Kaelan found himself standing in a corridor that shouldn't exist.
The walls were made of crystallized screams—he could see the frozen expressions of terror trapped within the translucent surface, their mouths open in endless, silent agony. The floor beneath his feet felt spongy and warm, like living tissue, and it pulsed with a rhythm that matched no human heartbeat he'd ever heard.
This wasn't like his previous journeys into the Mindscape. Those had felt dreamlike, surreal but somehow navigable. This place radiated malevolence so thick he could taste it—metallic and bitter, like blood mixed with copper pennies.
"Welcome, little Walker."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, seeming to emanate from the walls themselves. It was neither male nor female, neither young nor old, but something that existed in the spaces between human categories of understanding.
Kaelan tried to visualize his mental door, the barrier Dr. Vasquez had taught him to construct, but the image kept slipping away like water through his fingers. The air here was thick with something that made concentration nearly impossible—a psychic static that interfered with coherent thought.
"Your defenses are impressive for one so young," the voice continued, and now Kaelan could see shapes moving within the walls—long, sinuous forms that might once have been human but had been stretched and twisted into something unrecognizable. "But you are in our realm now. Here, we make the rules."
The corridor began to shift around him, walls flowing like liquid while maintaining their crystalline structure. Doors appeared and disappeared, each one showing glimpses of nightmare landscapes beyond—forests of bones, oceans of tears, cities built from compressed despair.
"What do you want?" Kaelan managed to ask, his voice echoing strangely in the impossible space.
"Want?" The voice seemed amused. "We want what we have always wanted. To feed. To grow. To break free from this prison of thought and dream and take our rightful place in the world of flesh and consequence."
One of the shapes in the wall pressed closer to the surface, and Kaelan found himself staring at what had once been a human face. The features were distorted, pulled and stretched like taffy, but he could still make out the basic structure—a teenage girl, probably not much older than himself. Her eyes were the worst part, black holes that seemed to go on forever, devoid of anything that might once have been called a soul.
"Do you recognize her?" the voice asked. "This was Maya Cortez. Seventeen years old, honor student, president of the debate team. She had such a bright future ahead of her."
Kaelan's blood turned to ice. Maya Cortez had been one of the disappearances Sarah had mentioned—one of the empty shells found wandering the streets with no memory of who they were.
"You did this to her."
"We liberated her," the voice corrected. "From the burden of consciousness, from the weight of self-awareness. She is part of us now, and through us, she will live forever."
The face in the wall opened its mouth, and Maya's voice emerged—but wrong, distorted, like a recording played at the wrong speed. "It doesn't hurt anymore, Kaelan. The doubt, the fear, the constant struggle to be something more than you are. All of that is gone now. Join us, and you can have that peace too."
"No." Kaelan stepped backward, but the corridor seemed to stretch behind him, maintaining the same distance to whatever exit might exist. "I won't let you use me."
"You think you have a choice?" The voice was laughing now, a sound like breaking glass. "You opened the door when you walked through that girl's mind in your classroom. You announced yourself to us, sent out a beacon that we could not ignore. Did you really think you could learn to control abilities you don't understand and face enemies you've never seen?"
More faces appeared in the walls around him—other missing teenagers, their features twisted into expressions of empty bliss. They began to speak in unison, their voices creating a horrible harmony.
"Stop fighting."
"Let us in."
"It's so much easier to just let go."
"You're tired, Kaelan. Tired of being different, of carrying this burden."
And the terrible thing was, they were right. He was tired—bone-deep, soul-deep tired of feeling like a freak, of hearing whispers that weren't there, of seeing things that couldn't exist. The prospect of simply surrendering, of letting something else take responsibility for his thoughts and actions, was almost seductively appealing.
But then he remembered Dr. Vasquez's words: "Whatever they show you, whatever they promise or threaten, remember that they're parasites."
"You're lying," he said, forcing strength into his voice. "This isn't peace—it's slavery. You're not liberating anyone. You're consuming them."
The laughter stopped abruptly, and the temperature in the corridor seemed to drop by twenty degrees. "Clever little Walker. Very well. If you will not come willingly, we will take you by force."
The walls began to close in, and the faces trapped within them started to push outward, their features becoming more distinct and more horrible. Hands made of crystallized anguish reached for him, fingers elongated into claws that scraped against the air like nails on a chalkboard.
Kaelan tried to run, but his feet were sinking into the fleshy floor as if it were quicksand. The faces were getting closer, their empty eyes fixed on him with predatory hunger.
"Your fear tastes delicious," the voice purred. "It's been so long since we've had a Walker of your caliber. The others were weak, broken things with barely enough consciousness to sustain us for a few days. But you... you could feed us for months."
