Chapter Text
[Welcome to the Dream Realm, Cassia!]
Cold.
That was the first thing Cassie felt. A biting, merciless cold that sank through her skin and into her bones.
The second thing she felt was the ground.
It was hard and uneven beneath her, nothing like the smooth cushion of the sleeping pod she was in a moment ago. Her palms were pressed flat against something rough and jagged, and when she instinctively pushed herself up, a sharp edge sliced across her left palm.
Cassie gasped and pulled her hand back.
Blood. She could feel it — warm and wet, already sliding between her fingers.
She was shaking. Not just from the cold, but from something deeper. Her whole body was trembling in a way she couldn't control, as though her muscles had a mind of their own.
'Where... where am I?'
She reached out again, slower this time, and touched the ground with her fingertips. Rough. Jagged. Some kind of stone, but not like any stone she had ever felt before. It was sharp in places and smooth in others, with ridges and grooves that cut in every direction.
She tried to sit up and felt something else — a cold, wet substance clinging to her skin. Mud. Thick, cold mud that smelled of salt. But what made it worse was...
She was naked.
Although she received three Memories from her first nightmare trial, she wasn't lucky enough to get an armor type memory. So, her bare body was pressed against alien ground, bleeding, shaking, and defenseless against the biting cold.
Cassie clenched her teeth so hard they ached. Her breath came in short, shallow bursts that fogged in the frigid air.
'I need... I need something to hold.'
She focused. It took longer than it should have — her mind was a storm of panic and cold and pain, and concentrating on anything felt like trying to hold water in her fists.
White sparks of light wove themselves together in her right hand as she summoned one of the three Memories she has.
[Wind staff]
She couldn't see it, but she could feel the familiar weight forming in her grip, and when the wooden staff materialized fully, she clutched it so tightly her knuckles ached.
She pressed the wood against her chest and held it there for a moment, both hands wrapped around it, as though it could shield her from everything. Her breathing steadied. Just slightly.
'Okay. Okay. Think.'
She couldn't stay here. She didn't know where "here" was, didn't know what was around her, didn't know if the ground beneath her was safe or if something was already watching her from the dark. She had to move. She had to figure out what she was working with.
Cassie shifted her weight forward and planted the base of the staff against the ground. She pushed herself up. Her bare feet pressed into the jagged surface, and she winced in pain as the edges bit into her soles. The mud between the ridges was cold and slick, and her feet struggled to find purchase.
Albeit unsteady and shaking, she stood.
Then she extended the staff forward and took a step.
She moved the way she had been taught. But it was painfully slow.
Every motion demanded complete focus, because the terrain beneath her feet was nothing like the smooth hallways she had trained in. The ground rose and fell without warning. Ridges of that strange, sharp stone jutted up at random angles, and between them, the mud was deep enough in places to swallow her ankles.
Three steps in, her staff caught on something — a protruding ridge she hadn't swept far enough to detect — and the sudden resistance threw off her balance. She stumbled forward, caught herself, and felt a sharp burning pain as the jagged ground scraped along her right shin.
She hissed through her teeth.
'It's fine. Keep moving.'
She stood again, and continued marching forward. Five more steps. The staff tapped against something hollow-sounding infront of her. She adjusted course, angling right. Two more steps. The ground dipped sharply, and her foot slid into a pocket of mud so cold it burned. She yanked it free, heart hammering.
'Where am I going?'
She didn't know.
She had no destination, no landmark, no reference point. She was walking because the alternative — sitting still in the dark — was worse. At least walking gave her the illusion that she was doing something. That she had some measure of control over what happened next. But she didn't.
Still, the illusion was all she had.
The sounds came gradually.
At first, there was only the wind — sharp and salt-laden, cutting across her bare skin like a blade. It came in gusts that made her stagger and then retreated, only to return from a different direction. She couldn't predict it. She couldn't brace for it. Each gust stole more warmth from her body and left her skin raw and stinging.
Then, beneath the wind, she heard the water.
Not close. Somewhere below her and to the left — a deep, rhythmic sound of waves.
Cassie stopped walking.
She stood perfectly still, staff planted in the ground, and listened.
