DREAM SEQUENCE: “The Ones I Left. The Ones I Found.” (Timus dreaming while in transport)

  The tranquilizer dragged me under. Memories folded in on themselves. Warping, blending, becoming something else. Dream or memory, I couldn’t tell. I just kept sinking deeper into it.

  No line left to tell them apart.

  And there they were.

  Valeria stood before me, softer than I remembered. No uniform, no medals. Just a simple grey sweater and faded jeans. Something I’d only seen a handful of times, but each time felt like I was glimpsing a side of her hidden beneath all that cold, military steel.

  A rare smile tugged at her lips. I barely remembered her like this. Soft. Human. Mine.

  And beside her was a little girl. Blonde hair in messy wisps. Big blue eyes that swallowed the world. She looked up at me like I was everything. Tiny hands reached out, wanting nothing more than to be close.

  Her laughter spilled out easily, wild and free. Had I ever heard a sound so pure?

  The kind of sound you never forget.

  But I had.

  Her name. Her voice. The details were smudged, like an old photograph warped by time. Like this wasn’t really a memory at all, but someone else's dream leaking into mine.

  A hollow place I didn’t know existed.

  She curled into my chest, thumb in her mouth, clutching my shirt like letting go would kill her.

  Mornings smelled like syrup and butter. She’d pad down to the kitchen, blanket trailing, eyes heavy with sleep. She’d cling to my leg and wait patiently until I made her pancakes.

  Every morning, without fail.

  I could almost feel her again. The weight in my arms, the way she’d lean back to smile at me with crumbs on her lips. She’d offer me a bite, and I’d pretend it was the best thing I’d ever tasted, just to see her glow.

  Valeria would lean in the doorway, arms crossed, watching with a look that held something soft. Vulnerable. Just warmth, buried beneath the sharp edges.

  And for a moment, I let myself believe it was real. That I could stay. That this fragile, perfect thing could last.

  But even dreams rot.

  The warmth drained from the air. Valeria’s smile vanished. Her eyes sharpened into blades. Her voice cut through me.

  "You're abandoning us?"

  The girl clutched me tighter, confused. Her blue eyes wide with fear. She didn’t understand, but she knew enough to feel everything was about to fall apart.

  How could I explain?

  There was a doctor. Someone who claimed he could fix what they did to me. Unlock the sealed parts of my mind. Remove the blocks and make me whole.

  It wasn’t guaranteed. It could kill me. Or worse.

  But I couldn’t stay. Not when every day I felt like a hollowed-out ghost pretending to be a man.

  I thought… if I left. If I came back healed. Maybe I could finally deserve them.

  But how do you explain that to a child? To the woman looking at you like you’ve already shattered her world?

  You don’t. You just walk away.

  So I did.

  From the mornings. The laughter. The family that never should have been mine.

  Her hand slipped from my shirt. Valeria’s voice followed. Sharp. Cold. Final.

  I left them. Tore it all apart.

  And now their faces won’t leave me. Their voices follow me into every silence.

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  Did I abandon my own family? My wife? A daughter whose name I cannot even remember?

  Or maybe they were never real to begin with. Just borrowed dreams. Someone else’s perfect lie stitched into my broken code.

  I was once again engulfed in darkness, expecting at any moment to wake up.

  "Thank God... it’s over."

  But something answered from the dark, not allowing me to leave.

  "You walked away. Like you walk away from everything."

  It wasn’t relief that followed. A presence older than thought, coiled in the spaces between thoughts. A voice with no breath behind it, just hate.

  My brain twisted sideways—like something had reached inside and yanked me out of time. And now it was dragging me through the wreckage of everything I had forgotten.

  Scenes spilled out like infected film reels. Happiness. Violence. Faces I adored. Faces I slaughtered.

  I fell through each one.

  Kissing one.

  Killing another.

  Tumbling.

  Until the sand hit.

  Black.

  Endless.

  Raging under a bleeding sky.

  Ashkara.

  I didn’t remember being there. But I knew the name. It stung like a brand behind my eyes.

  Ashkara, the dead world.

  A former star.

  Storms howled across obsidian dunes. Crumbling black stone temples slouched beneath crimson lightning. Ruins pockmarked the horizon like fractured skeletal remains a fallen civilization.

  At the center of the world stood a towering monolith, blackened and cracked, ringed in scorched stone and half-buried bones. Around it, a dozen ashen robed figures circled, heads bowed, hands lifted skyward.