The hands were almost upon him now, close enough that he could feel the cold radiating from their crystalline surface. In desperation, Kaelan reached for the techniques Dr. Vasquez had taught him—grounding, barriers, self-awareness—but the psychic static was too strong. His thoughts scattered like leaves in a hurricane.
That's when he remembered the notebook.
Even in this nightmare realm, he could feel its weight in his pocket—not the physical weight of paper and leather, but something deeper. An anchor to reality, to his own identity, to the part of himself that remained uncompromised.
He pulled it out, and immediately the psychic static lessened. The notebook glowed with a warm, golden light that pushed back the oppressive darkness of the corridor. The faces in the walls recoiled, hissing like vampires confronted with sunlight.
"Impossible," the voice snarled. "That knowledge was lost centuries ago. The Oneironauts were destroyed."
"Not all of them," Kaelan said, surprised by the steadiness of his own voice. He opened the notebook, and words seemed to leap from the pages—not the elegant script he'd seen before, but burning letters that hung in the air like brands.
"*By will and word, by thought and deed,*" he read aloud, the words coming to his lips as if he'd known them all his life, "*I claim dominion over my mind's landscape. No foreign thought shall take root here. No alien presence shall find purchase. I am the master of my own consciousness, and I banish thee from this sacred space.*"
The effect was immediate and dramatic. The corridor began to crack and splinter, the crystallized walls shattering like glass. The faces trapped within screamed as they were torn apart, their features dissolving into wisps of smoke and shadow.
"This isn't over, Walker," the voice howled as the nightmare realm collapsed around them. "We know where to find you now. In your dreams, in the spaces between thoughts, in the moments when your guard is down. We will have you, one way or another."
The last thing Kaelan saw before the corridor imploded was a massive eye—easily twenty feet across—watching him from the depths of the crumbling nightmare. It was ancient and patient and utterly malevolent, and something in its gaze suggested that this encounter had been less of a serious attempt at capture and more of a reconnaissance mission.
They had been testing him. And now they knew exactly what they were dealing with.
Kaelan jolted awake in his own bed, gasping and drenched in sweat. The notebook was clutched in his hands—somehow, impossibly, he had pulled it from his nightstand while dreaming. The pages were still warm to the touch, and when he opened it, he could see new text that hadn't been there before, written in his own handwriting though he had no memory of writing it:
First Contact: Hollow Ones - Classification: Parasitic Collective Entity
Defense Successful: Oneironaut Banishment Ritual - High Effectiveness
Threat Assessment: Extreme - Direct confrontation avoided future encounters
Notes: They know about the notebook. Security compromised. Seek guidance immediately.
His hands were shaking as he set the notebook aside and reached for his phone. Dr. Vasquez had given him her personal number for emergencies, and this definitely qualified.
She answered on the first ring, her voice alert despite the early hour. "Kaelan? What happened?"
"They found me," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "In my dreams. They tried to... I don't know what they tried to do. Convert me? Drain me? But I used the banishment ritual from the notebook, and it worked."
"You performed a banishment ritual on your first encounter with the Hollow Ones?" Dr. Vasquez sounded shocked. "That's... that should have been impossible. Those rituals require years of training to execute properly."
"The notebook helped. It was like it was guiding me, showing me what to do."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "Kaelan, I need you to look at the notebook right now. Tell me exactly what you see."
He described the new text that had appeared, the notes written in his own hand. Dr. Vasquez's sharp intake of breath was audible even over the phone.
"That's not your handwriting," she said finally. "That's automatic writing—your hand was being guided by the collective consciousness of the Oneironauts. The notebook isn't just a training manual, Kaelan. It's a living repository of their knowledge and experience. And it's chosen you as its new custodian."
The implications of that statement hit him like a physical blow. "What does that mean?"
"It means you're not just a Walker with unusual natural ability. You're the inheritor of a legacy that goes back over a century. The notebook contains the accumulated wisdom of dozens of psychic warriors who gave their lives fighting the Hollow Ones. And now their knowledge is part of you."
Kaelan stared down at the innocent-looking leather binding, trying to process what he was being told. "But I don't know anything about being a psychic warrior. I can barely control my own abilities."
"The notebook will teach you. But Kaelan, you need to understand—this changes everything. The Hollow Ones were testing you tonight, probing your defenses. Now that they know what you represent, they're going to come at you with everything they have."
"What am I supposed to do?"
"We accelerate your training. Meet me tomorrow after school at the address I'm about to text you. And Kaelan? Don't go to sleep again tonight. The banishment ritual will protect you for a few hours, but after that, your dreams won't be safe."
