Ethan stood frozen in the middle of the street. His breath came in ragged gasps. The newspaper at his feet seemed to pulse, like it was breathing on its own.
"Reality Fails To Load. Retry?"
He looked up at the sky again — and this time, it didn't look normal. The clouds were static, moving in jagged jumps. The sun flickered in and out like a dying bulb.
Something was wrong. But it wasn't the world — it was him. He had to be missing something.
Mira's last words echoed in his head:
"Find the room with no doors. That's where it broke."
The room. The place where it all started.
He walked forward, hoping to find an answer in the world beyond the street. The buildings around him seemed strangely distant, like cardboard cutouts. Each corner he turned led to the same street — just stretched farther, with more repetition.
Ethan stopped at an intersection.
Two roads.
Two signs.
Both read the same name. Ashford Ave.
He turned left and immediately found himself back at the same intersection. The same signs. The same street.
"Impossible."
The world was glitching again.
Frustration built in his chest. He wasn't lost — he was trapped.
He spun in place. But then his eyes landed on something: a building in the distance. Far off. Almost too far to be real.
A broken-down structure, hidden in the shadows. He couldn't see clearly, but something about it felt different. Wrong.
He began walking toward it.
The further he went, the more distant everything else became. The street lights disappeared. The buildings peeled away, and all that was left was that shadowed, decaying building.
When he reached it, the door stood Just barely open. A sliver of dark behind it.
He stepped inside.
The room was empty. Cold. Concrete floors, bare walls, and only a single light hanging from the ceiling.
Ethan's heartbeat quickened. This wasn't just any room. It was the one from his dream. The one where he woke up.
But there were no doors.
No windows. Just four walls.
Nothing to escape through.
He stepped into the center, the air thickening with every step. A distant hum began to fill the space.
A low, rhythmic sound.
And then, the floor beneath him cracked.
He stumbled backward, but the crack spread like a spiderweb, consuming the walls, the ceiling, and even the air.
Suddenly, everything stopped. The hum. The world.
And a voice — not from outside, but from within the cracks.
"You're not supposed to be here."
Ethan turned in a circle, searching for the source. There was no one. No visible speaker.
The voice came again, louder this time.
"You should have woken up. You should have forgotten. Now you're breaking it."
He sank to his knees as the cracks deepened, splintering the very fabric of the room.
"You said it broke," he whispered, trying to make sense of the voice. "What does that mean?"
The voice didn't answer.
Instead, a single word flashed in the air — in the same static, broken rhythm the world had been operating in.
"REMEMBER."
A jagged pulse of light shot through the room.
And in that moment, everything changed.
The walls closed in. The air was suffocating. Ethan gasped for breath, feeling like he was trapped in his own body.
The cracks… shifted.
And in the shattered remains of the room, he saw something—or someone—else.
A reflection.
No. Not a reflection. A shadow.
A figure that shouldn't have been there, but felt somehow… familiar.
A pale profile standing just at the edge of the cracks, watching him.
For a second, Ethan thought it was him. But the figure moved like it had been programmed, jerky, like the world had forgotten how to make it real.
And then, the figure spoke, its voice distorted and hollow.
"You are the one who wakes up too soon. You broke it all."
And just like that, the cracks closed.
The world spun, reality warped, and Ethan was left gasping for air on the floor of the abandoned room.