From the sound alone, she heard the rhythm of slow and heavy waves. But beneath them, layered underneath, there were other sounds. A distant splash — not a wave, something else. Something that had broken the surface and then submerged again.
A low, resonant vibration traveled through the ground, passing up through the soles of her bleeding feet. Something was moving out there. Something heavy enough that the vibration shook through her.
Her grip on the staff tightened until her fingers ached.
'What was that?'
She didn't know. She couldn't know. But what she knew for certain was, water meant death. That much, she was certain of.
Cassie turned her body until the sound of the waves was behind her and started walking in the opposite direction. She didn't know what was ahead of her. But she knew what was behind her, and that was enough.
She moved faster now. Still careful, still sweeping the staff, but with an urgency that hadn't been there before. Every step took her further from the waves, and every step further from the waves felt like breathing room.
She kept moving. Away from the water. Away from whatever was in it.
Her staff swept left, then right. The terrain was the same — jagged ridges of sharp stone jutting from black mud, rising and falling without pattern or mercy. But the further she went, the worse it got. The ridges grew taller. More of them, packed closer together, their sharp edges pressing in from every direction. She had to angle her body sideways to squeeze between some of them, and even then, the rough surfaces scraped against her bare skin, leaving thin lines of burning pain across her arms and ribs.
The wind found her here, too. But it sounded different now. The ridges and gaps between them caught the gusts and twisted them into sounds — a low, hollow moan as the air pushed through a narrow crevice to her right. A hiss from somewhere above, where the wind scraped across a sharp edge. A groan from deeper in, resonant and long, like something waking up.
Cassie stopped.
Her fingers tightened on the staff. She held her breath and listened.
The moan came again. Longer this time. Rising in pitch before it tapered off into nothing.
Just wind. She knew it was just wind. She had heard wind squeezing through tight spaces and making noises.
She knew that.
But knowing what something was and believing it when you're standing naked and blind in the dark, bleeding from a dozen cuts, shaking so hard your staff rattles against the ground — those were two very different things.
She kept walking.
The sounds multiplied. The wind didn't just moan now — it whistled through one gap, hummed through another, groaned through a third. Each one produced its own pitch. Together, they layered on top of each other into a low, shifting chorus that seemed to come from everywhere at once. There was no direction that was silent. No direction that felt safe.
And underneath the wind, there were other sounds.
A scraping noise from somewhere to her left. Short. Abrupt. Like something hard being dragged across stone.
Cassie froze.
She turned her head toward the sound and waited. Her breath was shallow while her heart was loud.
But nothing came. The wind continued its slow, shifting chorus. The scraping didn't repeat.
'It was nothing. A piece of stone that the wind knocked loose. That's all it was.'
She took another step.
A soft, wet squelch from somewhere behind her. The thick, heavy sound of mud being displaced. Not by her feet — she was standing still. By something else. Something she couldn't see.
Cassie spun around. The staff came up in front of her chest, gripped in both hands, her arms shaking so badly the wood vibrated against her palms. Her heart was hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears. Feel it in her teeth.
"Who's there?"
The words came out barely louder than a whisper. They died the moment they left her lips, swallowed by the dark as though the air itself had absorbed them.
No response. No movement. Just the wind, threading through the stone around her, filling the silence with sounds that might have been nothing and might have been everything.
She stood there. Waiting. Listening. Her head turning from side to side, straining to separate the wind from whatever might be hiding underneath it.
She couldn't. That was the problem. She had spent a month learning to read the sounds of the academy — the rhythm of footsteps, the distance of voices, the particular creak of her dorm room door versus every other door in the hallway. She had built an entire world out of sound, and that world had kept her sane.
But this place had no rules she could learn. She didn't know what "normal" sounded like here. She didn't know what belonged and what didn't. Every sound was suspicious because every sound was new. Every gust of wind could be covering the approach of something that wasn't wind at all.
Her legs were shaking. She forced herself to turn back around.
She kept walking.
The next stretch broke something inside her that she didn't know could break.
It wasn't one sound. It wasn't one moment. It was all of them, pressing in from every direction, piling on top of each other until she couldn't breathe.
A rattling from above — loose stone shifting in the wind, or something perched on top of the ridges, watching her with eyes she would never see. She flinched. Her foot slipped. She caught herself on the staff and kept walking.
