Chapter 5: The Mirror

As the child began to speak, Alex realized with growing horror that they recognized the story. The faces in the darkness, the feeling of helplessness, the way fear could consume everything until nothing else existed—this wasn't just any trauma.

This was their own.

Somehow, Alex's own buried nightmare had become the anchor point for the entire system failure. Years of suppressing their own deepest fear had turned it into a psychic beacon that called to every other terror in the Collective.

The child looked up at them with Alex's own eyes from twenty years ago.

"You left me here," the child said accusingly. "You locked me away and pretended I didn't exist."

Alex felt the weight of recognition crushing down on them. They had become so skilled at navigating other people's nightmares because they had spent years running from their own. But in the Collective, where consciousness was shared, their buried trauma had found a way to connect with everyone else's fears.

"I'm sorry," Alex whispered, and meant it. "I thought I was protecting everyone."

"You were protecting yourself," the child replied. "But fear doesn't disappear just because you hide it. It grows."

The nightmare web pulsed again, and Alex could feel the barrier between dreams and reality weakening. Soon, the accumulated terror of thousands of minds would spill into the waking world.

There was only one way to fix it.