I'd miscalcuted.

  In the game, dying in the dream meant returning to the start of the loop. I hadn't considered what would happen if the dream broke away at the same time.

  I was trapped. A fall with no bottom.

  The bedroom, my parents' knocks, Jae's bright voice—the dream peeled them away like cheap wallpaper. It wanted me deeper. It always wanted me deeper.

  The scene reshaped itself.

  Dining table.

  The hum of the overhead bulb, too bright. The report card, corners dog-eared, ink already bleeding. My father leaning over me like an entire future bancing on his crossed arms. My mother behind him, worrying her knuckles white against the back of a chair.

  I stared at the numbers, wishing I could make them say something else. Add up to something more.

  "You need discipline, son," he said. "If you want any chance at a real future."

  My mother tried to soften it. She always tried.

  "You're so smart," she urged. "You could be exceptional if you just applied yourself."

  I was thirteen. Fourteen. Too young to realize how heavy love becomes when it's shaped like expectation.

  "But I don't want to be a doctor..." I muttered.

  My father's jaw tightened. His silence was louder than shouting.

  "Look at my hands," he said. He lifted them, thick with old bor, callouses stacked like sediment across his palms.

  "When I was your age, I didn't get to choose. I worked, and I sacrificed, because someone had to."

  "??..." my mother murmured, "your father only wants you to have a stable future. A good job means you can take care of the people you love one day. Your wife, your children... even us, when we're old."

  The words pressed in from both sides, tightening around my ribs until I could barely breathe.

  The scene buckled, memory skipping like a scratched vinyl.

  College b.

  Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, flickering in a way that always gave me a headache. The table was cluttered with beakers and worksheets I had rewritten a dozen times, each version wrong in a slightly different way.

  My academic advisor tapped the red marks on my midterm, exhaling.

  "Are you sure this is the right path?" he asked gently.

  No.Yes.No.

  I heard my father's voice threaded through all of them.

  Wanting doesn't matter.

  The dream pressed its thumb down, accelerating the colpse: missed csses, skipped office hours, forgotten assignments, nights spent staring at textbooks that blurred until the ink bled.

  Failure, yered on failure, yered on pressure.

  I let myself sink.

  Cafeteria.

  A cold pstic tray. A half-eaten sandwich. I sat alone, pretending my textbook was more interesting than the ughter of everyone else my age. They all seemed to know how to exist so effortlessly.

  The pressure to be someone—someone impressive—made my skin feel too tight.

  So I withdrew.

  Into library corners.Computer bs.Dial-up bulletin boards.Usenet groups where everyone was just a username.Pces where everyone was faceless, voiceless, and therefore safe.

  The loneliness wasn't new.

  But the numbness was.

  The dream softened—almost tender—and then brought him back.

  Jae.

  Not the twenty-year-old boy who'd once babysat me.

  Older now. Mid-to-te twenties. Tired in the eyes. A grad student with a lived-in leather jacket and the faint air of someone who'd been drifting for too long.

  He stood in the doorway of my cramped apartment like a memory stepped out of time.

  "Hey," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'm between pces right now. Mind if I crash here a bit?"

  He didn't need to ask.

  He'd been... everything, once. A safe orbit. A crush I never admitted. Someone older, cooler, freer than anyone in my world of rules and expectations.

  Now he was older still.

  A little thinner.A little wilder.A little frayed at the edges.

  I ignored all of the signs.

  The dream jumped.

  He was on my couch again, flipping channels, teasing me about my off-brand cereal. Borrowing my shirts without asking. Leaving his textbooks in piles I had to step over. Showing up at 2 AM smelling like booze and something sweet and chemical I couldn't quite pce.

  His ugh was too bright. His touch lingered too long. His eyes stayed tired even when he smiled.

  And then—one night—he kissed me.

  It was sloppy and soft and devastating in a way that carved me open.

  He was older. I was old enough.

  And desperate enough to believe it meant something.

  I thought:This is love.Finally.

  Then the dream tore it away.

  Jae vanished.

  No note. No goodbye.

  Just... gone.

  His backpack gone.His jacket gone.His toothbrush gone.

  The couch cushions still held his shape.

  I stared at my pager until my eyes hurt. Waited for a beep that never came.

  I told myself he'd return. Told myself he cared.

  I told myself anything except the truth:

  My apartment was nothing more than a couch to crash on.

  He had used me because I was easy to leave.

  The clinic waiting room.

  Older me now—pale, thin, coughing into tissues that never fully stayed clean. Posters on the wall about "risky behaviors" that felt pointed without saying anything directly.

  The nurse called my name with a voice too careful. Too polite. Too distant.

  The doctor frowned before he'd even said hello.

  He didn't need to say anything.

