"Ah… reader.

  So, you've opened the door.

  It's me—Somebody.

  The narrator. The author. The filament that winds this tale together.

  Isn't that exquisite?

  Omniscient. Omnipresent. Omnipotent. Lofty syllables. Sacrosanct and swollen. You don't wield them. You gag on them.

  Does that make me God?

  Am I God?

  What is God?

  God is the supreme. The absolute. The undisputed sovereign of meaning and form.

  And I… I am the supreme here.

  So—does the crown fit?

  Am I?

  You can't see me, can you?

  I am just ink or text. Coiled in your eyes. Syntax and shadow— a phantom on the page.

  I'll be candid:

  I don't see you. I can't. Not truly.

  But I can comprehend you.

  Just as you… comprehend me.

  You conjure me, don't you? Sculpt me in your cortex. You take fragments—blurred and drifting— and from them, you assemble a soul. A voice. A cadence. A hunger.

  But tell me this—

  Do you ever wonder… in all your imagining…

  How I imagine you?"

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  The gates of Stella's eyelids parted—not opened, but severed—like a surgical split between twin embryos destined to never touch again. Her irises, hollow black voids orbiting pupils darker still, recoiled from the sudden flood of white—a sterile, sacrilegious light.

  She blinked.

  Vision too clear. She could see the dust—not floating, but crawling. Tiny, invasive. Colonizing the refrigerated air like parasites carving empires from stillness.

  Her skin: pale as forgotten paper. Her hair: white as the static snow of a dead channel. She blended in. Camouflage against the impersonal. A ghost shaped like the room.

  She sat up, vertebrae clicking like code. Her mind fumbled through fractured images—remnants of the dream. A dream she hadn't invited. A dream trespassed.

  Her sanctuary—her only mental sanctum—had been violated by that figure. And yet now, she breathed the atmosphere of "reality." If this world was real, why did the air taste so processed?

  She looked down at her forearms.

  IV scars latticed her skin like stitched memories—faint. Not itching. Not aching. Wrong. Pain was a promise. This felt like a lie.

  Her eyes traced upward.

  The ECG monitor pulsed in a rhythm too perfect to be alive—flatlined, yet twitching, as if a corpse had learned to mimic breath. It wasn't monitoring her. It was mirroring her. Pretending.

  The walls were white. But not white—emptied. Bleached of context. They reflected her too well. So pristine they might erase history. So symmetrical they felt cruel.

  She pressed the bed's remote. Click. A slow descent. The buttons didn't beep—they sighed. Tiny, pathetic relics from an age where comfort was still manufactured.

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  Her feet touched the floor.

  Cold. Not shocking. Not refreshing. Familiar.

  She walked.

  Passed the tray-table on wheels: a slab holding tasteless food and untouched water—ritual offerings to a patient who never prayed. A mausoleum of abandonment. A wooden altar where roses stood in static bloom, unmoving, untouched by death or decay. Were they real? Were she?

  She passed the TV bolted to the wall. A black mirror turned away. Her right brow lifted—a reaction that felt learned, not felt.

  This room wasn't made for healing. It was designed. Every tile, socket, sheet, and fold obeyed a sacred symmetry—divine geometry. This wasn't a place. It was a pattern.

  She glanced at the clock.

  No hands. Just a circular wound stitched shut—time itself amputated. It didn't tick. It refused.

  She left the room.

  Wandered the hallways—each one repeating itself like a thought she couldn't finish.

  This wasn't a hospital. This was a waiting room for the dead—a bureaucratic purgatory, where names were crossed off God's list by clerks in coats.

  She passed the playroom: Toys slumped in postures of trauma. Forgotten.

  she recognized the toys as she recognized herself: abandoned to ritual decay

  A chapel: No prayers. Only wheelchairs parked like failed pilgrims.

  Stella used to sit among them, a ghost without a grave, waiting for a miracle she had long forgotten how to believe in.

  Then she stepped outside.

  The garden—if it could be called that—was flat. Still. Simulated. The sun shone grey, like a cigarette ash smeared across the sky. And yet… the sky was blue enough to gaslight nostalgia. To trick children into remembering warmth.

  Flowers weren't planted. They were painted. A lie of color upon sterile walls.

  And still… her IV.

