(Soft static crackles in the background. A man’s voice, weathered but steady, cuts through.)

You don’t believe me, do you? None of you do. I see it in your eyes—the way you tilt your heads, the way your fingers twitch toward your radios, ready to call in a psych eval. Two years gone, and I’m the only one who came back. Of course, you don’t believe me.

But I remember everything.

I was flying routine—just another run over the Atlantic. The sky was clear, the ocean calm, my instruments steady. Then, a wall of clouds, thick and unnatural, rolled in from nowhere. Not a storm. Not turbulence. Just—silence. My compass spun wild. My radio shrieked static. My hands were on the controls, but the plane wasn’t mine anymore. It slid into that cloud like it was being swallowed whole.

I thought I was dead.

Instead, I found myself… somewhere else. A sky that never darkened. A sea too smooth to be real. Islands that shimmered like heat waves. Time didn’t move right there. The sun would hover in the same spot for what felt like days, then plunge into darkness in an instant. And the others… I wasn’t alone.

Some were pilots like me, flyers from every era—some in leather caps, others in jumpsuits decades out of time. They told me they’d been there for years, decades. Some accepted it. Others searched, mapped, calculated ways out. But the place didn’t follow rules. I watched men walk into the mist and never return. I saw lights in the water, pulsing like a heartbeat.

I should’ve been one of them. I was ready to be. But something changed.

One day, the sky tore open again. Just as suddenly as I arrived, I was flung back. No warning. No reason. One moment, I was trapped. The next—I was flying over the Atlantic, my instruments screaming, the coastline ahead like a mirage. Two years had passed in your world. Two years gone.

And now I’m here, sitting in front of you, telling you a story no one will ever believe.

But I swear to you, I wasn’t alone. And whatever’s out there… it let me go.

This time.