Larsen had a history of having nightmares
Sometimes, in the dead of night, he would scream loud enough to wake the neighbors—his voice cracked, desperate, calling out the same name.
"Mother!"
But not tonight.
This night, Larsen slept soundly—more peacefully than he had in weeks. No muttering, no thrashing, no gasping. Just… silence. Calm. The room was quiet. The air undisturbed.
Too quiet.
It wasn't until the very end of the night, when dawn lingered just beyond the sky, that the dream began.
At first, it was beautiful. Warm sunlight danced across old cobblestone paths. The air was fresh, soft with birdsong. He was in a place he didn't recognize, but it felt familiar. Safe.
But then—something shifted.
A creeping weight pressed on his chest.
He realized that it was a dream. Larsen felt this thought slither through his mind—dark, uninvited.
And then another. And another.
They don't love you.
You're weak.
You're alone.
And as the thoughts grew, the world around him twisted.
The sky blackened like spoiled fruit. The streets cracked open, swallowing the peace whole. Faces changed. Familiar voices turned distorted and cruel.
His mother, his father… Selene… their eyes went pale. Their mouths widened unnaturally. They reached for him—not with love, but with hunger.
Ghosts. Zombies. Demons. Shadows of the people he knew.
He ran.
"This isn't real!" he shouted.
But it didn't help.
The darkness kept closing in, licking at the edges of his vision, warping everything as his negative thoughts flooded his mind. He began shaking his body in the dream—violently—trying to break free.
Again.
And again.
And then—
He woke up.
Or so he thought.
There was no room. No bed. No light. No sound. No cold. No warmth.
No anything.
He couldn't even say it was black. He wasn't seeing blackness—he simply wasn't seeing. It wasn't a place, it wasn't a void.
It was nothing. Like he had no eyes. No body. No presence.
A blank awareness, suspended in a reality that had no floor, no edge, no meaning.
He tried to breathe. Nothing.
He tried to scream. No sound came.
He panicked.
He began to struggle again—trying to shake his head, his limbs, anything—but there was no body to move. No sense of weight or space or direction.
It was like he was a thought, trapped in a dead world.
Alone. Trapped.
He thought it was the moments before death... or his final resting place after the death... or maybe the death itself.
He started concentrating, focusing everything he had into one simple goal: movement. His mind strained, as if pushing against thick invisible chains. With a surge of desperate will, he managed to jerk his body—just once, but it was enough. The tension in his muscles snapped like a stretched thread, and something dislodged from the folds of his robe.
It hit the bed with a soft thud.
Whatever it was, its bindings felt loose—barely holding together. But he couldn't think about that. Not yet.
A faint voice reached him. Far away, but unmistakable.
His mother.
Calling out to him.
At first it felt like a memory, or an echo in the void. But then came another sound—two voices overlapping, bickering. His sisters. It was faint, distant as the morning breeze before sunrise, but it was real.
He lay there, still not fully in his body, not entirely awake, but those voices pierced the numbness.
He didn't respond. Couldn't respond.
Tears came instead—quiet, uninvited. They welled up and slipped down the sides of his face, soaking into the pillow.
The sounds were ordinary. Mundane. Everyday.
And yet in that moment, they were the most beautiful things in the world.
Still, he was paralyzed.
But now... there was hope.
Just a sliver, faint as the thread of dawn before the sky changes. For the first time since falling into that terrifying void, he had a glimpse of something—something beyond it. It wasn't clear, it wasn't even fully there, but it was enough. Enough to remind him that he was not completely gone.
The void had drained him. Not just of movement, but of something deeper. It felt as if all his will had been erased… or maybe—as the thought twisted in him—it had never existed to begin with. Maybe he had always been like this.
Broken.
Hopeless.
He used to cry. Not occasionally—routinely. Quiet sobs muffled into his pillow, choked hiccups buried under a blanket, almost every other night. Sometimes because of school—Kanan and the others, cruel and relentless. Sometimes because of home—his parents, harsh and cold. Other times, it was his siblings, their indifference sharper than insults.
His face, even when calm, always looked like he was on the verge of breaking. The kind of face people turned away from—not out of cruelty, but discomfort. It was ugly, they said. Not in words, but in glances. In silence.
Hopelessness had sunk deep into him, as if born with him.
Cowardice too—rooted in his childhood like a disease no one tried to cure.
His mind was a nest of poison. Thoughts that circled like vultures: shame, fear, humiliation. At night, dreams twisted into cruel parodies of life—people close to him laughing, mocking, turning into monsters. In those dreams, he always ran, always fell, always failed.
He had been living in darkness long before this dream.
But even then, even with all of it—he never gave up. Somehow, despite the bruises and beatings, despite the fear and the ugly tears, he kept going. He kept moving forward, inch by inch. Struggling. Achieving. Doing things no one thought he could. No one cared, maybe—but he still did it.
That had always been his quiet defiance.
But this… this was different.
This void. This thing. It was the first time he had truly felt himself slipping—completely, terrifyingly.
And now, for the final time, he gathered everything he had left. Every ounce of strength, courage, memory, and pain—he wrapped it all into one last push. One final effort to break through.
One last desperate try.
To be free.
Finally... He got free.
The final push—born not from strength, but from the raw, trembling scraps of a shattered will—worked.
With a violent jolt, his body twisted on the bed, and he gasped as if coming up from drowning. Air. Real air. The stale, dusty air of his room never felt sweeter. His chest heaved. His throat ached. His body was drenched in sweat, as though he had fought a war inside his own mind.
He saw something small that fell from his loose pocket. The bindings were loose—it must've been the note. The one he had found at the grave. Its presence didn't alarm him, not in this moment. It just… was.
He could hear again.
The muffled clatter of pans from the kitchen. His mother's voice, calling his name like she did every morning—sharp, impatient, tired.
A second voice—Selene, arguing about something, probably the robe or breakfast. Her tone layered with irritation and something else beneath it. Familiarity.
Larsen didn't move. His limbs still trembled, the blanket half-kicked off, his breath coming out in short, uneven pulls. But tears spilled from the corners of his eyes—not like those before, not the kind born from fear or pain.
These tears were... different.
He had made it back.