[Some Lovecraftian vibes midway through the chapter]
After many, many deep breaths, my erection finally goes down and my heart rate returns to something resembling normal.
I drop into my chair, boot up my desktop, and open Discord. The familiar startup sound chirps, and I can already hear my sisters' voices bleeding through their bedroom walls.
"Finally! Adam!" Selene's voice explodes through my headphones the second I join the voice channel. "What took you so long?!"
"Sup, dork." That's Bianca, casual as ever.
"Hi... Adam..." Luna's soft voice joins in, and I can practically hear the shy smile in those two words.
"Hey guys," I respond, deliberately pushing the hallway incident into a mental box labeled 'Do Not Open Under Any Circumstances.' "What's up?"
"We've been waiting forever! Come on, come on, open Minecraft already!"
I wince, already knowing this won't go over well. "Uh, actually... I'm not gonna play tonight. Sorry. I'm really close to finishing my side project and I kinda want to focus on that."
Silence.
Then: "WHAT?!" Selene's shriek is so loud I hear it both through my headphones AND through her bedroom wall. "Adam, nooo!"
"Holy shit, Selene!" Bianca's muffled yell comes from her room, and I hear a distinct thump, probably her throwing something at their shared wall. "You're so fucking loud! Shut up!"
I hear Selene's mic click as she mutes herself, then her distant voice shouting back. "You shut up!"
"You're the one screaming like a banshee!"
I can't help but smile. The joys of living in a house with paper-thin walls and dramatic siblings.
Selene unmutes. "But Adammm, it's no fun without everyone..."
"You guys can still play though," I tell them. "Don't let me stop you."
"No... it's not the same..." Luna says quietly. "We wanted... to all play together..."
"See? Luna agrees with me!" Selene declares. Then her tone shifts completely, bouncing back to cheerful in record time. "Oh! I know! Let's do a study session instead! We can all just hang out while we work!"
"Yeah... that sounds nice..." Luna agrees.
"Ugh." Bianca's disgust is palpable. "I fucking hate school."
And that's how we spend the rest of the night. I pull up my project while the girls' voices form this comfortable background noise: Selene going off on tangents about anime tropes, Bianca's making sarcastic comments about how stupid her art assignment is, Luna's occasionally giving anime suggestions in her soft, hesitant way.
My fingers fly across the keyboard as I debug another section of code. I'm so close I can taste it. The functionality is all there: my AI can analyze market trends, predict stock movements with decent accuracy, and I've even got the framework for autonomous trading built. Now I'm just hunting down bugs, making sure the system doesn't suddenly decide to go all-in on some random penny stock and bankrupt me.
Two hours slide by. My eyes are burning from staring at code, and I've reached that point where the letters are starting to blur together.
"Alright, I'm done." Bianca announces, punctuated by a yawn. "Calling it."
"Me too..." Luna says softly. "Good night... everyone..."
"Night night! Sleep tight! Sweet dreams!" Selene's voice is still somehow energetic despite the late hour.
"Night guys," I add.
We all disconnect, and suddenly my room feels very quiet. I go through my nighttime routine on autopilot: brush teeth, wash face, change into sleep clothes. My body feels pleasantly tired, the kind of exhaustion that promises good sleep.
I collapse into bed, pull my blanket up, and let my eyes close.
Sleep comes fast.
Cold.
It's so cold.
My eyes open slowly, and I don't immediately recognize where I am. Trees surround me, these massive, towering things that stretch up into darkness. I know this place. That huge national forest we visited once as a family, the one with trails that went on for miles.
But this isn't how I remember it.
Something is wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong, and my brain is screaming at me to notice, to understand what's making every hair on my body stand on end.
Then it hits me.
Silence.
Not the peaceful quiet of a forest at night. Not the soft rustle of leaves or the distant calls of nocturnal animals. This is the total absence of sound. The kind of silence that doesn't exist in nature, that shouldn't exist anywhere things are alive.
I look up.
The sky is black. Not the deep blue-black of night scattered with stars, but pure, absolute darkness. A void that seems to swallow light rather than simply lack it. No moon. No stars. No distant glow of civilization. Just an infinite expanse of nothing pressing down on me.
My heart starts hammering in my chest. This has to be a dream. A nightmare.
Something pulls at me.
It's not physical. Not exactly. It's like there's a hook buried somewhere deep in my chest, attached to a line, and something on the other end is reeling me in. Drawing me forward into the darkness between the trees.
I dig my heels in. Try to stop. Try to make my body resist.
Move. I need to move my hands, clench my fists, dig my nails into my palms. The pain should wake me up, should break whatever this is—
My hands don't respond.
My legs start walking. Not because I'm choosing to. Not because I'm telling them to. They just... move. One foot in front of the other, carrying me deeper into the silent forest.
I try to scream.
My throat won't work. My jaw won't open. I'm locked inside my own body, a prisoner watching through my own eyes as something else pilots me forward.
Darkness swallows everything.
When I can see again, the world has changed.
The trees aren't standing anymore. They're scattered like kindling, massive trunks snapped and toppled as if they were twigs. Some of the trees are simply gone, torn away completely, leaving stumps with ragged, splintered edges that jut from the earth like broken bones piercing skin.
The smell hits me. Metallic. Thick. Coating the back of my throat.
Blood.
Then I hear it.
