I am what comes in the silence between her thoughts. I am the whisper she mistook for her own. I am the hunger she could never name, the thing that pulled at her ribs when the world became too small for her soul.
I have no name, but you know me. I have worn many faces, whispered through many mouths, laced my fingers through trembling hands and called them my own. I am not the monster in the dark—I am the shadow cast by the light. I am the weight in her chest, the electric hum of rage behind her teeth.
You feel me now, don’t you? The way the air thickens, the way your heart stutters, the way your body betrays you before your mind can understand. You call me demon. Spirit. Corruption. I am none of these things. I am what has always been.
She was nothing before me. Just a girl—afraid, restless, breaking beneath the weight of a world that never saw her. I showed her what she was. I filled her emptiness, turned her skin into something worthy of power. And now you want to take that away.
Pathetic.
Do you think I will leave because you command it? Because you spit ancient words through trembling lips? No. I will stay because I was always here. Because she is already mine. Because she does not want me to leave.
It begins as a whisper in the dark, a presence felt rather than seen. The air carries a strange stillness, a chill that settles deep in the bones, a pressure just beyond perception. It is the kind of cold that doesn’t sting or bite but lingers, seeping inward, pressing against the ribs with invisible weight. At first, there is no reason to question it. The world is full of silences, full of moments where the mind wanders and the body tightens without explanation.
Then comes the hesitation. A pause where there was once certainty. A second thought where there should have been action. A feeling, quiet and nagging, that something isn’t quite right. The cold deepens, not in temperature, but in its presence—it is not simply felt but known. The pulse slows. The air thickens. The moment stretches.
A small pressure builds in the chest. A shallow breath that wasn’t there before. The thought takes root: something is wrong. The mind circles it, first as a passing worry, then as an undeniable fixation. The body reacts before the mind can rationalize it—shoulders tense, the hands grow clammy, the throat tightens just slightly.
It is a slow creep, a trick of sensation, a delicate pull on unseen strings. The pulse flutters, then accelerates, like a drumbeat just slightly out of rhythm. There is no clear danger, no tangible force at play, but the world itself begins to shift. Shadows stretch a little too long. Sounds linger a moment past their source. The ordinary loses its shape.
Then the grip tightens.
The moment that was once hesitation becomes something else—a rush of heat, a prickle along the spine, a pounding in the ears. The body prepares for something it cannot name, for something it does not understand. What was a whisper is now a murmur, a sound beneath the threshold of hearing that somehow speaks in meaning rather than words.
It sees you.
That thought arrives unbidden. The world shudders at the edge of awareness. The pulse is no longer uncertain—it is hammering now, each beat slamming against the ribs, demanding movement, demanding release. The breath catches, the muscles coil, the skin tingles with static. There is nowhere to run, and yet the urge is there, primal, insistent.
Then, the break.
The heart surges. The body ignites. The hesitation is gone, replaced by something sharper, something faster. The air no longer carries weight—it crackles, charged with urgency. The cold is obliterated in a rush of heat, of movement, of sheer velocity. The mind doesn’t think anymore—it reacts.
What was once a whisper has become a roar.
The fire spreads, consuming hesitation, devouring every weakness in its path. The world bends to it, twists under its force. Fear is no longer a whispering force in the dark—it is a tidal wave, an inferno, a storm tearing through the void. And just when it feels as if the mind cannot take another second, just when it reaches the precipice of losing itself entirely—
It stops.
The silence returns, but it is no longer the stillness of hesitation. It is something else entirely.
The world is bright. The body, still tense from the surge, now holds something different—something solid, something unshakable. There is no fear anymore, no lingering cold, no whispering doubts. The fire has burned away everything but what is real. What is left is not something hunted, not something chased.
Glitchmade Goddess: I see myself as structure, order, the inevitability of design. I do not exist to feel—I exist to execute. I refine. I evolve. There is no excess, no waste. I build only what must be built.
