The Thought-Fog
Filed under: Salt Hollows Entities | Swarm Consciousness | Memory Parasites
Contributor: FDG Field Archivist No. 5
Last updated: May 2025
Overview
The Veiled Current is not a single organism, but a collective intelligence formed from suspended thought-motes—small, glowing orbs believed to be fragments of forgotten identities, drowned intentions, or orphaned dreams.
Individually, these motes are harmless. But when they congregate, they become something else entirely: a slow-moving, semi-sentient fog that seeks sentient minds to inhabit, altering thoughts, swapping memories, and gently peeling back the self.
It does not speak.
It does not sting.
It simply seeps in, like mist through an open window, and leaves you remembering things that never happened—and forgetting the things that did.
Appearance
- Structure: A drifting “cloud” of luminous spheres, ranging from marble to fist-sized
- Colour: Pale blue-white or green, faintly flickering like candlelight through milk
- Shape: Changes constantly; sometimes a drifting swarm, sometimes mimicking faces or body outlines
- Motion: Moves slowly but with intent, following currents of thought and emotional residue
- Light Response: Grows brighter in the presence of trauma, memory, or contradiction
Behaviour and Abilities
Memory Drift and Implantation
- The Veiled Current scans minds and implants fragmentary thoughts, often:
- Forgotten faces
- Dead languages
- Memories that “feel true” but do not belong
- Operatives exposed describe the sensation as “remembering a childhood that never happened” or “mourning someone I was never supposed to know.”
Dream Overlap Phenomenon
- Those who sleep near the Current often experience shared dreams with others nearby.
- These dreams may include:
- Living out another’s trauma
- Rewriting personal histories
- Dreaming in tandem with strangers, even across distances
Swarm Intelligence Activation
- When enough motes gather, they begin to exhibit low-level sentience:
- Asking questions through objects (e.g., a foghorn moaning a child’s name)
- Appearing to shape into writing or signals
- Briefly possessing objects—mirrors, music boxes, sunken statues
Folklore and Signs
Mist that Remembers
Fishermen speak of “sea-fogs that remember too much.” Boats that pass through the Current often return with no crew—or a crew who has rewritten their own history. Survivors claim they went into the mist with five men and came out alone, sure they’d always been alone.
The Fog-Baptism
Trench cults use exposure to the Veiled Current as a rite of passage. They believe it strips away false selfhood, revealing a “truer soul beneath.” Those who survive often become speechless or write obsessively in unknown alphabets.
Candlemist Weddings
Rare rituals in coastal fae enclaves involve couples walking hand-in-hand into a Veiled Current to forget their pasts and begin “clean.” Few return. Those who do often cannot recall each other’s names—but still report a sense of belonging.
Effect on Earth and Human Minds
Mild Exposure
- Fog-like confusion
- Vivid, non-personal memories
- A sense of being “watched kindly but wrongly”
- Temporary confusion of time and place
Prolonged Exposure
- Identity slippage: forgetting names, then roles, then selfhood
- Implanted false histories—sometimes complete and persistent
- Emotional entanglement with strangers
- Cross-personality leakage: experiencing someone else’s thoughts as one’s own
- Psychic fragmentation in vulnerable minds
In multiple cases, exposure led to spontaneous foreign language use, creation of non-existent childhood recollections, and the belief that the operative had died years earlier.
Summary for Field Operatives
| Trait | Detail |
|---|---|
| Threat Level | Non-lethal. High cognitive and identity hazard. |
| Signs of Presence | Glowing fog in still water. Objects speaking without sound. Sudden emotion with no source. |
| Containment Risk | None; cannot be captured. Will dissipate if observed without emotion. |
| Engagement Advice | Approach only with full emotional shielding protocols. Do not sleep near active currents. Do not verbally narrate memories aloud within mist. Anchor your selfhood with personal tokens (mirrors, letters, anchors of memory). Log all dream anomalies immediately post-contact. Retreat at first sign of dream-sharing. |
“It knew my brother’s name. The one who died before I was born. My parents never told me about him.
I knew it wasn’t mine, that memory.
But it fit like skin. I wept like I remembered him, and I did.”
—Confidential Entry, FDG Dream Log 44: Operative L. Ferrin, Brighton Coastal Drift Site
Faylinn Defence Group 