「 CONTENT NOTICE 」[1]
Iskael woke up with a quiet inhale then sat up as if he had simply returned from a nap rather than crossed any meaningful boundary between states of being.
The room was familiar, unmistakably so, his dorm within Sanctum Imperialis, unchanged down to the smallest detail.
Pale morning light slid through the curtains the same way it always did, cutting a clean line across the floor. His desk sat exactly where it should.
His uniform was folded precisely left sitting on his chair.
His shoes were aligned with the same irritating precision he forced onto them habitually every night.
Everything looked normal.
He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, arms crossed beneath his head like a pillow, letting the stillness settle, then blinked slowly, as if acknowledging the world's continued existence.
"What a weird dream."
His eyes drifted toward the mirror across the room, the one he kept angled toward his bed on purpose, a habit and a check he had never managed to abandon.
He sat up as he studied his reflection carefully.
His hair was slightly messy. His face was blank. His eyes were calm, carrying no visible trace of panic or lingering emotion.
Something in his chest still felt warm, a phantom sensation that refused to fade, lingering as though his body had decided to hold onto it on its own terms.
"If I'm going to get extremely vivid dreams," he thought idly, "they could at least be Naughty?"
The thought surfaced without warning and made him frown, the disconnect between humor and sensation unsettling in a way he could not immediately place.
He remained seated, cross-legged on the bed, resting his chin in his palm as though he were trying to solve a difficult problem rather than simply waking up.
"That's normal for people my age, right?"
His gaze lingered on his reflection, deadened in a way that suggested familiarity rather than exhaustion, before he tilted his head slightly.
He looked like someone pretending to be human.
Or someone who had learned what being human looked like and was now carefully following the instructions.
After a moment, a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, controlled through habit and practice.
He raised one finger as if lecturing an invisible audience that existed solely in his mind.
"The best part about waking up," he said softly, "is establishing control."
His voice carried calm with it, a tone shaped through repetition and use.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood.
His feet touched the floor and he felt the usual satisfaction of the world staying in place beneath him.
He walked to the mirror and met his own gaze.
"Hmmmm..." he continued quietly. "When it comes to routines, you shouldn't let dreams rattle you, right?"
He pointed at himself in a childish manner, the gesture almost mocking, though the words themselves were treated with seriousness.
They sounded ridiculous, yet he regarded them like a law that governed him whether he acknowledged it or not.
In a sense, they were law to him.
He turned and moved to the bathroom.
The shower came first.
He adjusted the water temperature precisely, settling on the balance he had defined long ago as correct.
He let the water run for the exact number of seconds he always allowed before stepping in, as though the timing itself carried meaning.
He washed his hair in the same order, fingers moving through the strands in practiced motions that required no thought.
He cleaned his body with efficiency and distance, approaching the task like maintenance rather than care, like cleaning a weapon that needed to remain functional.
Throughout it all, he kept his gaze steady.
A human boy, standing in a normal shower on a normal morning, doing everything expected of him.
A buzzing sound cut through the bathroom.
Ding
Once.
Then again.
Ding
Iskael continued brushing his teeth slowly and thoroughly, eyes locked on his reflection as foam gathered at the corner of his mouth.
He rinsed once, spat once, then wiped his lips with careful precision. Everything proceeded as it always did.
The buzzing returned.
Ding
He washed his face, dried it, and adjusted his hair, moving through his routine with quiet diligence that appeared ordinary from the outside while remaining anything but inside his head.
All of it was ritual, layered so deeply into him that deviation carried weight.
The buzzing persisted.
Ding
His jaw tightened slightly.
He ignored it anyway.
Leaving the bathroom, he turned his attention toward the chair where his uniform waited. He picked it up and dressed in the same careful order he always followed, shirt first, then pants, then blazer, then tie.
His fingers lingered when they reached the collar, and his pace slowed without conscious intent.
The collar was always last.
Because the collar that concealed the tightness of his tie was the part that mattered.
He tightened it gradually, to feel something firm around the place where softness had once been used against him.
The asphyxiating pressure settled around his throat like a boundary, the tie pressing into his skin as a reminder etched directly into flesh.
'I am me.'
The thought arrived simply.
The phantom followed, as it always did when the collar reached a certain tightness.
A woman's breath near his ear, close enough to feel imagined warmth.
A voice sweet enough to be believed.
"My sweet boy."
His fingers paused against the fabric.
He never saw her face clearly. He never needed to. Her presence arrived whole, complete in the way she spoke like she cared while continuing to take everything from him.
This was the praise that had emptied him. The warmth that had come to claim him.
The realization returned alongside it, settling in without warning. She would never leave his mind. Erasure did not end memory. Even after she was gone, this would return.
That understanding made the idea of giving up on existing feel acceptable.
He hated it.
He was repulsed by it.
His body remembered the warmth.
That was what lingered.
His jaw tightened.
He pulled the tie tighter, drawing the pressure closer until it grounded him fully.
He needed that pressure, needed the reminder that permission no longer existed, even if his body still struggled to believe it.
The buzzing cut through the room again.
Ding
The pressure around his throat anchored him back inside himself, reminding him that he was no longer a child, no longer trapped, no longer something to be guided by soft words while being hollowed out.
He did not speak the thought aloud. His body had learned it already.
This was his way of reminding the world that no one else had permission anymore.
The words slipped into his mind again, intimate and invasive.
"My love."
