At first, nothing changed. The children still ran. The puppy still chased. The wind still whispered through the leaves.
But then, slowly, like dusk swallowing the edges of day, members of the family began to disappear. One by one, they faded. A laugh cut short. A gesture unfinished. A name half-spoken. Their smiles turned transparent, and then they were gone—consumed not by shadow, but by the very background itself. Faded into memory. Into nothing.
And still the others remained, unaffected, untouched, unbothered—until they too vanished, until there was no one left but the white figure and the silence. The silence of a dream falling apart.
The man turned his head slightly, observing the now-empty table, the grass swaying where children once played, the cool air where life had bloomed. He exhaled slowly, not out of fatigue, but quiet acceptance.
"A good dream indeed..." A second voice answered him, this one deeper, older, etched with command. It came from behind, blooming like thunder from the shadow's edge. "... but a dream nonetheless."
With those words, the world around them began to dissolve. The sky fractured into melting golden strands. The mansion and its warmth bled downward like dripping paint. Trees crumbled inward, and the grass rotted into black mist. Everything began to recede into the nothingness behind the voice, consumed by a slow-moving tide of pure darkness. The sun itself flickered... then vanished.
"How did you figure it out?" asked the voice, curious, intrigued, yet faintly impressed.
The pale figure didn't turn to face it. He kept his gaze on the void where his loved ones had stood.
"There was no darkness," he said evenly. "No contrast. No fear. Just light, laughter and positivity... An everlasting peace." He paused. "That's not how the real world...Not how my world works."
The mist around him thickened as his eyes—those impossibly dark, spiralling things—began to narrow.
"And I don't think I had two eyes... not the last time I was alive."
Only now did he turn, slowly, to face the approaching figure of darkness that had drawn the dream to its end. It stood a single meter away, still and massive, and as the white figure finally looked upon it fully, he understood why it had felt so wrong.
It didn't have one face. It had two overlapping, shifting between each other like warped reflections in broken glass. One face was jagged and featureless, the empty shell of the Wraith he had once fought. The other? Sharper. Familiar. A face he had only glimpsed briefly in the chaos of battle... the one who had intervened, who had saved him from the Chimaera.
"You're not a dream," the pale man, Lucius said, voice now firmer. "You're something else. Something that reminds me."
Lucius took a step forward, no longer passive, no longer cold.
"Who are you, really? Are you a Wraith? Or something tied to them... Or perhaps the darkness itself? One you ever so proudly carry with yourself?" His words cut like truth spoken aloud for the first time.
The figure of darkness did not answer immediately. It stood calmly, letting the question hang, suspended in the thick void that surrounded them both.
Behind them, the last remnants of the dream—sunlight, laughter, innocence—disappeared completely, leaving only the meeting of lightless eyes in a world returned to silence.
"First of all," the figure said, its voice cool and articulate, edged with an uncanny calm, "let me make one thing clear. I am not an associate of darkness. Nor am I its bearer."
It paused, letting the words laced with annoyance settle into the mist-heavy silence.
"It's you, Lucius. This world? All of it... is yours. A manifestation of your mind—a creation stitched from memory, dreams, instinct, and the raw remnants of consciousness. Even this form I wear, this parody of a reaper you've conjured to confront—"
The figure held out a hand, black-gloved, skeletal in silhouette beneath its fluid cloak of void.
"—It was you who gave me this shape. You chose me to represent death. The end. A conclusion wrapped in form. You honoured me, knowingly or not, as the gatekeeper to what comes after."
Lucius stood still, eyes narrowed. His breathing had no rhythm, no weight in this place, but the tension in his jaw, the flicker in his fingers, betrayed the struggle unfolding inside him. He understood the words—every syllable slicing through his awareness like a blade peeling away illusion. And with that clarity, he remembered. The battle. The Chimaera. His body collapsed under the weight of his own telekinetic overuse. The final moment. The light is fading.
It hadn't been time stopping, or some divine intervention. No. The entity was right.
This wasn't some trick. It was his mind—a brilliant, desperate thing—spinning an entire world to shelter itself from the inevitable.
"This is what I call 'Mind-Bending Reality Manifestation,'" the figure said, as though introducing a concept it had coined itself. "Every tree. Every ray of sun. The table. The laughter. Even that annoyingly soft grass beneath your feet—it's all you. Imaginary, yes, but crafted with startling precision."
Lucius blinked. A pause. Then—
What a shitty name, he thought, almost reflexively, though the remark rang dull against the depth of what he'd just learned.
But another thought came, sharper, immediate—cutting through the haze like lightning cleaving through stormclouds.
"…I'm dead," he said, calmly. Not as a question, but as a reckoning. He didn't look at the figure. He didn't need to. His gaze dropped to the darkened ground instead, to the nothing that pulsed gently beneath his bare feet. A part of him already knew the answer. He wasn't asking for confirmation.
He was bracing for the finality of it.
There was silence.
Then the reply came—blunt, but not cruel. "No."
Lucius's head snapped up.
For a brief moment, raw and unguarded, something flickered in his eyes. Hope. Distant, fragile, but real.
"Not yet," the figure continued, its tone almost amused. "Though you will be… in about a second."
The hope in Lucius's chest collapsed in on itself.
He looked down again, not in fear, but in resignation. His knees threatened to buckle, but they held. Somehow, they held. Whether from pride, denial, or the last flicker of willpower, he remained standing—shoulders taut, fists clenched.
Death felt closer now. Not as a concept, but as a breath on the nape of his neck.
"But," the entity said, with the casual tone of someone changing topics over tea, "that one second... can be delayed."
Lucius didn't move. His eyes flicked up, doubtful.
"Inside your mind," the figure explained, "a single second can be stretched. Into hours. Days. Months, even. If I allow it."
As it spoke, the darkness surrounding them began to shift. Slowly, but deliberately, it restructured itself—not devouring, but reshaping. The nothingness took form. Landmarks emerged. Monuments rose. The sky reformed above them in threads and sheets of ink, stitched with stars and clouds. Some clouds retained their original grey-white brilliance. Others remained black, etched with memory.
Then came the mountains.
Lucius turned instinctively to his right.
The Kalarth Range had manifested again, but something was off. It was reversed. The towering, obsidian peaks that always lay to his left were now rising to his right, still dark, still massive, their silhouette cutting the dream-sky like jagged scars.
He said nothing.
He didn't need to.
The shift was deliberate. Subtle. A reminder.
This was still his world—but it was being rewritten, reshaped by something else now. By someone else who had access to his mind's blueprint and wasn't shy about rearranging the walls.
Lucius exhaled, slow and steady. He said nothing more.
Because deep inside, he was beginning to understand.
This wasn't death. Not yet.
But it was the threshold.
And someone—or something—was waiting for him to decide what came next.