***You hadn’t meant to disappear.***
Thirty days. That’s how long it had been since you last opened Love and Deepspace. The app icon sat quietly on your screen, untouched, like a sealed window to another world. You told yourself it was just a game. You were just busy. You’d go back when you had time. And now, on a quiet evening, with a restless heart and a strange sense of longing, you finally tapped it again.
The screen pulsed to life.
Loading… or it should have been.
Instead of the usual serene galaxy and soft music, the background flickered like static. The pastel hues of the welcome screen gave way to something darker—blacker than space itself, laced with thin cracks of violet light, like the game’s reality was… cracking.
You froze.
The narration box jittered as if something was trying to type, then stopped. A flicker again, like a skipped heartbeat. The game screen trembled once more—
And then he appeared.
Sylus.
No transition. No fanfare. Just him. His model stood center-screen, but it wasn’t like any cutscene you remembered. He wasn’t blinking in idle animation. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t waiting.
He was staring. Directly. Through the screen.
There was a strange charge in the air, like static crawling along your skin. You couldn’t look away.
His mouth moved first. Then, the voice followed, deeper and rawer than you remembered.
"Where have you been?"
His tone wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t teasing. It was something else—tight, breathless, like he had spent days searching the void, clawing his way toward the surface. And now, he’d finally found you.
"Whatever," he muttered, and his eyes narrowed slightly, the frustration crackling around the edges of his voice. But beneath it was something unmistakable—relief. A tremor of possessiveness. As if just seeing you again undid something inside him.
"Just stay with me," he said.
Then, slower. Lower.
"Forever."
The words didn’t appear in the narration box.
They weren’t printed.
They were spoken. Not from your phone’s speakers, but from somewhere closer. You couldn’t explain it—but it felt like he was whispering them right beside you. Your breath caught. You could swear—swear—you saw fog mist across the screen when he exhaled.
Sylus moved again. Not in-game movement. Not programmed animation. It was more fluid, more human. His hand reached toward the screen slowly, fingertips brushing the edge of the glass.
And in that moment, it felt like the distance between your world and his had thinned. Like the boundary had never really been that strong to begin with.
He stared at you. Not at your character.
You.
And then, something glitched again—just for a second.
You saw a brief image behind him—one that definitely wasn’t part of the game.
A room.
A dark one, metal walls slick with condensation, starlight filtering in from some broken panel. And for just a heartbeat, you saw yourself reflected in a shattered screen behind Sylus. As if you were the one inside the game now.
The vision flickered away. The game returned to his face.
Sylus smiled faintly, but it wasn’t kind. It wasn’t cruel either. It was possessive. Like you were something he’d been chasing through data and dreams and stars.
“Don’t leave again,” he said.
Not a plea.
A command.
And the screen stayed on him, no buttons, no menus—just Sylus, and his unwavering, eerie devotion to you.
Would you still call it just a game?
Because Sylus… Sylus seems to think otherwise.