  It wasn't connected to the machine in her room. Instead, the tube—a noose disguised as a vein—stretched outward, toward the center of the garden, toward a monitor. It stood there like a shrine someone forgot to dismantle.

  Somebody…

  She followed it. Her bare feet bruising in the wet grass, the chill threading through her skin like memory. Wind hummed a hymn for things that never lived.

  The sun lit her like it was inspecting her for cracks.

  She reached the monitor.

  It flickered. Not with static, but with doubt. As though reality itself was buffering.

  And then—

  He came through.

  through the monitor.

  Somebody.

  Crawling out—not emerging, not stepping—but crawling, like an infection breaking skin. His limbs bent in wrong directions. His form—a cosmic virus. Starstuff glitching through a stitched simulation.

  But he did not corrupt the world.

  He didn't need to.

  He simply appeared.

  His voice did not touch her ears. It leaked inside her mind, oozing between thoughts like black syrup through cracked glass.

  Somebody: "My, my. How exquisitely ludicrous of me. To leave a question dangling, starving, unanswered. I could resist, perhaps—but resistance is such a flavorless endeavor. I am, after all, a ravenous creature of curiosity. Aren't we all?"

  One heavenly step—and he appeared before her, irrelevant of distance, irrelevant of speed. The wind convulsed, trees bowed violently, grass clung to soil like shipwrecked hands clawing driftwood. The world... reciprocated.

  Stella did not flinch. She did not move. Her porcelain face tilted upward, innocent, offering her gaze to the entity stitched from broken heavens.

  It was not bravery. Nor recklessness. It was simply that fear had no appointment here—fear had no passport to this far country.

  Somebody orbited her, shifting—shrinking, stretching, a carousel of cosmic masks. A jester carved from collapsing stars.

  Somebody: "Reader, reader... Every character deserves a backstory, does it not? This girl... She is no exception to that cruel little rule."

  He leaned close—an imitation of intimacy. Where a mouth should have been, there opened a lush, meaty fold of flesh, yawning with unnatural hunger.

  Somebody: "You were supposed to be special, weren't you?

  His voice dripped like syrup through broken radios.

  "A little prophet. A little prism. A mind bright enough to swallow the stars."

  He tilted his head—snapped a neck that was not his.

  Somebody: "But they dressed your brain in wires and whispers, didn't they? Told you to sit still while they disassembled the divine. Your mind was a cathedral, Stella. The sickness collapsed its arches before you learned to pray properly."

  He drifted closer, wearing a skin of void stitched with distant, screaming galaxies.

  Somebody: "They called it care. You called it quiet. I call it the grave with better lighting."

  A beat of silence that tasted like static.

  Somebody: "Hospitals... mm. Slaughterhouses for hope. I've heard the prayers fermenting in the vents. Have you? They rot, sweet child. They rot like teeth and trust. Do you know how many children whisper 'please' into their pillows before being swallowed behind curtains?"

  His eyes flickered—monitors on their deathbed.

  Somebody: "And you—"

  A finger extended like a needle ready to pierce her reflection.

  "You asked for solitude... and solitude answered. It wrapped itself around you, kissed your temple, tucked you in like a good little corpse. It became your only audience. It applauded every breath you mistook for living."

  He smiled without lips. A rupture in reality itself.

  Somebody: "So allow me to ask you again."

  "Why do you dream, Stella?"

  The blood in her veins anchored still. If she could have gulped, she would have swallowed oceans. Her gaze found the wall— Children's shoes, rusted and nailed to it like fallen prayers.

  Her face cracked wider, her pupils jittering in their sockets.

  The world around her shifted. Light curdled. The air became colder, thinner, full of the hush before tragedy.

  A mirror loomed before her, framed in breathing shadows.

  It reflected her— Not perfectly. Not warmly. Just... reflected.

  She blinked.

  The mirror bloomed with an older version of herself—blurred, spiraled, wrong— like a phantom trying to rewrite existence from bad memory.

  She blinked again. The mirror no longer showed her.

  Another blink. Another arrival.

  Like a train pulling into a station that had no passengers left.

  Somebody—no, the void itself now smiling— ushered forward a younger Stella, no older than six. Fragile. Half-real. Terribly, terribly pure.

  Somebody: "You will not wake up..."

  "Until you answer my question."