"Dad, look! Look what I drew! I got an A+!"
The boy's voice spilled into the stillness like a drop of color on a gray canvas. His feet padded across the floor, paper clutched tight in both hands, eyes beaming with the kind of joy that only children can still afford. His grin was too wide. Too hopeful.
The room should have felt warm.
But something was wrong with the air.
It hung thick, quiet—not the peaceful kind of quiet, but the kind that weighed heavy in the lungs, like breathing through a damp cloth.
The man sitting on the lounge didn't move.
Dark hair. Darker eyes. His shoulders were hunched, his hands clenched tight together. A storm crouched beneath his skin, coiled and waiting.
He wasn't looking at the boy—he was looking through him, like he didn't belong there. Like he never had.
A woman sat further away, spine rigid, hands folded in her lap. She stared at the boy too, but her eyes were different.
Wide. Not soft. They trembled, just barely, like they might shatter if he came any closer.
Still smiling, he reached the paper out, swaying it playfully.
"Dad, look! I did good, right?"
For a heartbeat, there was only silence. A pause too long. The kind that made the floor feel thinner.
Then the man stood.
"You…"
His voice cracked the stillness.
"You shouldn't have been born."
The boy's hand froze midair.
Then came the fist.
It struck his cheek like thunder, spinning him sideways. The grin vanished—replaced by a gasp, a thud, and pain. He hit the ground hard, ribs scraping against polished wood. The paper fluttered beside him, no longer important.
He blinked.
He didn't understand.
His father had never smiled often, but he'd never—
"I said—"
The man's voice rose, edged with something old and rotted,
"—you shouldn't have been born!"
He moved again, towering now, his shadow stretching like it had claws. His foot lashed out.
A kick.
Another.
And another.
The boy curled in on himself, arms up, tiny hands trying to shield what they could. His body shook. Each impact stole his breath, cracked something inside him that had nothing to do with bones.
"Dad… stop… please… what did I do…?"
The answer came not in words, but in violence.
The man dropped to his knees and grabbed him by the throat.
Fingers squeezed, harder than they should have. The boy's legs kicked weakly, chest heaving, but the air wouldn't come. His lips parted, silent, fluttering like leaves in a storm.
His vision blurred. Not from tears—but from pressure. Red bled into white as vessels burst in his eyes. He could feel them popping.
It burned. It stung. But he couldn't scream.
His arms reached upward—one last time—toward the woman.
She saw him. She saw him.
But she did not move.
She did not speak.
She turned her head away, slowly, as though watching him die might soil her skin.
That hurt more than the fist.
More than the choking.
That was the part that broke something permanent.
And still, the man's grip didn't loosen.
"I'll kill you,"
He muttered, voice thick and shaking.
"I'll kill you. I'll finally—kill you—"
His face began to change.
The jaw widened. The skin darkened, pulled tight over cheekbones that didn't belong. His eyes stretched too far.
The white vanished. The pupils split. Something long and wet slid between his teeth. Breath came out black.
He was no longer a man.
He wasn't human anymore.
The boy stopped struggling.
He stared, frozen, as the thing that used to be his father leaned closer—mouth wide, eyes wild, whispering only one thing now, over and over, beneath the tearing sound of its own skin.
"I'll kill you."
"I'll kill you."
"I'll kill you—"
And then—
He woke.
A gasp tore through his lungs.
He sat up.
The room didn't feel like his room. The air was too still, like it had been holding its breath while he slept.
Sweat clung to his skin, cold and sour, his shirt soaked through, his chest rising and falling like it had forgotten the rhythm.
His eyes darted—not in fear, not quite, but in something close. Disoriented. Untethered. Like waking up in someone else's life.
There was light. A soft glow from the right side of the bed.
He turned.
His phone screen was still on. It hadn't gone dark.
The page of the web novel he'd been reading before he drifted off was still there, frozen mid-scroll. A bright island in the room's gloom. As if the world had paused politely, waiting for him to return.
It hadn't been long.
Three... maybe five minutes. No more than that.
But something inside him felt like it had aged years.
