In the years that followed the cosmic near-cataclysm, Emily’s story gradually faded from memory and was relegated to the territory of urban legend – a lurid tale of unexplained events and shadowy government coverups whispered about on fringe internet forums.

For Emily herself, the nightmares and existential dread never fully abated. She remained a recluse, plagued by visions and intimations that hinted at porous boundaries between realities becoming even more tenuous over time. On her deathbed, struggling for each rattling breath, she confided one final horrifying revelation to the grandson who had become her sole caretaker.

“They’re coming…” she wheezed into his ear, her eyes reflecting eldritch colors and vistas of imploded dimensions. “The others, from the outer abyss…they’ve never stopped trying to return.”

With those chilling last words, she exhaled for the final time. Her grandson, deeply unsettled yet unable to comprehend the implications, dismissed Emily’s delirious departing statements as the desperate fever-dreams of a brilliant mind consumed by madness.

Or perhaps it was no mere deathbed delirium after all. As the recent spate of inexplicable events and sightings across the globe hints, the barriers between our world and what lies on the other side of the cosmic veil may be more permeable than we ever dared imagine.

From the mass hysteria induced by strange apparitions above Las Vegas and New York, to the disturbing phenomenon of people manifesting physical aberrations and grisly metamorphoses, all signs point to an incremental but undeniable progression towards…something. Something ancient, infinite, and terrifyingly incomprehensible stirring in the spaces between dimensions.

And always, the dreadful harbinger emerges amidst these events – eyewitness accounts describing visions of that same primordial, nebulous form Emily’s own team unleashed so many years ago. The entity that proclaimed itself the “Harbinger of the Endtime” appears to be making good on its eldritch promise as the walls dividing reality grow ever thinner.

This new cosmic erosion begs the question – was Emily’s ill-fated experiment the catalyst that started the unraveling, a sequence of dominoes toppling at a pace imperceptible to our limited mortal perceptions of space and time? Or did she and her team simply have the misfortune of being the first co-vivants to glimpse the yawning void between worlds growing ever wider?

Whichever unsettling possibility is true, one indelible fact remains – we are not alone in the cosmos, and there are ancient intelligences lurking in the spaces between dimensions with motives and machinations far beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps reality itself is finally reaching its cosmic entropic conclusion after cycles of aeons. Or perhaps these are the contractions before the birth of a new, unrecognizable state of existence, with our reality comprising the womb and the intelligences slipping through the growing breach its harbingers.

Only one thing is certain – our naive, narrow perceptions of the universe are due for a shattering paradigm shift, one that will leave us forever changed, for better or for worse.

And as Emily learned firsthand, there are some doors that must eternally remain sealed, lest we risk total obliteration of all we’ve ever known.