Whispers: The Veiled Realms

Chapter One

I had to do this, no one else could, not like anyone else was making an effort to try to anyway. I was the only one who could sense the portals and they have been gone for far too long. Just like the others, they stepped through the portals and never returned. It has been six weeks now, five weeks too long.

No one else knew I could sense the portals, no one outside my parents and my husband. They were the only ones who knew that I could point out the locations of the newest portal so they could avoid it. So they too would not be taken away like the others.

These portals, these invisible spots in the air that people randomly walked through. Unknowing they were there and suddenly they were gone, nowhere to be seen, to be found. Once someone disappeared into these invisible portals, they never returned.

Anyone could step through these portals, but it wasn't always in the same spot. Every day it was in a different location. Usually, no more than three at a time had been recorded to appear at once. The only way anyone knew where one was actively was the report of someone just disappearing into thin air.

It's been like this for over seventeen years. Ever since I was six years old, reports of people disappearing in thin air suddenly appeared on the news. People went into a panic as suddenly their loved ones would disappear into nothingness. Either just walking side by side, one minute they were there. The next they were gone.

There had been cases of portals appearing in the middle of a road. Cars driving right into them and suddenly they were out of sight. A blink and they were gone. A child sliding down a slide, never to make it to the bottom. A grandmother opened her front door to step onto her porch and suddenly she was gone. There was no rhythm or reason, no patterns to the portals, just that they suddenly appeared and the next day they were gone and in a new location.

This has only been happening in my town, a small town in the middle of a valley of the Appalachian Mountains named Azalea, named for the numerous trees that grew in the town. No other cases of it have been happening around the world, well at first anyway. At first, it just seemed to be happening frequently in my hometown. A few years later other cases appeared around the world, but they were far between instances. One day it was a few people disappearing in a small town in Japan, the next surfers off the beaches in California were disappearing after a crashing wave, but my town; it was every day since.

The government came to investigate. For a while, everything was on lockdown. People evacuated, or those who wanted to leave left. Others refused to leave their homes behind, while others went into a panic demanding their loved ones be found and returned.

The world went into a hunt for the missing souls but none were ever found, and not a single missing person has been found once in the past seventeen years. Eventually, the government started forming armies to send into the Portals they could find, but for a while, the Portals were hidden, as if they didn't want them to enter. Things got quiet and life continued, it became an everyday normal.

Someone would suddenly go missing? A witness would report the location. Our phones would get a message of what location to avoid for that day. It was routine.

A wall outside our town was built. Warning messages plastered all about the Portals. "Enter at your own risk" some of the signs would say.

People all over the world came to try and explore the Portals but after a while, they stopped coming besides the random depressed person who thought this was a way to an end and for charging into the portal. No one in the past five years has willingly wanted to enter the portal, that was until six weeks ago.