Chapter Text
The door clicked shut behind her.
Cassie stood at the threshold of her room, alone. She extended one hand forward, fingers splayed, and took a careful step. Then another. Her fingertips brushed the cold surface of the wall, and she traced it slowly, counting her steps the way she had learned to count them over the past week. Seven steps to the corner. Four more along the adjacent wall. Then her fingers would find the bed frame.
When she reached the bed, she lowered herself onto the mattress and lay back, staring upward at where the ceiling should have been. But there was no ceiling. There was nothing. Just the same endless, suffocating darkness that had become her entire world.
Cassie closed her eyes. An action that made no difference.
She had not always lived like this. There was a time — not long ago, though it already felt like another lifetime — when her world had been full of colors and light and promise. She had been the kind of girl whose future seemed written in gold.
Top of her class in every subject, so consistently that her teachers had stopped being surprised and started being proud. Best on fencing among all of her peers. Pretty enough that boys would rehearse what they wanted to say to her in the hallway, only to stammer through half of it when she actually looked at them. She remembered how that used to make her feel — not vain, exactly, but warm and happy. Like the world was a place that wanted good things for her.
Her parents used to joke about it. Her father joking that she might finish college when her peers just finished their first year. Her mother would always smile while touching her hair, the way she always did, and say nothing, because some happinesses were too fragile for words.
It was a beautiful life. The kind that made you believe the world wanted her to be happy.
Then she became a carrier of the Nightmare spell.
Cassie's parents were ordinary people — neither of them had ever been touched by the Spell. The odds of their daughter being infected were low, so low in fact that most families like hers never even considered the possibility. It was something that happened to other people. Something you saw on the news and felt a distant pity for before changing the channel.
But the Spell did not care about odds.
The day her parents found out, her mother didn't cry. That was worse. She went very still, unable to comprehend that information. Her father's hands wouldn't stop shaking. He kept picking things up and putting them down, his mind wasn't aware of what his body did, his body was instinctively trying to reach for something, anything.
Cassie watched them from across the room, and something cold and hard settled in her chest. It was really painful to see her parents at this state, and it was rare too.
She clutched her fists and put on a forced smile "I'll be fine, mom and dad. I'm your daughter after all."
She wasn't fine. She was terrified. But she was sixteen, and sixteen-year-olds would rather die than let their parents see them fall apart. So she shrugged and rolled her eyes and said all the right things in the right tone, and her parents pretended to believe her because they didn't know what else to do.
They all knew it was a performance. None of them acknowledged it.
The day of her trial came too quickly. Her parents drove her to the nearest police station — they couldn't keep her at home, because if she failed the Nightmare and a creature came through, there would be no one strong enough to stop it. The station had reinforced rooms and an Awakened on standby.
Her mother hugged her in the parking lot. Held on too long. Her father kissed the top of her head and said, "We'll be right here when you wake up," and his voice only cracked on the last word.
Cassie smiled at them and walked inside.
The Nightmare was everything she had feared it would be, and even worse.
She didn't like to think about it — the details were already beginning to blur, mercifully, the way trauma sometimes does. What she remembered was the terror. The bone-deep, animal certainty that she was going to die. Moments of desperate cunning and blind luck and the sickening wet sounds of violence.
She remembered thinking, over and over, I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.
But she survived.
When the Spell spoke to her in that vast, star-filled void, Cassie listened with her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
She received three Memories. And her Aspect evolved to an outstanding rank.
Her Aspect was of the Sacred rank.
For one dizzying, incandescent moment, Cassie felt the shattered pieces of her future that the Nightmare spell made rearranging themselves into something new.
With a Sacred Aspect, she wouldn't just survive. She could thrive. She could become someone powerful, someone important, someone whose name was spoken with respect. Aspects of the high ranks were unheard of. She wasn't naive to think that she was the first one to have an Aspect of this rank. There might be a few other individuals who also have a sacred aspect. But that only meant that they were extremely rare.
Hope flooded back into her chest so fast it almost hurt. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She wanted to run to her parents and tell them that everything was going to be okay, that their daughter wasn't going to die after all, that the universe hadn't been as cruel as they'd feared—
[All power has a price.]
[You have received a Flaw.]
The words appeared in the void like a verdict.
And then the stars went out.
Not metaphorically. Not gradually. One moment, Cassie was standing in the infinite expanse of the Nightmare Spell's inner workings, surrounded by silver light and cosmic weaves.
The next — nothing. The void, the stars, the ethereal weaves of the Nightmare spell — all of it vanished, replaced by a darkness so complete and so total that for a moment she thought she had died.
She hadn't died. She had gone blind.
Her Flaw had taken her sight.
The world she woke up to was one of darkness. Permanent, irreversible, absolute darkness. She could feel the medical bed beneath her. She could hear the hum of machines and the muffled sounds of the police station beyond the door. She could smell antiseptic and her own sweat.
But she could not see.
She would never see again.
Her body began to shake. It started in her hands and spread inward, until her whole frame was trembling so violently that the medical bed rattled against its frame. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. The darkness pressed against her eyes like a physical weight, and she kept blinking, kept blinking, as though the next blink would fix it, as though this was a temporary glitch that would resolve itself if she just—
The door opened.
She heard footsteps. Two sets — one heavy, one lighter. She heard her mother's sharp intake of breath and her father's low, strained voice saying something she couldn't process.
Then arms were around her. Her parents. They were hugging her, both of them at once, and her mother was saying, "You did it, sweetheart, you survived, we're so proud of you—"
"Dad," Cassie whispered. Her voice came out broken, barely a sound. "Mom."