He didn't remember falling asleep. Not clearly. Just the weight of the day pressing him down, and then... that.
The thing that clawed its way through him in the dark.
His breathing was ragged. Shallow. His throat burned, raw and constricted like it had been held shut from the inside.
He moved slowly, as if his body no longer trusted itself. A tremor lingered in his hands. He wiped his face and stared at the sweat on his palms like it was blood.
Something was still wrong. Something unreal, but heavy, as if whatever had followed him in the dream hadn't left.
The clock blinked: 3:02 AM.
Too early. Too late. Too everything.
He stood up and stumbled slightly, legs stiff, knees aching like they remembered being kicked. His shoulders flinched when the floor creaked. As if something might answer back.
He walked toward the window without really knowing why.
The blinds were half-shut. Moonlight bled through the gaps like a memory trying to re-enter the world.
The sky was indifferent—calm, vast, silent. The kind of silence that let you know you were truly alone.
He sat on the edge of the windowsill, elbows on his knees, the room behind him receding like it didn't want to be seen. Outside, the moon hung like an eye. Watching. Not judging—just watching.
He looked down at his phone again.
The text still sat there, untouched. Characters mid-sentence. A protagonist about to awaken some world-breaking power. A clash. A destiny.
And yet here he was. Breathless from nothing. From something.
His lips moved, but he didn't know what he was trying to say. Maybe he wasn't trying to say anything.
Just breathe.
The dog barked.
Far away. Just once.
A crack in the silence.
And then nothing again.
He leaned back, neck resting on the wall, and let his eyes wander across the ceiling. It didn't feel like he was fully back. Like the nightmare hadn't quite finished closing the door behind it.
He blinked.
The story on his screen was still there, unchanged.
But something in him wasn't.
As he sat by the window, knees drawn up beneath him, his forehead rested lightly against the glass. The cold touched his skin, but he didn't move.
Outside, the night breathed quietly, the moon pale and high, casting the world in silver outlines. But inside, something heavier stirred.
He didn't want to remember.
But memory doesn't ask permission.
The moment returned—uninvited, unwelcome. The tightness around his neck, his eyes blotched with the spreading bloom of burst vessels.
Breathing had become impossible. He had thought, in those final seconds, that he was dying. And perhaps, in a way, he had been.
It had stopped as suddenly as it began.
He remembered lying there, vision spotty and head light, struggling to make sense of the silence.
He hadn't noticed it immediately. But when his senses returned, the first thing he saw was the man who had been choking him—now slumped, blood trailing down his face from a cut on his head.
One hand clutched the wound, the other planted on the ground for support. Beside him, a woman knelt, helping to hold him upright.
But what struck him wasn't their condition.
It was their faces.
They looked at him as if he weren't human.
As if they had seen something that should not exist.
The anger was gone. Replaced by a quiet kind of horror. Fear. Disbelief. A soul-deep unease, like they couldn't comprehend what had just happened.
Above them, the ceiling lamp lay shattered on the floor. Its fall, likely the cause of the bleeding. But it was only a detail—background noise to the shift that had occurred.
He hadn't understood it then. He only knew that something fundamental had changed.
And that change didn't wait long to show itself.
In the days that followed, silence replaced conversation. Distance grew. They brought meals to his room. They didn't speak to him unless absolutely necessary. When they did, it was short, clipped. Like he might break something. Or they might.
It didn't take long before he was taken away.
The day itself was quiet. The way grief can be. A ride had been offered—one he hadn't expected. The man's bandages were still fresh, wrapping around his head.
As for him—his neck was wrapped in bandages, perhaps to hide the mark. The blood vessels in his eyes had ruptured, painting the whites with blotches of black and red. Paired with his naturally dark irises, his gaze looked inhuman—like something possessed, a demon torn straight from a horror film.
They gave him a sunglasse. He wore it without question. He didn't want to ruin this moment, no this hope by questioning.
