Breathe. Just breathe. You've done this every day of your life. There's no reason to be afraid. This is just, … a bad dream.
The fog was thick, suffocating. Each breath stung his lungs, cold and heavy, as though the air itself did not want to be breathed. In the middle of it all stood a young man, hair as black as night, eyes darker still — eyes that seemed to swallow the world whole. His pale skin glowed faintly, like moonlight, a beacon in the endless grey.
He turned, searching for a path, but every direction looked the same. The forest pressed close around him, skeletal trees jutting from the ground like bones. They were silent — too silent. Not a rustle of leaves, not a chirp of insects, not even the whisper of wind. Only his own breathing, shallow and sharp.
Something cracked in the distance. A twig breaking. Then silence again.
The boy froze. His nails dug into his palms, sharp crescents biting his skin. He had walked this nightmare countless times, and yet it never lost its grip on him.
The fog shifted. He thought he saw movement between the trees. The shadow of something loping low to the ground. But when he blinked, it was gone.
Hooooowll!
The sound ripped through the stillness. Low at first, then rising, fraying at the edges until it broke into something almost human. His chest clenched. He forced himself to breathe, to be quiet. Stillness was the only thing that had ever saved him pointless suffering.
The world fell silent again. No birds scattering, no branches snapping ; just silence, the kind that seemed to listen.
The boy's heart pounded. The fog swirled thick around him, curling into shapes that made his stomach turn: a tree knot that looked like an eye, branches bending like fingers reaching toward him.
He stood rooted to the spot. He knew what was coming. Knowing never helped.
The silence broke. Something emerged from the fog — not clearly, not yet. A suggestion of too many limbs, a glint like teeth, moving wrong, bending wrong. His breath caught as it lunged forward.
He saw only a mouth. Wide and Endless. Gleaming rows of teeth stretching deeper than should have been possible.
And then it was on him.
He jolted awake.
Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. It was just a dream, he told himself, but the reassurance did nothing. His heart still throbbed violently.
"Riel!"
A soft voice called.
It was his mother.
As Riel calmed, he crawled out of bed and into the bathroom. He caught sight of his reflection: deep, sharp eyebrows, a prominent nose; a strong jaw — he would have been handsome if it weren't for the lifeless eyes, the dark circles etched permanently onto his face, the mouth forever pulled into a frown, and hair in a tangled, unkempt mess.
Dragging himself downstairs, he found his parents and older sister waiting, the sunlight streaming through the windows, warming their silver hair, glinting off their piercing eyes. They looked at him with pity.
"Riel, you know your dreams are blessings of the Great Holy One. Why fight them?" his father's deep voice asked.
"Blessings!" his laugh cracked, bitter. "You will never understand the horrors I face. You will never know what follows me in the shadows, what haunts my very being. Every waking moment is a blessing. Every sleeping second is a curse. Father… how dare you—"
"Riel, stop!" his mother interjected, her voice firm but gentle. "Your father merely misspoke. Please, just sit down, Riel."
Riel's dark eyes turned in her direction, but they did not focus on her. They could never focus on her, not when something far more entrancing lay just beyond, a thing that could not be fathomed.
Eldritch horrors flickered into existence. Mangled, disgruntled limbs crawled across the kitchen, moving in inhuman ways, making sounds no mortal tongue could reproduce. They crept toward him, passing right through his mother as if she were nothing.
Riel sat at the table, accustomed to this terror, forcing himself to ignore it — the only thing he could do.
Spider-like beings, each with thousands of legs rather than eight, scuttled across the ceiling. Their limbs were neither rigid nor powerful, but gangly and limp, writhing in agony. Every motion seemed to cause them immense pain, yet they moved without pause, relentless and unnerving.
This was his world — his own horrible world. No one could see what he saw, feel what he felt. Ever since he could remember, his reality had never been bathed in the holy light of the gods. Instead, it had always been filled with the malignant darkness of the abyss. The monsters and demons fought by the Sentinels were nothing compared to what he faced every day, mere echoes of something far more sinister.
He poked at his breakfast with a trembling fork, though his appetite had long fled. Eldritch spiders scuttled across the plate, hundreds of jointed legs skittering in impossible angles, some vanishing into nothingness only to flicker back into existence, crawling across his breakfast like a grotesque decoration. Their movements were wrong. Wrong in ways that made his skin crawl.
Through it all, Riel forced himself to eat. Every bite was a mental exercise in detachment, a practice he had honed over countless mornings. He didn't scream. He didn't panic. He simply pushed food around the plate, ignoring the feeling of thousands of alien eyes watching him, of teeth that weren't teeth scraping along the surface of his table.
From the corner of his vision, the shadows flickered and shifted, forming shapes that should not exist. Limbs bent and writhed like molten metal, eyes stared from empty sockets, mouths opened and closed with no sound. He had long ago learned the futility of acknowledgment; attention gave them power, and he could not afford to give them that.
He picked up a bite of food. A spider crawled along it. Riel simply stared, then brought it to his mouth.
Crunch.
He imagined biting clean through the thing, imagined wielding control over his world. But he knew it was a lie. He had no power — not in his dreams, not in reality, nowhere. He was insignificant.
And yet, even as he ate, part of him could not help but marvel at it, the way his world bent the rules of reality like a cruel, living puzzle. It was horrifying, but it was his. No one else would understand, no one else could even glimpse it. And in that, there was a perverse comfort.
Even his family, with their silver hair and piercing eyes, could not see the truth. To them, Riel was merely troubled. And so, he endured, pushing food across his plate while the eldritch spiders continued their relentless crawl — a silent, constant reminder that his life and the life of everyone else were separated by a veil that could never be pierced.