The first sound that appears in this dead place, and it's laughter. Deep. Guttural. Wrong.
My body turns without my permission, rotating to face the source of the sound.
It's a deer. It's massive. Elephant-sized, maybe bigger. Its body is slick, coated in something dark that drips onto the destroyed ground beneath it. Blood. Definitely blood. Fresh blood that steams slightly in the cold air.
It's looking at me.
And it's smiling.
Deer don't smile. The thought appears in my mind, sharp and desperate. Deer don't have mouths full of razor-sharp teeth arranged in rows like a shark. Deer don't have eyes that gleam with malice and hunger.
This thing shouldn't exist.
It charges.
The ground shakes with each thunderous step. The laughter gets louder, splitting the air around me, and I'm trying to move, trying to raise my hands to protect my face, trying to run, trying to do anything—
My eyes slam shut.
When they open, I'm standing in the city.
I'm in the neighborhood of Empyrean Heights. I recognize the architecture immediately, the sprawling mansions, the carefully manicured estates. Or what's left of them. The destruction here is different. More precise. Deliberate.
Buildings are toppled, reduced to mountains of rubble and shattered glass. But some have been cut. Perfectly, impossibly cut, sliced cleanly in half as if a blade the size of a building had passed through them. I can see inside the cross-sections: furniture, walls, staircases all exposed, ending abruptly at the cut line.
In the distance, rising above everything, I see it.
My mind refuses to process what I'm looking at. It's too big. Too impossible. This thing rises up past the clouds until I can't see where it ends. It has limbs. I think. Maybe. Too many of them, extending and bending and folding in directions that space shouldn't allow. Some of the limbs drag along the ground, carving trenches through earth and concrete and buildings. Others reach upward, disappearing into the void-black sky.
The sounds it makes aren't breathing, aren't movement. They're the sounds of reality being violated. Scraping and grinding and breaking, like the world itself is being forced apart.
I can feel it looking at me. Not with eyes. I don't think it has eyes, or if it does, they're nothing I can recognize. But I feel its attention fix on me like a physical weight crushing down.
I blink—
There's grass under my feet.
The field outside the Fairchild School of Excellence stretches out around me, but the grass is gray. Colorless. Dead. Each blade brittle and lifeless, crunching under my feet as my body continues walking forward.
The smell of decay fills my nose. Not fresh death, old death. Rot that's been festering, spreading, corrupting everything it touches.
Four figures stand in the middle of the field. Four silhouettes, all facing away from me.
I know them.
Selene. Her pink hair unmistakable even from behind.
Bianca. Shorter, her black and green hair catching nonexistent light.
Mom. Tall, her long green hair cascading down her back.
Luna. Tiny, drowning in an oversized hoodie.
Every instinct I have is screaming. Not words. Just raw, primal terror condensed into one clear message:
DON'T LOOK AT THEM.
My body moves closer anyway. One step. Another. Each movement unstoppable.
The scream is trapped inside my head, bouncing around my skull with nowhere to go. STOP. PLEASE. STOP.
I can see more details now. The way they're standing. They're too still. Unnaturally still. No breathing, no shifting weight, nothing living about their stillness.
I'm getting closer.
Please, I need to do something, need to stop this, need to—
The skill. Will of Iron. It's the only thing I have left, the only ability that might—
I find that mental muscle and clench it with everything I have.
Will of Iron [Enabled]
The change is immediate. The fear doesn't vanish, but it gets pushed down, muffled beneath a layer of cold calm. My thoughts clear. I can think again instead of just drowning in terror.
Now that the panic has receded, I can feel what was underneath it. Some kind of presence, vast and incomprehensible, pressing against my mind. Forcing me forward. Clouding my thoughts with existential dread.
My body stops moving.
I have control again. Finally. My fingers twitch, responding to me, listening—
I hear something speak from beside me.
It's not a voice. Not really. The sounds it makes aren't anything a human throat could produce, aren't anything that should exist. They're sounds that hurt to hear, that make my teeth ache and my eyes water.
But I understand them anyway. The meaning bypasses language, drilling directly into my consciousness.
Surprise.
Interest.
Then, simple and absolute: Move forward.
And my body obeys.
Despite having just regained control, despite my desperate resistance, my legs take another step. Then another. The four figures are getting closer. I can see more details: the fabric of their clothes, the way their hair falls.
I cannot look at their faces. I know with absolute certainty that if I see their faces, something will break. Something in me or in the world or in both, and it won't be fixable.
Please no please no please—
Golden light erupts in front of me.
Everything changes. The fear vanishes like it was never there, replaced by warmth and safety and hope. Pure, unconditional love washing over me in waves.
The gray field dissolves. I'm standing in vibrant grass under warm sunlight, bathed in golden radiance that should blind me but doesn't. It's gentle. Welcoming.
I look around. Hundreds of other lights surround me. Humanoid shapes made of pure golden luminance, all standing in this field of light and warmth and safety.
Then she speaks.
The voice is impossibly beautiful, warm like sunlight and gentle like a mother's embrace, and I can feel the grief and love in every word.
"Oh, my precious children. I apologize." The sorrow in those words is overwhelming. "I will not last much longer." There's a pause. "But please, don't give up. And please… do not lose hope."
The warmth intensifies, and I feel like I'm being wrapped in the most comforting hug imaginable.
Then darkness crashes over everything.