  Not the words whispered on the news. Not the ones my pastor spoke on Sunday, preaching hellfire and damnation.

  I could already tell by the way he held his breath. By the way the nurse, who had touched my arm earlier, now stepped back.

  A gift. From someone who had breezed in and out of my life like a summer storm. I hadn't been with anyone else.

  I remembered thinking, sick with heartbreak:I hope he's alright.Even then.

  Even then.

  The dream loop tightened.

  Friends drifting away.

  Family retreating behind forced smiles and quiet dinners.

  Me shrinking, again, into message boards, emutors, obscure Japanese games—worlds that accepted me because they didn't require anything real.

  Old RPGs. Dungeon crawlers. Games I could tinker with and lose hours inside because it hurt less than thinking.

  The cough worsened. The meds were too expensive. The treatment breakthroughs hadn't trickled down yet. They wouldn't.

  Not to someone like me.

  The hospital room appeared.

  IV drip.Beeping monitor.Curtains faded from too many wash cycles.A window that wouldn't open no matter how hard the nurse tried.

  I y in the bed, thin as paper, still only twenty-something, feeling older than my parents ever would.

  The nurse brushed my hair back with gloved hands and whispered, "Rest."

  I remembered this part too clearly.

  The dream wanted me to drown in it.

  It wanted me to remember what it felt like to die quietly, small and unseen.

  To feel the world shrink until it was just the soft beep of a monitor and the weight of a bnket I couldn't lift.

  To know that my life had slipped away before anyone figured out how to save it.

  And then the loop reset—because death in the dream meant starting over.

  Dining table.Cafeteria.Jae.Clinic.Hospital.Dining table.Clinic.Jae.Hospital.Dining table—

  Faster. Sharper.

  As if the nightmare wanted to grind me down into the shape of who I used to be.

  As if it whispered:

  This is your truth.This is where you came from.This is the fear you never escaped.

  And worst of all—

  A part of me felt almost relieved to be back.

  Because I remembered this person.Because I understood him.Because being Cire had always meant pretending none of this mattered anymore.

  But it did.

  It mattered enough for the dream to use it against me.

  It mattered enough to keep me here.

  And the world outside—Seraphine, Rocher, the forest, my body lying somewhere in the moss—felt impossibly far away.

  Because this was the nightmare I'd spent a lifetime avoiding.

  And now that it had me again, I couldn't look away.

  The loop hit its rhythm again—Dining tableCafeteriaJaeClinicHospital—each memory neat as beads on a string.

  Then something snagged.

  The hospital curtain shivered.

  Not with wind—there was no wind here—but as if something enormous had brushed against it.

  I froze.

  A shadow lengthened across the linoleum floor. Too big. Too tall. A shape with shoulders that scraped the ceiling and a distortion where a face should be, like light bending around a bck hole.

  A voice followed.

  Not a voice.

  A pressure.

  Low. Cracking the air like a fault line.

  —are...

  I cmped my hands over my ears. It didn't help. The sound vibrated in my teeth.

  The figure stepped closer, bending down—or maybe the room shrank upward around it. Its eyes weren't eyes. Two burning smears of green, like someone had set fire to sunlight.

  I couldn't breathe.

  I knew—deep in the marrow of the boy I used to be—that this thing had come to judge me. To measure me. To look straight through my skin and see everything wrong inside.

  My stomach lurched.

  "Please," I whispered. "I'll try harder. I'll do better. Just—please—don't—"

  The monster didn't answer.

  The second one appeared behind it.

  Smaller, but only in the way a knife is smaller than a guillotine. A smear of red, eyes like bloodstains spreading through water. Its shape bent wrong, edges blurring like it couldn't decide where its body ended.

  A screeching static poured from it—high, keening, intelligent.

  A reprimand. A disappointment given sound.

  I stumbled back until my spine hit the wall.

  "No—no—stop—please, I can't—"

  My voice cracked into something thin and young.

  The monsters hovered over me, blotting out the fluorescents, blotting out the room, blotting out the years I'd earned as Cire.

  A cold truth splintered through me:

  They weren't here to save me. Nothing here was meant to save me.

  Everything in this world existed only to break me back into the shape I started from.

  My vision blurred.

  The first monster leaned closer. The verdant light of its eyes split into sharp lines—bars, maybe.

  The bars of a cage.

  I squeezed my eyes shut.

  "Please," I whispered, voice so small it sounded stolen. "I'll be good. Don't take any more away."

  Something brushed my shoulder.

  Survival screamed through me. I tore away from the monsters with a ragged breath and ran—heart in my throat—somewhere, anywhere, that wasn't here. A sound followed me down the corridor, thin and otherworldly, chiming like a distant bell.

  The dream caught the motion and dragged me deeper. The floor opened beneath me, and the nightmare swallowed the rest of the world whole.