The Dream That Refuses to Break

The world gave way beneath me.
One instant I was still clinging to the collapsing Archive, the echo of that forbidden name on my lips, and the next I was falling into a chasm where no sky, no earth, and no boundary remained. I thought I knew what falling felt like, but this was different. This was a plunge through thought itself. Memory streamed around me in ribbons of fractured light, pages without words, voices without throats. I tried to scream, but even that was taken from me. All sound was devoured by the silence of the Veil.
Then—impact.
The ground rose up from nothing. It was not earth, not stone, not wood, but a shifting surface of broken reflections. I slammed down onto it and rolled, gasping, every muscle screaming. My hands shook when I tried to push myself up, but I forced myself to my feet.
The place stretched infinitely in all directions. Shards of mirror-like terrain jutted up like jagged mountains, reflecting not me but fragmented images—my smile at eight years old, a tear I shed in a classroom window, the first glimpse of Aeris beneath the silver tree. Each shard showed me something I had lived, and something I feared I might never live again.
“The Veil resists,” I muttered to no one. My own voice sounded thin, already being unraveled by the place.
I staggered forward. Every step bent the ground beneath me, sending ripples through the fractured plain. In the distance, I thought I saw a flicker of light—warm, faint, almost like someone holding a lantern. But it was too far, and I dared not call out.
Then came the sound.
Not footsteps. Not breathing. But the scrape of glass upon glass, echoing through the empty plane. I froze. From the mirrors around me, shapes began to peel themselves free. At first they were nothing more than silhouettes of light and shadow, but slowly they took form—limbs, eyes, jaws. They were creatures born of memory, twisted and incomplete. One bore my face, but with hollow sockets where eyes should have been. Another had Aeris’s smile, stretched too wide and brittle, like cracked porcelain. They crawled across the fractured ground, whispering in broken voices that weren’t words but echoes.
I stumbled back. My chest tightened. My instincts screamed at me to run, but there was nowhere to run. The plain was endless, the sky a ceiling of nothing.
“Lumae verin!” I gasped, thrusting out my hand.
The light answered. A flicker, fragile as candle flame, bloomed in my palm. The first spell Aeris had taught me—the one that had carried me here. But against these things it looked pitiful, a child’s torch against a devouring night.
The creatures advanced. Their broken bodies rattled with every step, glass dust falling from their forms. One lunged. I barely rolled aside, my shoulder slamming into a jagged shard that cut straight through my uniform sleeve. Pain shot down my arm, hot and real.
This wasn’t illusion. They could hurt me.
I scrambled up, clutching my bleeding shoulder, forcing the light to grow. It flared, casting long shadows across the plain. The creatures hissed, retreating for only a heartbeat before circling tighter. Their whispers grew louder.
Forgotten.
Alone.
Never enough.
I shook my head violently. “You’re not real!”
But the words felt empty. Because weren’t they? Weren’t they parts of me I’d left behind, broken fragments that had taken shape when the Archive shattered?
The largest of them stepped forward. It had my face, but older, lined with exhaustion, its mouth curved into a cruel smile. It lifted its hand and from the shards beneath us rose a jagged blade made of glass and memory.
I froze. That weapon hummed with the weight of recognition. I knew it. I had seen it before, in dreams I could never fully recall. It was mine—and not mine.
The creature spoke, its voice a distortion of mine: “You can’t wake from this.”
My legs threatened to give out. The light in my hand flickered. The others closed in, circling, scraping, their movements synchronized as though led by this distorted version of myself.
Then—a sound cut through the silence.
Not the scrape of glass. Not the whispers. But something else. A clear note, like the faint pluck of a string in a forgotten song. The sound rippled through the plain, making the shards tremble. For a moment, the creatures faltered. Their whispers broke. Their movements stilled.
I whipped my head around, searching for the source. In the far distance, atop one of the larger shards, a figure stood. Too far to make out clearly—whether man or woman, human or something else entirely. All I could see was the outline, cloaked, motionless, a faint glow at their side like an instrument held in one hand.
And then they were gone.
The creatures screeched, shaking off the interruption, turning back to me. My pulse thundered. I had no choice. My hand clenched, and I poured everything I had into the light.
“Lumae verin!” I cried again, louder this time, not just with my voice but with every ounce of myself.
The light burst outward, not as a flame but as a wave, bending the shards around me into curves of gold and silver. The creatures shrieked as their bodies fractured further, splintering into dust. The wave swept through them, breaking their forms. Shards rained down, dissolving into nothing as they struck the ground.
When the glow faded, I collapsed to my knees, breath heaving, sweat burning down my face. My shoulder throbbed where the shard had cut me. Around me lay only fragments—silent, still.
But it wasn’t victory. It was survival. Barely.
I forced myself to my feet, my whole body trembling. My eyes scanned the horizon. The cloaked figure was nowhere to be seen. Had they been real? Or just another trick of the Veil? Yet the sound, that clear note, still echoed faintly in my chest like a heartbeat not my own.
I clenched my fists. I couldn’t let myself break here. Not now. Not when Aeris’s voice still lingered at the edge of memory, not when Ren’s laughter still anchored me to who I was.
The Veil wasn’t just a world of dreams.
It was alive. It resisted. It tested.
And for the first time, I realized it didn’t want me to move forward.

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I walked on through the endless plain, each step heavy, each breath jagged. My reflection stared back at me from every shard, some smiling, some crying, some broken. I wanted to look away. But I couldn’t. Because every fragment reminded me of what I was fighting for: to remember, to hold on, to not let myself vanish like the echoes that haunted me.
Far ahead, the horizon shifted. A path of shards aligned into what looked almost like a road, leading toward a distant glow. I didn’t know what awaited me there. Another trap, another battle, or the next piece of truth.
But I walked toward it anyway.
Because the dream refused to break—and so did I.

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Author’s Note:
Lucen’s first true confrontation with the Veil leaves him scarred but alive. The creatures of fractured memory hint at what the Veil is hiding… and the mysterious cloaked figure watching from the distance raises even more questions. Next: Chapter 12 – The Shadow That Learns to Speak