A faint clicking from deep inside one of the gaps — stone settling, or something opening and closing inside the dark. She froze. Listened. Nothing, then walked.
A sudden rush of air from behind that swept her hair across her face and made her stumble forward — just a gust of wind, or something lunging past her in the dark, close enough to touch, choosing not to. She spun around. Nothing. She turned back. Walked.
Something cold and wet draped across her arm. She screamed — a short, broken sound that she couldn't hold in — and clawed at it, her fingers tangling in something slick and heavy. It clung to her skin. She tore it away and felt it in her hand — limp, slimy, reeking of salt.
Seaweed. Just seaweed, hanging from one of the ridges.
She was shaking so hard she could barely stand. She threw it away and wiped her hand against her thigh, again and again, but the slick feeling wouldn't go away. The smell clung to her fingers.
But still, she kept walking.
Every sound triggered the same thing inside her — the spike of fear, the locking of her muscles, the frantic turning of her head, the held breath, the racing thoughts. And then the slow, agonizing release when nothing came. When the darkness stayed the same and she was still alive and still standing and still alone.
But each release took longer. And each spike hit harder. And the space between them grew shorter, until they started blending together into a single, unbroken state of terror that didn't rise or fall anymore. It just was. A constant, grinding pressure behind her ribs that made every breath feel like breathing through a wet cloth.
She was burning through herself. She could feel it happening — whatever it was inside a person that kept their legs moving and their mind working, it was draining away. Each flinch spent some. Each held breath spent some. Each second of standing rigid in the dark, bracing for something to lunge at her from a direction she would never see — it all spent something.
And she... was almost out.
She walked faster. Too fast. Too reckless. Her staff swept ahead but her feet moved before it could finish, and her bare sole came down on something in the mud that wasn't mud — something hard and smooth and curved. It rolled beneath her weight and her ankle twisted and she went down, hard, her hip slamming against a ridge that cut a line across her skin.
She pushed herself up. Her palms were so raw that pressing them against the ground made her vision — if she'd had any — white out with pain.
She stood. And did what she could only do in her current state. She walked.
She fell again. Her staff caught in a gap between two ridges and the sudden resistance ripped it from her hand. She lunged for it, missed, her fingers closing on empty air. Her knees hit the ground. The mud splashed up against her chest.
She reached forward, swept her hand across the ground. Her fingers found the wood then grabbed it and pulled it to her chest.
She got up.
She walked.
She fell.
Each time the ground caught her, it took a little more. More skin. More warmth. More of whatever was keeping her upright. Her palms were raw and sticky with blood. Her knees were torn open. The soles of her feet had been cut so many times that she couldn't feel individual wounds anymore — just a constant, burning ache that pulsed with every step. The mud had gotten into everything. Her hair was matted with it. It was caked on her face, in the cuts on her arms, between her fingers. She could feel it drying where the wind hit her skin, tightening like a second layer, cracking when she moved.
And she could taste it. Every time she fell face-first, the mud got into her mouth. Salt and iron and something underneath — something old and dead and rotten that she couldn't name.
She was crying. Not the careful, pillow-muffled crying from the academy. Not the kind that she could control, that she could keep behind closed doors and pressed into fabric. This was open. Broken. The kind that comes from a place deeper than sadness — from the place where a person's body decides on its own that it has had enough, whether the mind agrees or not.
She sobbed between steps. The sounds tore out of her in bursts she couldn't stop, raw and ugly, echoing off the ridges around her. And some part of her knew that crying was dangerous — that it was loud, that it could attract things, that she should be quiet, she must be — but she couldn't. She physically could not make herself stop, because the fear and the cold and the pain had filled her up past the point where willpower mattered.
And the dark didn't care. The wind kept moaning through the gaps. Mud kept squelching beneath her feet. Things kept scraping and shifting and clicking in spaces she couldn't reach and couldn't see. The world around her continued in its slow, indifferent rhythm, completely unaware that a girl was walking through it, bleeding and crying and trying very hard not to die.
She didn't stop to listen to the sounds anymore. She didn't have the strength for it.
She just walked. And cried. And bled. And walked.
