'What?'
Jean was frozen. His reflection stared back at him, and yet—it wasn't his reflection. Not the one he remembered.
It was him. Same eyes. Same nose. Same everything.
But different.
He had lost weight. His face was... slim. Not the chubby cheeks he had woken up with every morning for sixteen years. The softness was gone, replaced by something sharper, more defined. His jawline had emerged from beneath the baby fat. His cheekbones were visible.
But he hadn't aged. Not a day. He looked exactly as he did when he fell asleep.
'How?' he thought. 'What happened to me? How long was I under? Why do I look different but not older?'
He raised a hand to his face, touching his cheek, his jaw, tracing the unfamiliar contours. The skin felt the same. The bones beneath felt new.
Before he could ponder further, a sound broke the silence.
A door—to his left—creaked open.
Light poured in from outside, blinding and bright, obscuring whoever stood in the doorway. Jean raised his hand against the glare, squinting, trying to make out a shape. The light was painful after so long in darkness, searing against his retinas.
A figure stepped forward. The light shifted. A face emerged from the brightness.
"Jean?"
The voice was confused. Hesitant. Disbelieving. It cracked on the single syllable of his name.
"Is that you?"
Jean stared. The man before him was familiar, but changed. A beard, unkempt and graying at the edges. Dark hollows under his eyes that spoke of sleepless years—decades, maybe. Lines on his forehead that hadn't been there before. His shoulders were tense, hunched with a weight Jean couldn't see.
He looked exhausted. Worn down by something heavy. By time itself.
But beneath all of it—the shape of his face, the way he stood, the sound of his voice—
"Uncle Eugene?" Jean's voice cracked. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. 'It can't be. He looks so... old. But not that old. How long—'
Eugene crossed the distance in three quick strides and wrapped his arms around Jean, pulling him into an embrace so tight it almost hurt. His shoulders shook. Sobs escaped him—raw, broken sounds that Jean had never heard from his uncle before. The man who always laughed, always joked, always filled a room with warmth—he was crying like a child.
"I thought you wouldn't wake up," Eugene wept into Jean's shoulder. "I thought none of you would wake up. I lost hope. All of you. I checked every day. Every single day for—" He choked on the words. "I lost hope."
Jean held him, confusion warring with the warmth of reunion. 'None of you.' The words stuck in his mind, repeating. 'None of you. That means—Mom. Dad. Julie. Ben. They're here too. They're asleep. They're alive.'
After a long moment, Eugene pulled back, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He sniffed, trying to compose himself, but the tears kept coming.
Jean looked past him, toward the row of sleeping pods.
Three of them. Silent. Still. Occupied.
His heart leaped. 'Three?'
"Uncle?" Jean's voice was quiet, fragile. "Are my parents and siblings in those things?"
Eugene followed his gaze. His expression shifted—a flicker of something Jean couldn't read. Pain. Grief. Fear.
He nodded slowly. "Yeah, but..."
He trailed off.
Jean waited. The silence stretched, thick and terrible.
"...Ben," Eugene finally said, his voice breaking on the name like glass. "Ben isn't here. He..." He raised a hand to his eyes, hiding them behind his palm. "He died. During the tempus."
The words didn't make sense. Couldn't make sense.
Jean stared at his uncle, uncomprehending. 'Died? Ben? No. No, that's not—he can't—'
"Wait, what?" His voice rose, sharp and desperate. "Please tell me this is some silly joke you want to make. Please, Uncle Eugene, tell me you're joking."
He grabbed Eugene's shoulders, shaking him violently. His uncle didn't move. Didn't budge. Didn't laugh and say it was all a prank.
"Please!" Tears streamed down Jean's face. His legs gave out. He crumpled to the ground, the world spinning around him, his head pounding like it might explode.
Ben. His brother. His one and only brother.Gone.
'No. No, no, no. This isn't real. This is another nightmare. I'm going to wake up again and he'll be there. He'll be there.'
But he knew, somewhere deep in his chest, that this wasn't a nightmare.
This was real.
After a while—Jean didn't know how long—he found himself still on the ground. Eugene sat beside him, face buried in his palms. Neither spoke. The only sound was Jean's ragged breathing and the distant hum of machinery.
Finally, Jean wiped his eyes. His voice came out raw, scraped clean of everything.
"What happened?"