They pulled back slightly. She could feel their smiles. She could hear the relief in their breathing.
"I– I can't see anything." She said with a shaking tone.
Silence.
A silence so absolute it felt like the air grew heavy.
"What do you mean?" her father said. His voice was careful now. Controlled. The voice of a man who already understood but was refusing to understand.
"My Flaw." The tears came. She tried to hold back, but they came anyway, spilling from eyes that could no longer serve their purpose, streaming down her face in cruel irony. "My Flaw took my sight. I'm... I can't..."
She didn't finish. She didn't need to.
Her mother made a sound — not a word, not a cry, something more primal than either. Her father's arms tightened around her until it almost hurt, and she felt his whole body go rigid, as though he was trying to absorb the blow through sheer force of will.
They all understood what this meant. If the Nightmare Spell was the court trial, then her Flaw was the death sentence. And the execution date was already set: the winter solstice, when every Sleeper would be sent into the Dream Realm. A realm of grotesque horrors and darkness and death, where even the strong and the sighted died screaming.
For a blind girl, it wasn't a trial. It was a foregone conclusion.
There would be no appeal.
The academy was quieter than Cassie had expected.
She had arrived the day before the monthly orientation, guided by an escort who spoke to her in the gentle, careful tone that people reserved for the dying. Her mother had wanted her to stay home. Her father had said something worse.
"You could stay with us," he had said. "We could... spend the time together. As a family."
He wasn't saying let's make the most of the time you have left. Cassie had been hoping — desperately, pathetically — that he would say the right thing. That he would put his hand on her shoulder and tell her she was strong, that she was brilliant, that if anyone could find a way to survive, it was her. That her mother would cup her face and whisper I believe in you.
They didn't. Neither of them did.
Instead, her father insisted on her staying, and her mother kept touching her daughter's hair with trembling fingers, unlike the way she always had. Now each touch felt like a goodbye. They had already started mourning her, Cassie realized. She was still alive, still standing in their kitchen, still breathing — and they were already grieving.
Something inside her broke.
All the fragile, pathetically little hope she had of surviving was all shattered.
She went to the academy anyway. Not because she believed she would survive, but because staying home and watching her parents mourn her while she was still breathing would have destroyed her faster than any Nightmare Creature could.
The first two nights, she cried herself to sleep. Real crying — the kind that came from somewhere deep and raw, that left her gasping and hiccupping and curling into herself like a child. She pressed her face into the pillow so that no one would hear and sobbed until her throat was ragged and her eyes burned and her whole body ached. And even then she couldn't stop, because every time she tried, the darkness would remind her that it was permanent, and the grief would surge back like a wave she couldn't stop.
By the third night, her tears had run dry. Her body still shuddered, still went through the motions — the hitching breath, the tight chest, the way her face would crumple against the pillow — but nothing came out. She lay in bed, dry-eyed and hollowed out, sobbing without tears into a darkness that would never lift.
She wanted to fight it. She wanted to be the kind of person who refused to break. But she was sixteen years old. Her Flaw was a death sentence. She had been infected barely a month before the winter solstice — not nearly enough time to learn how to live without her eyes, let alone find a way to survive the Dream Realm without them.
It was as if the world wanted her dead after giving her the world in her early years.
Tonight was no different.
Cassie lay on her bed in the academy, arms at her sides, staring into the same nothing she always stared into. The familiar tremor began building in her chest — that tight, shuddering pressure that came every night.
She pressed her lips together. Breathed through her nose. Tried to hold it back.
It never worked.
The first sob escaped — quiet, strangled, barely more than a catch in her breathing. Her body curled inward, knees drawing up, fingers twisting into the sheets. She didn't make a sound beyond that. She had learned not to. The walls in the dormitory were thin, and the last thing she needed was someone knocking on her door with that awful, gentle voice, asking if she was okay.
She wasn't okay.
'I don't want to die.'
The thought surfaced quietly, the way it always did. Not dramatic, not defiant. Just a small, honest thing. A sixteen-year-old girl lying in a dark room, thinking the only thought that mattered.
'I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to—'
Her breathing slowed. The trembling eased. Exhaustion pulled at her, dragging her down toward a sleep she dreaded, because waking from it meant one fewer day between her and the end.
Then she fell asleep.
That night, Cassie had a dream.
Except it wasn't a dream. Sleepers didn't dream. What came to her was something else entirely. A vision, conjured by her Aspect, uninvited and unannounced.
She saw a boy.
He was thin — painfully thin, the kind of thin that announced years of not eating enough. His skin was pale, almost sickly, and there were dark circles under his eyes that made him look older than he was.
He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a rusty shipping container, hunched against the cold. Outside, wind howled through the gaps in the corroded metal walls, carrying with it the acrid stench of the outskirts — toxic smog and industrial decay and the particular kind of misery that belonged to places the world had forgotten about.
In his hands, he held a small cupcake. It was lopsided and obviously cheap. A single candle was stuck crookedly into the top, its tiny flame the only source of light in the entire container. It painted the boy's gaunt face in warm, flickering gold, and despite everything — the cold, the filth, the loneliness — he almost looked at peace.
He stared at the candle for a long time with a smile. A smile that spoke of how difficult it was for him to get something as cheap as this cupcake.
"Happy birthday, Sunless," he said quietly, to no one. His breath fogged in the cold air. "What is it now? My sixteenth birthday?"
He leaned forward and blew out the candle.
Then the vision ended with the world turning dark again.