I was nine years old when the first Gate appeared on Earth. I remember that day clearly. Every news channel was talking about it, every headline repeating the same thing: at last, humanity had made contact with an alien civilization. The greatest event in human history. The world was about to change. Unimaginable horizons were opening before us.
A couple of months later, the second Gate appeared. Then the third. Then more, one after another—until there were eight of them.
By now, everyone knows what the Gates look like and who the Creatures are. Still, it’s probably worth describing them. I didn’t only see the Gates on the news—I saw one of them in person. Shortly after the first Gate appeared, my parents, like millions of others, went on a guided tour to see it, and they took me along. These trips are still a popular form of entertainment to this day.
A Gate is a massive arch—or more precisely, a half-circle the size of a rainbow. They always rise above forested mountains, because they appear exclusively in mountainous, wooded regions, always near either a mountain river or a lake. Why the Gates emerged in places like that, no one knows.
Each end of a Gate seems to grow straight out of the ground or the mountainside. Some people even believe that a Gate isn’t really a half-circle at all, but a full circle, with its lower half hidden underground. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe it’s just idle speculation.
The surface of a Gate is a pale gray haze, constantly in motion. Lighter patches drift slowly across it, flowing, changing shape, growing brighter and dimmer. There is something ominous about that movement—something deeply unsettling. Looking at a Gate is difficult. After just a minute, your head starts to spin, nausea creeps in, your mood darkens. The longer you stare, the worse it gets. People who live near the Gates have learned to simply look away. That helps: if you only catch the Gate out of the corner of your eye, without focusing on it, you feel fine.
From either side, a Gate looks the same. But from the edge, it simply isn’t there. The Gates have zero thickness. When viewed from an angle, they narrow like any flat object, but unlike everything else, they narrow all the way down—to nothing. If you look at a Gate perfectly edge-on, with one eye, it vanishes completely. A colossal wall stretching into the sky simply disappears. It’s very strange—and, to me at least, a little disturbing.
The Creatures—or, as they’re sometimes called, the Beings—emerge from the Gates, wander across Earth, and then return—either into the same Gate or into a different one. No one can make sense of their routes. They seem to be just… walking. Or perhaps traveling.
The Creatures vary wildly in shape and, it feels, in their very nature. One might look like a jet-black, viscous mass, slowly flowing in on itself. Another resembles a crystalline sphere, bouncing across the ground in a way that defies explanation. Yet another might be nothing more than a drifting cluster of chaotic, glowing points of light.
Creatures have names—and a curious, almost charming habit of announcing their names when they approach someone, as if introducing themselves. They don’t do this with sound. Somehow, they transmit a thought, and the person hears a name inside their head. Names like Ink-Puddle, Bubble, or So-Many-Bees. Often—though not always—the names artistically reflect the Creature’s appearance. In that sense, they feel less like names and more like nicknames, or even descriptive labels.
There are rumors that some people have seen humans emerge from the Gates the same way the Creatures do—not by walking through them. Anyone can pass through a Gate the normal way: you simply step into it and instantly appear on the other side, as if walking through a sheet of light or a thin strip of fog. I’ve done it many times myself. You don’t feel anything at all.
But Creatures never emerge from the opposite side of a Gate. They come from somewhere else—and leave to somewhere else through them.
So, every now and then, people claim they’ve seen humans appear from the Gates the same way Creatures do. There’s no proof, though. Most likely, it’s just rumors and imagination.
There’s one more thing that happens around the Gates: Storms. But these aren’t storms in the usual sense—not just bad weather. They’re something else entirely. Suddenly, energy erupts from a Gate and explodes outward in all directions, twisting and spiraling—flares and clots of pale gray haze, just like what you see inside the Gates themselves. It all comes with hurricane-force winds and horizontal lightning flashing across the air.
Despite how terrifying they look, Storms have never killed anyone. Still, being inside a Storm—standing exposed in the path of that rushing flow—is nearly impossible. People experience an intensely unpleasant, almost unbearable pressure of unknown origin. It feels like pain and suffering, both physical and psychological at once. You can’t resist it. The only option is to take cover—behind thick walls, cliffs, or any sufficiently massive obstacle that shields you from the rushing flow.
Fortunately, the farther you are from a Gate, the weaker a Storm becomes. A few kilometers out, it’s still unpleasant, but tolerable. A few dozen kilometers farther, it turns into little more than mild bad weather: stronger winds, faint pale ripples in the air like scraps of mist, and for some people—especially those sensitive to weather—a slight pressure in the temples.
Storms are short-lived, usually lasting about an hour. They happen roughly once a week, each time at a different Gate. Sometimes there’s a gap of two or three weeks. Occasionally, two Storms happen back-to-back, though that’s rare. But more than two Storms in a single week? That has never happened.
So, as I said before, looking at the Gates is unpleasant—and increasingly so. They can’t be photographed or filmed: recordings show nothing but blurry, shapeless smears. In fact, the Gates can’t be registered by any instruments at all. That’s one reason—but not the only one—why studying the Gates, the Storms, and especially the Creatures has failed.
The other, more fundamental reason is the same physical and psychological pressure people experience—not only inside a Storm, but even when trying to approach a Creature, whether to capture it, restrain it, or simply measure it. Intense physical discomfort sets in, along with fear, depression, and apathy. It all escalates quickly, until it becomes completely unbearable.
Because of all this, the global fascination that followed the appearance of the Gates—along with interest in Storms, Creatures, and everything connected to them—faded surprisingly fast. Researchers abandoned their projects one by one. They said they were losing motivation. That thinking about it felt heavy. Scientists seemed to forget why they had started in the first place. Studies were shut down. Institutes, laboratories, entire research centers created during the initial frenzy were closed. Eventually, it all came to nothing.
That’s how it happened that the Gates, the Storms, and the Creatures became… ordinary.
They turned into part of nature—no different from mountains and rivers, fish and birds, ordinary storms and hurricanes. People still travel to see the Gates. They still smile when they “hear” a Creature’s name. They still take shelter from Storms. But now it’s no different from visiting a beautiful waterfall or an oddly shaped mountain, from hiding from a hurricane or a flood, from reacting to an animal in the forest or a bird on a branch.
Born as the greatest sensation in human history, the Gates—and everything connected to them—became part of everyday life.