Eugene looked at him. His eyes were red, exhausted, ancient in a face that should have been younger.
And he told him.
The Somnum. The great slumber that had taken half the world. Jean's family—his mother, his father, Julie—all lost to sleep, their bodies sustained by the pods, their minds trapped somewhere unreachable. Only Ben... only Ben never woke from something else. Something Eugene wouldn't—couldn't—describe in detail.
Jean listened, absorbing the words like blows to the chest. Each one landed. Each one hurt.
Then a question struck him.
"How many days has it been?"
Eugene shook his head slowly. "Not days."
He paused, gathering himself.
"It's been decades."
Jean stared at him. The words didn't compute. He looked at his uncle's face, searching for the joke, the lie, the misunderstanding. 'Decades? That's impossible. He looks old, but not that old. I look the same. How can it be—'
"What do you mean, decades?" His voice was hollow.
Eugene looked away. Stared at the ground. When he spoke, his voice was distant, as if reciting a history he had lived but never understood.
"After you all went into Somnum, 'The Voice', the figures of light disappeared. Just... vanished. For a month—maybe two—we thought it was over. Everything went back to the way it was before the apocalypse. Humans started to rebuild. Cities. Governments. Hope." He let out a bitter laugh. "Hope came back. Things were almost normal."
Jean listened, intent.
'Normal. After everything, they thought it was normal.'
"Then another rift appeared. Not in the sky this time. On the ground. Smaller than the first. It opened in Ammitt first, like before, then spread to every country. Every continent. Monsters came through again—different ones."
Eugene's voice grew heavier.
"But this time, we fought back. We had to. We had weapons, strategies, and desperation. Still..." He shook his head. "We lost more than we gained. Every victory cost us. Every monster we killed took someone with it."
"This went on for a year. Then the promise of 'The Voice' came true. People started disappearing—vanishing out of nowhere. One moment they were there, the next—gone. We thought it was another apocalypse. Another wave. Another end."
He paused, something like wonder creeping into his voice.
"But some of them came back. Some after days, some weeks, and sometimes months. And when they returned, they were different. They had powers. Abilities. They could fight the monsters. Kill them. Really kill them, not just slow them down."
Jean's mind raced. 'Powers. The Path. The accord. It was real. Everything they said was real.'
"We and 'The Voice' called them 'Pathwalkers' or 'Pathwayers'"
The word hung in the air between them.
"But there weren't many of us," Eugene continued. "Pathwalkers were rare. Maybe one in a thousand. The mundane—normal people—they were the majority. We couldn't save everyone. Couldn't save the ones in Somnum. Couldn't protect the ones awake. But we held on. For a year, we fought them, bled for them, died for them. And still, the monsters kept coming."
Jean saw his uncle's hands tremble.
"The rifts never stopped. New ones opened every few months. Different creatures every time. Some we could kill. Some we couldn't. Some killed us instead. We adapted. We evolved. We learned to survive in a world that kept trying to end us."
Eugene stopped. His eyes met Jean's, and there was something in them—a weight, a truth he didn't want to speak.
"But the strangest thing," he said slowly, "the thing none of us understand..."
He trailed off.
"What?" Jean pressed. "What is it?"
Eugene looked at him for a long moment.
"We, the humans of Earth, didn't age a single day."
Jean blinked. 'Didn't age? That's—that's impossible.'
"What do you mean?"
"Exactly what I said." Eugene spread his hands. "Look at me. I should be in my sixties. I look maybe forty. You—you should be over forty yourself. You look sixteen. None of us aged. Not the Pathwalkers. Not the mundane. Not a single human being on this planet has aged since the day the Voice appeared."
Jean's head spun. 'No aging. Ben is dead. Mom, Dad, Julie are still in this somnum. And I'm still sixteen.'
"How?" he whispered.
Eugene shook his head. "No one knows. The scientists can't explain it. The Pathwalkers with knowledge-based powers can't figure it out. It's just... how things are now. Time passes, but we don't."
He reached out and placed a hand on Jean's shoulder.
"You've been under for twenty-five years, Jean. A quarter of a century. The world outside this room is nothing like the one you remember."
Jean stared at him, tears fresh on his cheeks.
'Twenty-five years?'
What could he do now?
His brother dead.
His family still asleep in Somnum.
And he—he was still just a boy.