And the darkness remained exactly the same in every direction, at every moment, as though the entire world was one vast room with no walls and no doors and no end.
She didn't know how long she had been walking. It could have been twenty minutes. It could have been three hours. The cold had seeped so deep into her body that she had stopped shivering — and the part of her that still thought clearly knew that was a bad sign. Her movements were clumsy now. Sluggish. The staff caught on things she should have detected. Her feet slipped on surfaces she should have avoided. She was slowing down, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't make herself speed up.
The fuel that had been driving her — the fear, the adrenaline, the desperate animal need to keep moving — had burned out.
She had nothing left.
Then she fell, again.
Her foot caught on something the staff had already cleared. She pitched forward and hit the ground with her full weight, the impact driving the air from her lungs. The staff bounced from her grip and clattered somewhere to her left. Her chin struck a ridge and her teeth snapped together so hard she tasted blood.
She lay face-down in the mud. It was in her mouth. In her nose. In her eyes, not that it mattered. She tried to breathe and got mud instead of air, and for a moment she choked, coughing and gagging, her body convulsing against the ground.
When the coughing stopped, she tried to push herself up.
Her arms shook. Her elbows buckled. She collapsed.
And tried again.
Her muscles didn't respond. Not because they couldn't — because they had nothing left to give. She had spent everything. Every ounce of energy, every reserve, every last scrap of whatever it was that kept a person moving when everything inside them was screaming to stop. She had spent it all on walking and falling and getting up and walking again, and now there was nothing left.
She reached for the staff. Her hand swept through the mud to her left, found the familiar wood. She pulled it close, wrapping both arms around it the way a child wraps their arms around a stuffed animal. Not because it could help her. Not because it could protect her from anything.
Because it was the only thing in this world she could hold.
And she was so tired of having nothing to hold on.
She didn't get up this time.
Her knees drew up to her chest. Her arms shifted from the staff to her own legs, wrapping around them, pulling them close. She pressed her face into the space between her knees and curled into herself as small as she could get.
The position was instinctive. The same one she had curled into on those first nights at the academy, face pressed into the pillow, trying not to be heard. Except there was no pillow. No bed. No room with four walls and a locked door. Just the mud and the stone and the wind and the dark.
'Mommy...'
The thought came from somewhere very small inside her. Somewhere she had locked away weeks ago when she decided to be brave. To be strong. To be the kind of person who didn't cry for her parents like a little girl.
She wasn't that person anymore.
'Daddy...'
She could see them. Not with her eyes — those didn't work anymore — but in the only way that mattered.
'I miss you.'
'And I'm sorry.'
She was sorry for leaving. Sorry for walking into that academy and pretending she was going to prepare, to train, to fight — when really she went because staying home and watching her parents mourn her while she was still breathing would have killed her faster than any Nightmare Creature ever could.
Sorry for shrugging and rolling her eyes and saying "I'll be fine" in that bright, careless tone she had practiced in front of the bathroom mirror after becoming a carrier of the Nightmare spell, when what she wanted — what she really wanted, more than anything in the world — was to crawl into her mother's lap and be held.
Sorry for every time she forced a smile. Every time she pretended. Every time she watched her parents try to believe her and knew that they couldn't, and that all three of them were trapped in a performance none of them had the strength to stop.
'I'm sorry I wasn't stronger.'
The wind cut across her bare skin, but she barely felt it anymore. The sounds continued around her — moaning, scraping, the slow rhythm of a world that didn't know she existed and wouldn't notice when she stopped.
She was sixteen years old. She was naked and blind and bleeding on the ground of a world that wanted her dead. She had no armor, no allies, no plan. She had three Memories and neither of them could save her. She had a month of training and none of it mattered here. She had the staff pressed against her side, and it couldn't protect her from anything.
She had nothing.
'I can't take it anymore.'
The thought was quiet. Not angry. Not defiant. Just quiet, the way a candle flame is quiet in the moment before it goes out.
'I can't... I can't do this.'
She pressed her face harder against her knees. The mud on her skin had dried in places, cracking with the movement. Her body was still shaking, but slower now. Not because the cold had eased or the fear had passed. Because there was simply nothing left inside her to burn.
She was empty. Completely, utterly empty.
