complain about a hearty hot meal to ward off the cold.

While I was in the kitchen cooking my food for the day, a thought came to mind. For the entire day, I haven’t seen a single one of my flatmates, not even a whisper of activity to suggest that they were even there in the first place. Now granted, my flatmates were fairly active and wouldn’t spend much time in the flat during the day, the fact I hadn’t heard a thing or seen anything to suggest they were out today, on top of the other weird things happening at the moment? I made a mental note to keep an eye open for my flatmates.

I finished cooking my meal for the day and return to my room, a bowl of chilli in hand and a small mug of coffee I had brewed before finishing off the meal in the other. While I walked back to my room, the chill once again intensified, though something told me that the intensification of the chill was despite the hot food I had. Maybe something was attempting to contact or affect me somehow through the chill?

“Well, whether it was some kind of communication attempt, malicious or not, it would have to wait until later; I had a delicious meal to consume. Whatever the source of the chill was, it would have to wait until I was ready to deal with it.” I was probably thinking to myself as I reentered my room, placed the bowl of chilli on my desk, sat down and began to tuck into the meal while checking emails and surfing the internet on my computer and texting some friends; I had rejoined a smaller group in a microphone chat but had muted my microphone since I was eating.

When I had finished my food, taken the bowl back to the kitchen and cleaned all my utensils, I get a text through to my phone; whenever I was outside of my bedroom, I would always keep my phone on me, just on the off chance there was an emergency. I reached for the phone, tapped in my password and felt my heart sink and my back turn to glacial permafrost when I read what I had been sent.

Apparently, there were “strange noises” coming through my microphone in the group voice chat...

My microphone was muted and turned off…

I stopped everything I was doing, sprinting from the kitchen and practically shoulder-bashed my way through the door without hesitation. The giant oak fire-door slammed against the wall as I rushed inside, expecting to see something in my bedroom. Much to my dismay and surprise, there was nothing there; heck, nothing had even been moved or otherwise disturbed.

I checked around the rest of my room, swinging open the door to my en-suite and peaking into the shower to make certain that I didn’t miss a single possible hiding spot for a monstrous being hiding away, ready to ambush me from the darkness. Thankfully, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at this situation, no mysterious entities were hiding out in my room, at least not any that I could physically see, that is...

I managed to convince myself that, whatever it was that could have been the source of the unidentified noises, it had long since left by now or simply didn’t exist in the first place. Though my friends contacting me disproved the idea that the source of the noise didn’t exist, I’d rather not think about the ramifications of this at that time; my mind was already having extensive difficulty dealing with this esoteric stuff as it is, the last thing I needed was for invisible entities to be included to the already considerable list of problems.

After a few more hours of, albeit slightly tense, gaming and watching funny videos together over Youtube, the group disbanded for the evening one final time, leaving me alone in the frigid flat once again. I decided that it would probably be best to get some sleep earlier today than I normally would; I didn’t have a busy day tomorrow, but I wanted to get some additional rest.

I reorganized my room while the sun climbed beneath the horizon and the stars came out to dance along the night sky. It took quite a while since I wanted to make sure my Abyss related items were as easy to reach as possible and as secure as I could get them with what little security I could afford in a modestly priced flat. I knew that if something from the Abyss wanted to get access to my stuff in the back of my mind, Odds are they would find a way to bypass anything I could do to stop them, one way or another.

Considering that I had very little in the ways of tangible means to protect myself or my possessions from whatever existed in the Abyss, I decided the best I could do is hope nothing came through to the real world to cause me any harm; it’s not like I could do much to stop them even if they did want to hurt me, plus if something did want to cause me harm they probably would have by this point, hell The Statue had a perfect opportunity on the first day yet for some reason it chose not to.

With all that said and with my mind put to ease as best possible in the given situation, I finished up for the night, got changed into my pyjamas and went to bed. My mind ran through a cavalcade of possible questions and theories about the Abyss as I laid there, more things I could note down in preparation with my notebook, of course.

As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if I would be blessed, or rather cursed, with spending the night revisiting the Abyss. My excitement was palpable since this time, unlike all the previous times I had been drawn into its vorpal embrace, I was going to be visiting the Abyss on my terms, rather than its own far less generous terms.

The night, rather surprisingly, was entirely uneventful; I didn’t find myself waking up within the cold embrace of the Iridescent Abyss but rather in my room while the sun was still a long way from the horizon. Before I could congratulate my psyche for avoiding sanity draining exploration of the nightmarish realm, however, I could hear something rather unusual within my room. It sounded like…

Breathing…