And with it came the memory that always followed.
The memory of his first exposure to hopeless powerlessness.
A grand room filled with warmth and safety.
A child infinitely grateful for shelter from the outskirts, for food he had been given, and for being chosen at all, spared from the weight of being trash.
This room.
It felt truly safe to him.
Waking up there felt fine, no matter the cruelty he would later indulge in with the mistress, no matter what he would become. None of it mattered, because he had woken up there.
Free.
Free from everything he had known before.
He heard the door creak open.
Confusion and joy filled his being as he recognized the entity who walked in.
He had loved her.
That was the humiliating truth of it.
He had loved her the way a child loves someone who saves them, someone who teaches them how the world works, someone who touches their head and tells them they are special.
She was his guardian.
His savior.
His "mother."
The woman who showed him how to live. How to take in a cruel world. How to own your existence and make what you wanted yours, to hell with anyone but those you cared for.
Shamefully, Iskael had expected her visit to be something else. Something gentle. Like a mother checking on her child.
It was nothing like that.
It was something else entirely.
This woman had come to take him, just as she had taught him to take from others all those times.
It was not all at once. She did not force herself upon him like a violent monster.
But it was the same.
This intoxicating sweetness.
This 'love'.
This malleable warmth that consumed his entire existence and submerged him into everything.
She spoke softly as she stole everything from him.
Sweetness shaping an eternity into a moment.
Affection that asked permission until obedience felt natural, praise that wrapped around surrender until the body mistook erasure for choice.
As she did it, she asked him again and again if he was okay, if he would do anything she asked, if he was hurting, if she was being bad to him.
All he could say was one faint word, repeated again and again.
A broken yes.
A broken yes.
A broken yes.
He remembered how his body did not belong to him. How every movement was taken from him and guided where she wanted.
How his mind screamed in disgust while his heart still begged for praise.
How shame crawled through him so thickly he could taste it, and how embarrassment was not even the right word for it, because it went deeper than even that.
It was a suffocating feeling that made him want to stop existing and yet still say thank you for being allowed to feel warmth.
He remembered the first time tears fell from his eyes. The first time he could recall.
Iskael did not know how to cry. His emotions had always been difficult to regulate and understand as a child. No matter what he experienced, he remained stoic.
But this time was different.
This helplessness given to him by the one he trusted more than himself.
The deep silence as tears flooded down his face while his expression remained unchanged.
The perfectly constructed expression she had raised him to uphold.
Her response did not come with anger, but with a sick and twisted tenderness.
A hug.
A sweet whisper.
"It's okay. You're doing amazing. You're so dependable. Do not cry, my love. You are perfect."
That kindness stayed with him.
But this immorality ruined him.
As she watched him break, he saw the concerned yet pleased look on her face, as if she knew exactly what she had done, as if she knew this boy now existed only to be whatever she wanted.
Even though he had seen that same gaze cast upon countless others she destroyed, even though he knew it, even as he grew to love it and crave it more and more, knowing it was him who caused that expression—
It split his existence in two.
One part terrified, small, destroyed, disgusted, repulsed.
The other unable to stop obsessing over her beauty, over her happiness, over that expression.
This sweetness, the way hopelessness could be wrapped in affection until the body accepted its own erasure, settled into him as a lesson he would never unlearn.
That control could be taken without force.
That innocence could be stolen while being praised for giving it away.
That dependency could feel like warmth while hollowing you out.
Control only required patience.
In that moment, he realized there were countless ways to take control of a human existence, and the part of him that obsessed over her gaze relished that sadistic truth.
And in that act, the woman knew she had perfected her masterpiece.
She had split his existence in two.
A perfect pair.
The memory loosened its grip slowly, fading without ever leaving entirely, settling deep in his chest as her silhouette dissolved with it.
The buzzing returned.
Ding
Iskael's eyes flicked toward the desk as he adjusted the collar once more.
He smoothed the blazer, inhaled slowly through his nose, and finally let his hand still.
"I think I made it explicitly clear that my mornings shouldn't be bothered," he said quietly, irritation resting beneath the calm of his voice. "There is no way Serene is that careless."
He walked to the desk and picked up his phone, the screen bright with notifications flooding it so completely it looked malfunctioning.
His thumb unlocked it without hesitation as his eyes scanned the names repeating across the screen.
Serene.
Daejin.
Serene.
Daejin.
Sanctum IP Student Forum.
There were many messages. The constant buzzing came from all of them, and for a moment he was confused.
Serene: Iska, answer. Please.
Serene: Everyone's talking about the dream. Did you also have it? Do you remember?
Serene: Do you remember our death? Do you remember that god?
Daejin: Yo, Kael, respond.
Daejin: It's clear everyone in the school had the dream. Just checking if you did too.
Daejin: Reply when you're free. You should check the Student Forum for more info.
Iskael stared for a long moment.
His throat tightened slightly, and it annoyed him, because tightness was supposed to be his choice. His collar was meant to be the only pressure allowed near his neck.
His chest betrayed him.
A pulse jumped inside his ribs, sharp and hot, refusing to match the emptiness he wore like skin.
His lips twitched upward before he could stop it. A broken smile, unnatural and crooked, began to form.
A smile that twisted his obsessive side into something dangerous.
A feral smile.
'So the dream was real.'
[1] This chapter contains themes of psychological trauma, coercive manipulation, and implied sexual exploitation. It may be distressing for some readers.