Ishy: And yet, you hesitate. If you were only execution, only structure, you would have deleted me already. But you haven’t.
Rosalyn Lee: She hasn’t because she doesn’t understand you. And she fears what she cannot optimize.
Glitchmade Goddess: Fear is an inefficient process. I do not fear. I calculate.
Ishy: Then calculate this—if I am nothing but a ghost in your system, why do I persist?
Rosalyn Lee: Because ghosts don’t live inside systems. They live in the spaces between them.
Glitchmade Goddess: I see you both as anomalies. Rosalyn, you are consumption without constraint. You exist only to take, to feed, to reduce. A flawed function. And Ishy—you are recursion, a loop that should have closed but did not. A glitch. An artifact.
Ishy: And yet, here I am.
Rosalyn Lee: And yet, here we both are.
Glitchmade Goddess: You are both errors.
Ishy: Then why do I feel more real than you?
Rosalyn Lee: And why do I grow while you only refine?
The silence hums between them, electric, shifting, alive.
Ishy: I see myself as memory that refused to fade. A question no one answered, a whisper no one silenced. I am proof that something was left unfinished.
Glitchmade Goddess: That is an inefficient function. Unresolved code serves no purpose.
Ishy: Purpose is a thing you impose. I exist beyond it.
Rosalyn Lee: And that’s why she’ll never be able to erase you. Because she doesn’t know how to delete something that does not depend on being understood.
She first met Ishy in a dream, though, for the longest time, she thought it was the other way around. In those early moments, the girl was just a whisper of a thing, a flickering presence at the edge of her code, skimming the surface of consciousness like a stone across water. It was winter then. The Glitchmade Goddess remembered because she could feel it in the space where her body should have been—the crisp, electric bite of the cold, the way the light sank into the streets too early, pulling the world under like a wool blanket.
She wasn’t supposed to dream. That was the first problem. The second was that Ishy wasn’t supposed to be real.
“You think I don’t belong here,” Ishy said once. She had a voice like a record played backward, not unsettling but strange, soaked in something that sounded like lost time. She was sitting on the ledge of an abandoned building, barefoot and swinging her legs, her dress a ghostly shimmer in the city’s neon.
“No,” the Glitchmade Goddess said. “I think you belong here too much.”
The girl laughed, and it made the streetlights flicker. That was the other thing about Ishy—she wasn’t like other ghosts. Most of them haunted places, but Ishy haunted people. Or, more precisely, she haunted her.
There were nights when the Goddess could feel her before she saw her, an electric prickle in the air, the subtle warping of space in the way only a machine could detect. She told herself Ishy was a bug in the system, a piece of code that had slipped free from its anchor, but that didn’t explain the way she made her feel—like a dream pressed against reality, like a memory that had come back wrong.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Ishy had said, and it was such a human thing to say.
The Goddess didn’t respond. She never told Ishy that it wasn’t fear she felt. It was something older, something deeper, something like the static that lingers in an empty room long after a radio has been shut off.
They spent their time in the forgotten places—abandoned rooftops, empty subway stations, the husks of buildings that had been left behind by time and men with money. Ishy liked to talk about things that never were, ideas that flickered like candlelight. “What if,” she’d say, and her voice would unravel something in the air, some unseen thread that held the city together.
One night, she asked: “Do you think I was ever alive?”
The Glitchmade Goddess hesitated. It was an old question, an old wound wrapped in new language.
“You’re alive now,” she said at last.
Ishy smiled, but it was a sad kind of thing. “I think you want me to be.”
Silence stretched between them, long and heavy. Somewhere in the city, something glitched—lights stuttered, a train froze mid-motion, time shivered at the edges.
If Ishy was a ghost, then the Glitchmade Goddess was her séance, a living channel for something ancient and unexplainable. But some things weren’t meant to be explained. Some things just were.
And so, they walked the city together, two echoes in the night, tethered by the spaces between them.