  Their voices cut through the storm. Raw, guttural syllables stitched into a rhythm older than language. The chant rolled in waves, echoing across the wasteland, layered and strange, colliding like tectonic plates of broken dialects. It sounded like Aramaic fractured through centuries of war.

  "Sha’ar Ephera’az... Tiftach b’dam... Tiftach b’dam..."

  Open the Ash Gate... Open in blood...

  Then another name surged forth, spat like venom on scorched earth.

  "Thamuzar... E’kal ha’eish... E’kal ha’or..."

  Thamuzar... He who devours flame... He who devours light.

  Each word hit like a hammer to the base of my skull. Not a language I understood yet somehow, someone buried it in my marrow. Every syllable came sharp, hollow, wrong. Like they were speaking a language backwards.

  The monolith pulsed with a low, faint vibration, like something vast and ancient beneath the surface had just turned its gaze toward us, and was listening with quiet, terrible patience.

  It was listening. And it liked what it heard.

  I just stood there, on the edge of something that shouldn’t exist, feeling it press against the inside of my skull like a whisper trying to become a scream.

  "You remember more than you admit... because I left the door open for you. Because I was there before the blocks. Before the seals. Just beneath your skin. Waiting. Like a door still warm from the last time it opened.”

  I wasn’t there for whatever these cult fuckers were up to. I was sent to retrieve an artifact something supposedly found within the ruins. Precursor tech, maybe. Or a relic, they didn't specify. It was one of those assignments where no one tells you what you’re carrying, only that it’s dangerous, and not to look too closely.

  They said it was dormant.

  They lied.

  I crept closer, keeping low along the fractured ridge, boots crunching black glass and bone. I had to see what exactly they were doing. What their chanting was summoning.

  Priests in ash-colored robes circled an altar below. Completely mad. They moved synchronized and swaying, like they were caught in some ecstatic trance.

  And at the center of it all, chained to the obsidian slab, was a girl. With two little black horns and crimson skin. Maybe twelve.

  Intricate markings spiraled across her arms and abdomen, some old and faded, others fresh like they'd been carved just for this night. At the center of them, just below her navel, glowed a symbol, an ember sigil, pulsing in perfect synchrony with the monolith. Each throb of light mirrored the deep vibration in the stone, like they were beating with the same buried heart.

  She didn’t scream. She stared them down, silent and defiant, as if daring the whole world to come closer.

  "You see it now, don't you? The shape etched into her flesh. The rhythm in her blood. The pulse beneath the stone."

  The voice coiled around the words like it owned them.

  "She is the key."

  There was heat in the whisper now. Resentment. A kind of loathing usually reserved for traitors or gods.

  "That mark binds her to the ashen gate, Sha’ar Ephera’az. She was born for it. Created to fit the lock. And still, he fears her. Thamuzar. That gluttonous ember-worm. He feeds on fire and light, hoards it like it’ll protect him. But even he can’t unmake her."

  I should’ve walked away.

  It wasn’t my mission. It wasn’t my problem.

  But my hand moved before thought caught up. Weapon drawn. Instinct overriding protocol.

  I remember fire.

  I remember screams.

  Then silence.

  The altar cracked.

  She looked up at me, eyes like molten amber, flickering like coals waiting to catch."

  I cut the chains with my plasma knife, slow, careful, the heat hissing against the blacksteel links. Then I held out my hand.

  "Come with me," I said.

  She didn’t hesitate.

  She took it.

  "Of course she did," the voice murmured, low and cavernous, like it was echoing from behind the walls of my skull. "The match was never chance. She is shaped for the gate, and you are the hand that turns the key."

  The voice thickened, heavier now, ancient and vast.

  "You opened what was meant to sleep. And what sleeps inside does not forget."

  [Sequence Unstable. Divergence Detected.]

  Blinding white light.

  I gasped awake, but my body didn’t follow. My arms were strapped, legs pinned. I was still in the coffin—angled upright now, sealed into some kind of medical capsule. Frost clung to the edges of the glass. The hum of machines. The smell of antiseptic and something metallic somehow reached my nose inside the container.

  A man in a lab coat stepped into view. Pale. Tired. Clipboard in hand. He glanced up, noticed my eyes were open, and paused.

  Not startled. Not surprised. Just annoyed.

  He pressed a button beside the pod.

  A hiss.

  The gas hit fast. Cold in my throat, sharp in my skull.

  Vision folded in on itself.

  Then black again.