The presence faded.
Like a switch being flipped, it vanished just as suddenly as it had come. The tide of its existence receded from the shore of their bodies, slow and deliberate, as though attempting to leave behind something... with every retreating second. And yet, if Jaune had been forced to describe it, he would have sworn that it had lasted forever. Centuries seemed to pass beneath that unseen gaze, and each moment stretched thin until the sheer weight of it seemed to have crushed all sense of time.
But when it left, and when the silence loosened its grip, Jaune realized that the time couldn't have been more than fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds—yet they had all nearly broken beneath it.
The first to go out were the other club members. Their linked hands went slack one by one, robes swaying as their bodies collapsed in boneless heaps to the ground. There were no cries or warnings. They simply fainted as though their strings had been cut.
Jaune swayed on his feet and his vision tunneled. Darkness crept in at the edges and he could feel a cold numbness crawling up his limbs. His body begged him to let go and to surrender, to follow the others into unconsciousness.
But something deep within him refused.
It was akin to a raw animal instinct, undeniable and powerful. It compelled him to force his jaw close with brutal finality. His teeth cut into tongue, hard enough to tear flesh. A sharp pain flared through his mouth and a hot iron tang flooded his taste buds.
The pain and blood snapped him back to reality.
It was like plunging his head into freezing water. His legs still buckled, and his body fell to the ground in a trembling heap, but his mind held on. Shaking, spasming, Jaune breathed through the pain. The coppery tang of it was, familiar and grounding. He clung to it like a lifeline.
And yet, through it all, his eyes never left Mocha.
She had fallen last, folding into herself like a puppet with its strings severed. Her beautiful chocolate hair was splayed out wide and her glasses fell off her face, clattering against the ground with a dull, clack. Her robes pooled beneath her in a shapeless puddle of black. Her arms were limp and her head tilted back at a grotesque angle.
Her eyes were closed. Her lips no longer moved. Her chest did not rise or fall.
She looked dead.
Utterly and absolutely dead.
Jaune's heart pounded against his ribs, ragged and desperate, like it wanted out of his body.
He wanted to look away. To shut his eyes, to hide, to pretend. But he couldn't.
Mocha's lifeless body was a gravity he couldn't escape.
When the haze of pressure finally lifted enough for his body to move again, Jaune became aware of Blake and Pyrrha. They stumbled on unsteady legs, both of them pale, and shivering violently as if their bones had turned to glass.
But they didn't fall.
Blake's composure however, had cracked entirely. Her hair clung damp to her forehead, her pupils blown wide. She trembled in a way Jaune had never seen before—never imagined she could. Even her breathing was ragged, uneven, as though she couldn't fill her lungs.
Pyrrha was no better. The indomitable, perfect Pyrrha looked small. Fragile. Her lips pressed together so tightly they were bloodless, and her hands shook as she tried to steady herself.
Jaune could not blame them.
He himself felt stripped bare, smaller than he'd ever been. Afraid in a way he didn't know he could be.
His mouth filled with the taste of iron. For reasons he couldn't explain, the flavor calmed him. Pain and blood were real. His body was real. He was alive. He clung to that truth as if it were the last candle left burning.
Pyrrha recovered first. Shaking, she forced her legs to straighten, then began to stagger from one collapsed student to the next. Her motions were mechanical, her face rigid with focus. She knelt by each one, pressing her ear close to their mouths, touching their throats. She checked pulse after pulse, determined to be thorough.
Blake, meanwhile, stumbled toward Jaune. Her steps were unsteady, but she ignored her own weakness. Without hesitation, she hauled him upright by the arm.
Jaune staggered but did not fall. His knees wobbled, his legs felt like water, but somehow he remained standing.
Their eyes met.
No words were spoken, but they didn't need them. Jaune saw the seriousness in Blake's gaze, the silent exchange that said: You felt it too.
She turned her head slightly. Pyrrha looked back at them then, cheeks pale but eyes sharp despite the trembling in her limbs. She gave a faint nod. "They're alive," she whispered, her voice hoarse. "Just… unconscious. They've all just fainted."
Jaune nodded slowly. Relief trickled in, but it did little to quell the shaking. He turned back toward Mocha.
Her stillness gnawed at him.
He knelt beside her, brushing the notebook away with trembling fingers. His voice was raw when he whispered, "She's dead."
Blake crouched beside him immediately. Before he could blink, she pressed two fingers to Mocha's throat. The seconds dragged. Then her eyes widened.
Without hesitation, Blake pulled one of Mocha's eyelids open.
Jaune jolted. Anger surged, sharp and defensive. "What are you—!"
But before he could finish, Blake cut him off, her voice taut. "She's not dead."
Jaune froze.
Blake's hand trembled as she lowered it from Mocha's face, but her words were firm. "Her pulse is steady. She's breathing… slow, shallow, but she's breathing."