She hung up, leaving Kaelan alone in his dark room with only the notebook for company. The silence felt oppressive, pregnant with threats he couldn't quite identify. Every shadow seemed to hide watching eyes, every creak of the old house sounded like footsteps.
He spent the rest of the night sitting at his desk, reading through the notebook by lamplight. With each page he turned, more knowledge seemed to flow into his mind—not just intellectual understanding, but muscle memory, instinctive responses, the kind of deep knowing that usually took years to develop.
He learned about the different types of psychic entities that inhabited the Mindscape, from relatively harmless thought-forms to the predatory nightmares that fed on human consciousness. He studied techniques for navigating the treacherous geography of dreams and memories, for distinguishing between his own thoughts and external influences.
Most importantly, he began to understand the true scope of what the Hollow Ones represented. They weren't just individual monsters lurking in the depths of the collective unconscious. They were part of something larger—a vast, interconnected web of parasitic consciousness that had been growing stronger for centuries, feeding on human fear and despair until it had become something approaching a dark god.
And now, for reasons he still didn't fully understand, he had been chosen to stand against it.
By the time dawn broke over Meridian, Kaelan felt like a different person. The knowledge from the notebook had settled into his mind like sediment, becoming part of his fundamental understanding of reality. When he looked in the mirror while brushing his teeth, the silver veins in his eyes were more pronounced, forming intricate patterns that seemed to pulse with their own inner light.
The day at school passed in a blur of half-attended classes and worried glances from Sarah, who could tell something significant had happened but couldn't ask about it with other students around. During lunch, they found a quiet corner of the library where Kaelan could give her an abbreviated version of his nocturnal encounter.
"They showed me Maya Cortez," he said quietly, still haunted by the memory of her twisted face in the crystalline wall. "What was left of her, anyway. Sarah, they don't just kill people—they hollow them out, use them like puppets."
Sarah's face went pale. "That's worse than I thought. My grandmother's journal mentioned the Hollow Ones, but she made them sound like individual predators, not some kind of collective entity."
"According to the notebook, they've been evolving. Growing stronger. The individual Hollow Ones are just fingers of a much larger hand."
They were interrupted by the arrival of Marcus Webb, a junior from Kaelan's chemistry class. Marcus was the kind of person who existed on the periphery of social groups—not quite popular enough to be part of the in-crowd, but not unpopular enough to be actively ostracized. He was also, Kaelan realized with growing alarm, moving with the distinctive gait of someone whose consciousness was no longer entirely their own.
"Hey, Kaelan," Marcus said, his voice carrying just a hint of the wrong intonation—like an actor who had learned the lines but didn't quite understand the character. "I was wondering if we could talk."
Every instinct Kaelan had developed over the past few days was screaming warnings. He could see it now, the telltale signs of hollow possession—the slightly too-wide smile, the eyes that tracked movement a fraction of a second too slowly, the way Marcus held himself as if he were wearing a suit that didn't quite fit.
"I'm kind of busy right now," Kaelan said carefully, his hand moving instinctively toward the notebook in his backpack.
"Oh, this won't take long," Marcus continued, and now there was definitely something wrong with his voice—a harmonic undertone that made Kaelan's teeth ache. "I just wanted to tell you about this amazing dream I had last night. I was in this beautiful place, surrounded by all these faces of people who had found peace. They told me about a way to make all the pain stop, all the confusion and fear that comes with being different."
Sarah's hand found Kaelan's under the table, her fingers cold with fear. She could hear it too—the wrongness in Marcus's voice, the predatory patience of something wearing a human mask.
"It sounds like you should talk to the school counselor about that," Kaelan said, standing up slowly. "We really need to get to class."
But Marcus moved to block their path, and when he smiled, Kaelan could see that his teeth were just slightly too sharp, as if they had been filed to points. "The counselor can't help with this kind of problem. But I know someone who can. Someone who's been waiting to meet you, Kaelan. Someone who has so much to teach you about what you really are."
The library suddenly felt much colder, and Kaelan could hear whispers at the edge of perception—the same voices he'd encountered in the nightmare corridor. The Hollow Ones weren't content to wait for him to fall asleep again. They were making their move in broad daylight, using a possessed classmate as their puppet.
"Run," he whispered to Sarah, his hand closing around the notebook. The leather binding was already growing warm, responding to the psychic threat.
But it was too late. Marcus lunged forward with inhuman speed, his hands reaching for Kaelan's throat. And as he moved, his human disguise began to slip away, revealing the crystalline horror beneath—another face trapped in the walls of the Hollow Ones' realm, another consciousness consumed and repurposed for their war against the living world.
The battle for Kaelan's soul was about to begin in earnest. And this time, there would be no waking up to escape it.