'Just let this nightmare end.'
She wasn't asking for rescue. She wasn't bargaining with the dead gods. She wasn't making promises — if you save me, I'll be braver, I'll be better, I'll never complain again. She was past all of that. Past hope and past bargaining and past every stage of grief she had cycled through in the past month.
She was just asking for it to stop. The fear. The cold. The sounds. The waiting. All of it.
'Please... just let me die.'
Because the waiting was worse. That was the thing nobody told you — that the worst part of dying wasn't the dying itself. It was the sitting in the dark, knowing it was coming, not knowing when. It was flinching at every sound, bleeding from ground she couldn't see, listening to a world that might contain the thing that would kill her, or might contain nothing at all, and having no way to tell the difference.
The other Sleepers could see. They could fight. Even the weakest of them could look at a threat and raise their fists. Even a futile defense was something — a choice, an act, a last moment of defiance, however small.
But Cassie... didn't even have that.
If something came for her, she wouldn't see it. She wouldn't hear it over the wind and the moaning stone and the hammering of her own heart. She would just be sitting here, curled up in the mud like a child, and then she wouldn't be.
She didn't even have the privilege of facing the thing that killed her.
'Just... make it stop.'
She held her knees tighter.
'Make it all stop.'
And she waited.
Time passed.
Or maybe it didn't.
She had no way to know. The darkness was the same. The cold was the same. The wind continued threading through the stone around her, moaning and groaning in its slow, endless chorus. Somewhere far behind her, the waves still breathed.
She sat on the ground with her forehead pressed to her knees and her arms locked around her shins. At some point, she had stopped shaking. Stopped crying. Stopped doing anything at all, because there was nothing left to do.
She wasn't asleep. She wasn't unconscious. She was just... absent. The terror had burned through her so completely that it left behind a kind of silence she had never known. Not peace — nothing so kind as peace. Something more like the space after an explosion. Where the air is still. Where the dust hasn't settled. Where everything is very, very quiet, and you don't know yet if you're alive or dead and it doesn't seem to matter either way.
She sat in that silence for a long time.
She didn't think about the winter solstice. She didn't think about the academy, or the cafeteria, or the boy who sat across from her and ate like he was starving. She didn't think about the shipping container or the candle or the quiet way he had wished himself a happy birthday. She didn't think about her parents or the reactions they gave her.
She didn't think about anything.
She was so tired.
So unbelievably tired.
Then, after what seemed like eternity, she heard another sound, a sound she recognized in an instant... it was the sound of... footsteps.
Cassie's heart slammed against her ribs.
The sound cut through the numbness like a blade — sharp and sudden and unmistakable. Footsteps. On solid ground. Not the scrape of stone shifting in the wind. Not the squelch of mud settling beneath its own weight. The deliberate, measured rhythm of something walking on two legs.
Step. Step. Step.
Getting closer.
Her body locked up. Every muscle, every tendon, every nerve — frozen solid. Her arms tightened around her knees until the pressure hurt. Her breath caught in her throat and stayed there, trapped between her lungs and her teeth.
'What is that?'
Step. Step.
Closer.
Her mind, which had been empty just moments ago, erupted into chaos. Scenarios flooded through her faster than she could process them — a creature, walking upright, approaching on two legs. Some Nightmare Creatures walked on two legs. She had learned that much at the academy. Or—
Or a person.
Another Sleeper.
'It could be a person. It could be someone like me.'
Step.
'Or it could be something that walks like a person but isn't.'
Step.
Her heart was beating so fast it hurt. She could feel it in her temples. In her throat. In the cuts on her hands. Every beat was so loud she was sure that whatever was approaching could hear it — could follow the sound right to her, like a trail leading to a girl who couldn't run.
Step.
Closer. Much closer now. Ten meters? Five?
Step.
The footsteps stopped.
Silence.
Something was standing very close to her in the darkness. She could feel it — not a sound, not a smell, not anything she could name. Just a presence. The particular way air changes when something is watching you.
Her fingernails dug into her own skin. Her lungs burned from holding her breath.
'Please be a person. Please be a person. Please—'
One second. Two. Three. An eternity compressed into the space between heartbeats.
Then, a voice.
"...What are you doing?"