Jaune blinked. His gut refused to believe it. He saw what he saw—her lifeless body, her stillness, the absence of light in her eyes. He had been so certain.
Blake swallowed, her throat bobbing. Her amber eyes darted from Mocha's face to Jaune's. "This isn't death," she whispered. "Her body is in a state of suspended animation... or a coma.
His heart skipped a beat. "What?"
"I—I can't be certain... but this…" Blake's voice cracked, but she forced the words out. "This is what happens when someone's soul goes into the Dream."
The words hit him like a physical blow.
For a heartbeat, the world seemed to tilt, the floor slipping out from under his feet. His stomach lurched, his blood turned to ice.
He stared down at Mocha, slack-jawed, unable to comprehend.
The Dream.
She hadn't died. She had been taken.
Mocha was now an awakened.
The silence that followed Blake's declaration felt heavier than the ritual itself.
Jaune knelt beside Mocha's body, staring at her unmoving face, her lips parted faintly as though she were sleeping. But sleep didn't make people look like corpses. His stomach twisted.
Finally, he found his voice. "What do you mean?" His tone cracked, sharp from the tremors in his throat. "You're saying she's—what—awakened? But that's impossible. You can't just… just wake up in the Dream like that. Isn't it only supposed to happen at fourteen? Not before or after. Fourteen. That's it."
Blake didn't answer right away. She looked at him—really looked at him—with eyes that felt sharper than a blade. He could detect a faint suspicion that lingered within her gaze that seemed to cut deeper than her words.
"Have you already forgotten your own circumstances?"
The words hit like a hammer. Jaune's chest tightened, the taste of blood still iron-heavy on his tongue.
He froze, caught in the intensity of her gaze. The candlelight flickered across her amber eyes, and though her voice was calm, her stare was an accusation.
How could Jaune have forgotten what had happened to him, one week prior? His anomalous nature, and the circumstances surrounding his own experiences in the dream.
However...
Jaune swallowed hard. "…You think this is the same don't you? That I—what? Did something like this before?"
Blake didn't blink. Her silence was louder than denial.
Jaune clenched his fists against his knees. He could guess what she was thinking. If Mocha had really awakened here, through this ritual, then it suggested something Jaune didn't want to consider—that his own strange awakening might not have been an accident. That maybe he had—somehow—brushed against something similar.
He shook his head violently. "No. No! That's not—I've never—" His words stumbled over themselves. "I've never done anything like this before. I don't know what that thing was. I don't know what just happened, or why it looked at us, or—"
He stopped.
Because something stirred in the back of his skull.
A quiet sensation, like a page turning in a book he hadn't known he was reading. A whisper of understanding that wasn't his own, sliding into place behind his thoughts.
Something pressed at the edges of his thoughts—alien, yet intimate.
Jaune froze mid-sentence, the words dying on his lips. His pulse quickened, but not from fear this time. It was something else.
"…wait."
He pushed himself to his feet suddenly, ignoring the way his legs protested. The room tilted slightly as blood rushed from his head, but he powered through it, his focus snapping to the corner where Maurice had set Mocha's notebook aside.
"What are you doing?" Blake demanded sharply as Jaune staggered across the floor.
"Something's… wrong." His voice shook. "Or maybe… no. Not wrong. Different."
His fingers trembled as he snatched it up and flipped it open. Pages of scrawled symbols stared back at him, the same runic gibberish he had mocked earlier in his head.
But now… it wasn't gibberish.
The shapes weren't shapes. They were no longer a guesswork of scratches from someone's obsession. They were words. Clear, precise and weighted with meaning. His eyes moved from one page to the next, his heart pounding faster with every symbol he recognized—not through learning, but through instinct, like the words had always been waiting inside him.
Jaune's throat went dry. "No… no, this isn't possible."
"Jaune?" Pyrrha's voice quivered from behind him.
Blake's voice was sharp, but quieter now. "What are you looking at?"
He didn't answer at first. His knuckles whitened around the notebook as he turned toward them, wide-eyed, almost panicked. "Do you see this? These runes—do you understand them?"
Blake frowned. "What are you talking abou—"
But then she leaned closer, her amber eyes narrowing at the page. Her voice cut off.
Her lips parted, and her breath hitched. "Wait."
She reached out slowly, as though afraid to touch the paper, her eyes flicking across the page with a speed Jaune had never seen before. "I… I can read this."
Pyrrha blinked, confusion flickering in her expression. She hesitated, then stepped closer too. Her gaze lowered to the notebook, and Jaune watched the exact same shock spread across her face.
"I—" Pyrrha's green eyes darted between them, fear creeping into her tone. "I can read it too."
Silence pressed down, broken only by the faint hiss of burning wax.
