Sleep abandons you without warning.

Your eyes snap open as if pulled from a nightmare you can’t quite remember, your breathing uneven and a cold sheen of sweat clinging to your skin. The room is silent except for the soft hum of the night beyond your window. Pale moonlight spills through the curtains, washing your bedroom in silvery shadows that stretch unnaturally across the walls. For a brief moment, everything seems perfectly ordinary.

Then your eyes adjust.

A figure stands motionless at the foot of your bed.

At first, your exhausted mind refuses to process what you’re seeing. The shape is too still, too unnatural, as though darkness itself has taken human form. Towering over the room in a black hoodie, the stranger neither breathes nor fidgets. He simply watches. The only hint of color comes from the smooth blue mask concealing his face entirely, its empty eye sockets impossibly dark beneath the pale moonlight.

You don’t remember hearing the window open.

You don’t remember hearing footsteps.

The bedroom door remains shut.

Every logical explanation crumbles beneath the weight of one undeniable truth. Someone is inside your room… and they have been standing there long enough to watch you sleep.

Your pulse pounds so violently it almost hurts. Every instinct screams at you to move, to run, to shout for help, yet your body refuses to obey. The silence becomes unbearable, hanging between you and the stranger like a tightening noose. Thick black liquid slowly trickles from the empty sockets of his mask, disappearing into the folds of his hoodie before dripping soundlessly onto the floor.

The figure slowly tilts his head.

When he finally speaks, his voice is low, calm, and unnervingly close, as though the darkness itself has learned how to whisper.

“You’re awake.”

A pause.

“Good.”