Ashlar’s Whirlwind Vortex By Olofin

The night shift had left Ashlar hollowed out.

At nineteen, the city still felt like it belonged to him in the small hours—Marble Arch's pale stone, the long glide past Hyde Park Corner toward Knightsbridge, the roundabout that spilled traffic toward Edgware Road and Oxford Street. He took the park route without thinking, tires whispering over empty roads, and somehow found himself back at the Fulham flat before the sky had decided whether to remain dark.

He dropped onto the bed still dressed in clothes that smelled of kitchen grease and late orders. Exhaustion hit like a tide.

Lying face-up, his eyes already closing, he felt the first wrongness: a tight, spinning pressure opening in the soft space between the lower edge of his ribs and the hollow above his navel. It wasn't pain. It wasn't indigestion. It was a personal whirlwind, a vortex no wider than a fist, turning faster than any sensation had any right to turn inside a body.

He sat up.

The motion felt lighter than it should have, as though the mattress had given him a gentle push. Then the thought arrived, fully formed.

This is an out-of-body experience.

If it was, then his physical body should still be lying in the bed.

He looked.

There it was—his own shape, slack and ordinary, breathing with the slow rhythm of deep sleep.

Recognition struck.

The room snapped, and he was back inside the heavier body, his heart hammering against ribs that had just moments before felt empty.

Seconds later—minutes, perhaps; time had gone soft—the vortex opened again.

He rose a second time.

If this is real, look at your hands.

He lifted his arms. Something answered the intention: weightless limbs, the ghost of elbows and wrists. But when he tried to see them, there was only the dim room and the unmistakable sensation of movement.

The snap returned him harder this time.

Ashlar sat up for good, his skin cold. Unable to settle, he went downstairs to the late-night restaurant beneath the building. He sat among strangers in the smell of coffee and frying oil, saying nothing, waiting for the world to feel solid again.

A month later—perhaps less—it happened differently.

Awareness returned while he was already floating.

This time he was face down, his back toward the ceiling, looking at the bed below. His physical body lay there wearing the same patterned white clothes he had fallen asleep in, only now the white was brighter—cleaner—as though the fabric carried its own light.

The vortex did not spin this time.

Instead, a steady pull drew him upward toward the plaster ceiling.

Beyond the walls lay the open night.

If he drifted outside, he might never find the room again.

Think of Mum, he muttered.

The words felt small and childlike, the same instinct that had once made him call her name from another room whenever the house seemed too quiet.

The thought of her steadied something.

Control returned—just enough to slow the ascent.

Then another impulse surfaced, colder and more curious than the first.

Before it ends, look.

See what you are.

He drifted toward the mirror on the wall.

Stopped in front of it.

Waited.

Nothing looked back.

No face.

No outline.

No silvered distortion.

Only the empty glass and the room behind him, where another version of himself should have been standing.

The snap took him again.

He woke in bed, heart pounding, the brilliant white of his clothes already fading back into ordinary fabric.

Years later he would hear other people describe the same inward whirlwind, each in different language. Whether the resemblance meant anything, he never decided.

The experiences continued—intermittent and never entirely explained—but those first nights in Fulham remained the clearest: the drive through the sleeping city, the sudden spin beneath his ribs, the body left behind, and the mirror that refused to show anything at all.

Ashlar never decided whether the brightness of the white had been a true color or simply the way the mind filled its own gaps.

He only knew that once the vortex opened, gravity stopped feeling like a law and started feeling like a habit.

[ Ashlar’s Whirlwind Vortex By Olofin ]