The woman didn't speak. Her hands trembled slightly in her lap. But when she saw his hesitation she grabbed his hand and reassured him that everything is fine, with a trembling hand which clearly didn't like the idea of holding his hand. And a smile put on with great difficulty. He had been too afraid to say anything. Too hopeful.
For a brief moment, he'd thought—maybe—they were sorry.
They'd driven for hours. Through cities and then past them. Fields blurred by. Morning light touched the sky by the time they arrived.
And in that unfamiliar place, there stood a man. Kind-eyed. Waiting.
He couldn't remember what they talked about. Only the expressions.
The relief on their faces when they finally stepped away from him. The smiles—not warm, but unburdened. And the way they turned.
They didn't look back.
Didn't say goodbye.
They walked—almost ran—toward the car.
And then they were gone.
He watched the vehicle disappear into the distance, swallowed by the road.
He didn't cry. He didn't scream.
He had known it was coming. But he hadn't known it would come like this.
The man beside him said nothing. Only offered his hand.
He took it.
And just like that, a new chapter began.
Abandonment leaves marks that words struggle to explain. The kind that doesn't scream—it lingers. Quietly.
Invisibly. A crack in the foundation. Not wide enough to collapse you, but deep enough that you always feel it beneath your feet.
And what does it do to those who leave?
The ones who see their own child as a curse? A wound that won't close?
Guilt is complicated. It doesn't always show itself as tears. Sometimes it shows in the way someone never looks back.
The way they smile—not because they're happy, but because they're finally escaping the shadow of something they fear.
But the weight of such an act…
That weight never truly leaves.
*****
✢═─༻༺═✢═─༻༺═✢
✶ Dimension Walker ✶
✧ The Veiled Paragon ✧
⊱ Eternal_Void_ ⊰
✢═─༻༺═✢═─༻༺═✢
*****
The silence outside his window pulled him back, as if someone had gently closed the lid of a box filled with thorns. The memory faded—not disappeared, but tucked into the chest of things he never wanted to remember.
His gaze softened, the ache in his chest slowly losing its grip. He let out a quiet breath, as if exhaling the past could loosen its hold on the present.
Sleep began to tug at the edges of his awareness again. It was already 3:40. The clock glared at him from the nightstand, unmoving in its judgment. The room felt still, almost sterile, but peaceful in that strange, empty way that often follows pain.
He returned to his bed, pulled the blanket over himself. No dogs barking this time. No shadows shifting at the edge of his vision. Just warmth. Quiet warmth.
And the slight hum of the still-glowing phone beside him — the same novel app still open, the page barely flipped. It hadn't even been that long.
This time, he slipped into sleep without resistance.
***
He woke at 11:03. The sun was filtered through his curtains in a lazy spill across the floor. His body felt sluggish, but not heavy. Sunday.
He liked Sundays.
Holidays had a quiet charm. They carried no weight. No alarms. No teachers. No eyes.
He rolled out of bed with the clumsy grace of someone who didn't feel like being awake just yet.
The bathroom light flickered when he turned it on, and the cold splash of water against his face felt gentler than usual. Maybe the dreams had exhausted everything sharp inside him.
He cooked. Nothing special—eggs, rice, miso, a bit of spice. A familiar routine. Something about the ritual of it grounded him. And then, like most
Sundays, he vanished into the world behind his phone screen. Scrolling. Reading. Pausing to smile at something funny, forgetting what it was five minutes later. Hours passed this way.
By evening, he was out—wandering through the slow pulse of the city. His footsteps quiet against cracked sidewalks, his breath a whisper in the cooling air.
The streets weren't crowded. Just a few people here and there, some vendors closing shop, a dog chasing its tail near a lamppost. He walked without a destination, but somehow always ended up at the same grocery store near his apartment.
He came home with two bags in one hand and thoughts swirling in the other.
He cooked again. Ate slowly. Watched an episode of an anime he barely followed anymore. The characters talked too fast. He didn't mind. It filled the silence. Then a novel. Just one more chapter, he told himself. Just one more.
But sleep found him before the chapter ended.
And that was how his Sunday ended. Softly. Quietly.
Just the way he liked it.
-To Be Continued