The moment passed.
That was the first deception.
Moments did not end when something like him was involved; they echoed. The slip he had made lingered like an afterimage in the architecture of the night. Not visible. Not traceable. But present in the way a room remembers a scream long after the sound is gone.
He felt it as he moved.
The city no longer merely accommodated him. It adjusted around him with care that bordered on caution. Lights flickered a half-second too late. Reflections lagged behind motion. The air carried a density that had not been there before, as if reality itself had grown alert.
He did not know why.
That was worse than knowing.
He changed direction twice, then a third time, testing whether the sensation followed location or proximity. It followed him. Not closely, not insistently—like a thought that refused to be forgotten rather than a presence that pursued.
He reached a public transit platform near midnight. Trains thundered past without stopping, metal screaming against rail. The noise was useful. It swallowed anomalies. He leaned against a pillar, posture loose, head lowered, indistinguishable from the others waiting without hope or intention.
A child cried somewhere down the platform. A couple argued in exhausted murmurs. A man slept sitting upright, fingers locked around a bag like a lifeline.
Human noise.
Grounding.
He closed his eyes for a count of five breaths.
On the third breath, something changed.
Not around him.
Above.
The sensation was subtle but absolute, like gravity deciding to consider you. The pressure did not come from any direction his senses understood. It came from meaning.
He opened his eyes.
The platform was the same. The people were the same. The train schedule board flickered uselessly as ever. And yet—
There was an absence.
A silence inside the noise, like a gap in thought.
His instincts screamed without sound.
Still.
Do not move.
Do not be.
He obeyed, sinking inward, flattening his presence the way he had flattened his silhouette in the alley days before. Breath slowed. Muscles released. Attention diffused outward instead of focusing inward.
Contain.
Something vast regarded the scene.
Not with eyes.
With comprehension.
Far above the concept of night, in a place where stories slept and nightmares were shelved like rare books, Dream of the Endless stood still.
He did not arrive. He had always been there.
The anomaly did not register to him as danger or defiance. It registered as error. A place where narrative pressure collapsed inward instead of flowing forward. A being with no beginning tugging gently at the architecture of consequence.
Dream reached—not with a hand, but with attention.
The boy felt it immediately.
The world sharpened.
Every sound became too clear. Every line too defined. His heartbeat thundered in his ears. The pressure inside him recoiled, coiling tighter, as if recognizing a predator older than itself.
Images flickered behind his eyes.
A library without end.
Pages writing themselves.
A figure made of shadow and certainty, crowned with stars.
He did not understand them.
But he understood this:
If he moved now, something would happen.
Not to him.
To the world around him.
Dream paused.
He did not push further.
The anomaly did not belong to any story he governed. To interfere without understanding would be… inelegant. Dangerous, even for him.
So he did what only beings of his nature could do.
He waited.
The pressure lifted gradually, like a tide receding without fanfare. The silence inside the noise dissolved. The platform returned to its natural disorder.
The boy sagged imperceptibly, breath catching for the first time since he woke in the alley.
He did not know he had been examined by an Endless.
He only knew that something had looked at him and decided—not yet.
He left the platform shortly after, legs steady despite the tension still unwinding inside him. The city accepted him back with relief thinly disguised as indifference.
As he walked, a new instinct surfaced—not tactical, not physical.
Caution toward the unseen.
Whatever forces existed beyond this city, beyond even the pressure he carried within, they were aware now.
And awareness, once earned, could not be revoked.
Behind him, in realms that catalog beginnings and endings, Dream turned away and made a single note in a ledger that did not exist.
ANOMALY OBSERVED.
STATUS: UNWRITTEN.
INTERVENTION: DEFERRED.
The story continued.
And for the first time since his arrival, the universe admitted—quietly, reluctantly—that it did not know how this would end.