The rain in the Outskirts was a constant, miserable drizzle, weeping from a sky the color of lead. It wasn't water, but a chemical-laced mist that coated every surface in a slick, grimy film, turning the narrow alleyways between prefabricated housing blocks into muddy streams of refuse and despair.
For Lucian, this was the only world he had ever truly known.
He moved through the labyrinthine streets with a practiced silence, his worn synth-leather boots making barely a sound. At sixteen, he was lean and wiry, a product of chronic malnutrition and a life spent in the shadows. His face was sharp and angular, but it was his eyes that set him apart. They were a deep, dark grey, almost black, holding an intensity that missed nothing. A necessary trait for a scavenger. A rat.
This life was a stark, brutal contrast to the one he remembered in fleeting, dream-like flashes. A world of soft beds, bright screens, and stories. One story, in particular, haunted him. A story about a boy named Sunny, a Nightmare Spell, and a world of horrors that was now his reality.
He'd been in this world for as long as he could remember, reborn into it after a life that felt like a faded photograph. The knowledge had settled in slowly, a creeping dread that solidified into certainty when he was six. That was the year the sirens wailed.
A flash of memory, sharp and unwelcome. The piercing shriek of the district-wide alarm, a sound that meant only one thing: a Gate had opened. Chaos erupted in the streets. People screamed and ran, a panicked herd. His father had grabbed his arm, his mother clutching his other hand, pulling him through the surging crowd. "To the shelter!" his father yelled over the din. But the shelter was too far. The monsters were already here.
He saw them—things of chitin and claws, things that scuttled and shrieked, pouring from the shimmering tear in reality. A wave of darkness consuming the world. His parents formed a desperate shield around him, pushing him forward. He remembered the feeling of his mother's hand being ripped from his, her scream swallowed by the cacophony. He remembered his father's final, desperate shove that sent him tumbling into a storm drain just as a hulking beast descended. He had huddled in the darkness, listening to the sounds of slaughter, the wet, tearing noises that would forever echo in his mind. He didn't scream. He didn't cry. He just listened, his small body trembling, as the world outside was painted in blood.
By the time the Enforcers and a team of Awakened had stabilized the area, it was over. The Gate was sealed, the creatures were dead, and so were his parents, along with hundreds of others. He was just another orphan of the Outskirts, another statistic from a Tuesday afternoon catastrophe. But he was an orphan with a terrible secret. He knew. He knew this world was not his own, and he knew the true, hopeless scale of the danger.
For ten years, he had survived alone. He learned to fight, to steal, to disappear. He trained his body in the clumsy, inefficient way a child with no teacher could, push-ups in his tiny hovel, running until his lungs burned. It was pathetic, he knew. But it was all he had.
He was aware of the novel's protagonist, Sunny. Their paths crossed occasionally—two solitary shadows flitting through the same grim landscape. Lucian would see him sometimes, a slightly younger boy with a perpetually sullen expression, just as grim and self-reliant as himself. A silent nod was the most that ever passed between them. They were ghosts in the same graveyard.
Today, however, was different. A strange lethargy had taken root in his bones. It started in the morning, a simple tiredness he'd dismissed as a lack of sleep. But as the day wore on, it deepened into a profound, soul-deep exhaustion that no amount of rest could fix. It was a weight pressing down on his very consciousness.
He was scavenging near the old industrial sector, picking through a pile of discarded electronics, when his eyelids began to feel like lead shutters. His movements grew sluggish. A wave of drowsiness washed over him, so potent he had to lean against a wall to keep from falling over.
This wasn't normal. This wasn't physical fatigue. This was something else, something… unnatural.
A cold dread trickled down his spine. He knew the symptoms. He had read about them, pieced them together from the novel's descriptions. This was how it began for some. Not with a bang, not with a splitting headache, but with a whisper. A gentle, inexorable pull into the abyss of sleep.
The Nightmare Spell.
It had found him. After all these years of living in fear of it, of preparing for it, it had come for him not in violence, but as a creeping thief of consciousness.
He had to move. He knew, with chilling certainty, that if he fell asleep here, in this filthy alley, he would never wake up. His body would be just another piece of refuse for the sanitation drones to collect.
He pushed himself off the wall, his muscles screaming in protest. Every step was a monumental effort, like wading through thick tar. The world seemed to fade at the edges, his vision tunneling. He had one goal: the local Enforcer precinct. It was his only chance. They had the technology, the stabilizers to keep his body alive while his mind was thrown into the meat grinder of the First Nightmare.
He stumbled through the familiar alleys, his mind a flickering candle in a hurricane. He fought the urge to simply lie down, to close his eyes and let the darkness take him. It was a seductive feeling, a promise of an end to the struggle, to the hunger, to the loneliness.
No. The thought was a spark of defiance. I will not die like this.
He finally burst out onto one of the main thoroughfares, staggering like a drunkard. He saw the grey, imposing structure of the precinct ahead. It felt a million miles away. He forced his legs to move, one after the other, his entire being focused on that single point.
He collapsed against the front entrance, his hand slapping weakly against the door. The Enforcers who came out saw him and their expressions, a mixture of boredom and mild annoyance, immediately shifted to one of clinical recognition. They knew the look of the damned.
"Infected," Lucian managed to rasp, the word barely a whisper.
They didn't ask questions. They grabbed him, their grips firm and impersonal, and dragged him inside, down into the sterile, white-tiled basement that smelled of antiseptic and despair.
They strapped him into a bulky chair, a monstrous fusion of a medical bed and a torture device. Restraints locked around his wrists, ankles, and forehead. A female attendant with a tired face approached him.
"Try to relax," she said, her voice flat, devoid of sympathy. "The Spell will take you soon. All you have to do… is survive the dream."
Lucian stared at the ceiling, the fluorescent lights blurring. The weight on his soul was unbearable now, a black ocean pulling him under. The struggle was over. He couldn't fight it anymore.
He thought of his parents. He thought of the ten years of cold, hunger, and solitude.
I will survive, he vowed, his mind a single, burning point of defiance in the encroaching darkness. I will come back. And I will have the power to make sure I am never helpless again.
The world dissolved into blackness, and the gentle, treacherous voice of the Nightmare Spell filled his soul.
[You have fallen into a deep sleep…]
[Prepare for your First Nightmare.]