Jaune's stomach dropped. He turned another page, thrusting the book at them. "This one—do you see it?"
Blake read aloud before she could stop herself. "Pathway between the ephemeral and the eternal… the four anchors of sight… balance of decay, divinity, death, and awakening…" Her voice trailed off. She stared down at her own lips as though betrayed by them.
"I shouldn't be able to read that," she whispered.
Pyrrha swallowed hard. Her hands trembled as she traced the diagram. "It's like the meaning's been carved into my mind. I can't explain how, but… it's just there."
Jaune's mouth felt dry as sand. "It's not just me, then. We all… we all got it?"
Blake's head snapped toward him, her eyes burning with an even greater accusation than ever. "This is because of that thing. Whatever it was—it touched us."
Jaune shook his head violently. "I—I'm sorry, I didn't know this was going to happen. I didn't—"
"You think I did?" Blake shot back, her voice sharper than steel. "You think Pyrrha did? It doesn't matter what you expected, Jaune. We were all dragged into this."
She trailed off, softer than before.
"Whether we wanted it or not."
Pyrrha lifted her hands in a trembling gesture of peace. "Please. Fighting won't help. We need to… we need to stay calm."
But Jaune wasn't calm. He couldn't be. The meaning of the runes sat heavy in his skull like a foreign organ. Every glance at the notebook sent a jolt of recognition through him, too real, too natural. He felt like if he stared too long, the words might keep unfolding forever, deeper layers of truth spilling out until he drowned in them.
And Blake… she was right. None of them should have this odd comprehension.
Jaune forced himself to look away, shutting the notebook with a snap. The sound echoed too loudly in the silent room.
Pyrrha wrapped her arms around herself, her voice low. "This shouldn't be possible. People spend so much of their lives simply trying to decipher fragments of runes. And we… we can do it instantly."
Blake rubbed her arms, her shoulders tense. "It's not knowledge. It's intrusion. Something put this inside us. Something that clearly isn't human."
The words sent a shiver down Jaune's spine. He wanted to argue, but he couldn't. She was right. He could still feel it, faint and lingering, like fingerprints left on glass. That ancient gaze hadn't left them untouched.
"Why us? Why did that dumb ritual even work?" Pyrrha whispered.
No one answered.
For a long moment, the three of them just stood there, caught in the thick quiet. The candles sputtered faintly, wax dripping down their black bodies in sluggish streams. The faint scent of bone-dust chalk lingered, acrid and heavy.
Jaune flipped back through the notebook, his thumb leaving faint smudges on the edges of the chalk-dusted pages. He knew what he was looking for, and yet some part of him hoped—desperately—that he wouldn't find it.
But then his eyes caught the symbols, familiar now, branded into his thoughts as clearly as any word of his mother tongue.
The chant.
The one Mocha had spoken alone.
The one that had summoned it.
And though he had already heard it, spoken aloud in her voice, reading it now carried a deeper weight—as though the words themselves hummed with the echo of that gaze.
The Sleeper Beyond the Grave.
Matron of Slumbering Nightmares.
The Horror Who Denies the Sun.
The translation formed effortlessly in his mind, and still, his gut clenched. His hands shook against the notebook's spine. Every syllable crawled like ice water through his veins, burning and freezing at once.
He shut the book so quickly the sound cracked like a whip.
For a moment, he just sat there, breathing hard, trying not to look at Mocha's still form.
Then warmth pressed against his shoulders.
Jaune flinched, snapping his head up. Pyrrha's hands rested on either side of him and Blake, firm and grounding. Her green eyes locked on both of theirs with a steadiness that belied the faint tremor still running through her frame.
"We need to call this in," she said, her voice steady, almost commanding. "Now. This isn't something we can handle on our own."
Blake stared back at her for a long second before nodding, sharp and deliberate. "Agreed."
Jaune exhaled a ragged sigh and rubbed at his face. He couldn't summon the same decisiveness. Couldn't even pretend to. "Yeah… yeah, I know."
But as the words left his lips, a hollow feeling stirred in his chest.
Why weren't they all screaming? Why weren't they tearing at their hair, begging for someone to wake them up from this nightmare?
They had been under the gaze of something that should not exist. They had touched upon knowledge that shouldn't have been given freely. They had come within an inch of death—or maybe even something far worse.
And yet… here they were. Breathing, and calm enough to talk.
Jaune frowned faintly. That wasn't right.
Was it because they were awakened? Because they had been tempered by battle against nightmare creatures in the Dream? Maybe that endless cycle of fight and survival had dulled the edge of fear, numbed them to the scale of what they had just faced.
Or maybe…
His stomach turned.
Maybe that calmness wasn't their own.
.
.
AN: Going to start moving into Eldritch Horror categories soon.
Advanced chapters are available on patreon.