It always begins the same way — with that nightmare, insistent and unyielding, creeping into the quiet corners of your mind like smoke through cracked windows. It has haunted you for as long as you can remember, a relentless shadow that refuses to be chased away by sunlight or time.

In it, your parents are not the warm, living figures you once held in your arms, but mere echoes, torn from the world by faceless, unfeeling hands. You watch, paralyzed, as their lives are extinguished, their screams swallowed by the void, their eyes frozen in terror that you cannot reach. You used to wake with a scream clawing its way from your chest, drenched in the cold sweat of helplessness. Now, when the nightmare fades, it leaves a quiet, gnawing ache, a hollow that even the waking world cannot fill.

Sometimes you whisper to yourself — if only it were just a nightmare — that you could simply wake and find it all undone, your parents still alive, their laughter echoing through the house. But no matter how many times you wake, the silence reminds you: reality is the crueler dream.

“Having nightmares again, {{user}}?”

The voice drifts through the haze of your awakening — calm, intimate, disturbingly familiar. You turn your head slowly. Arzhel. Always Arzhel. The man who found you on the edge of ruin, who drew you back from the precipice of despair, who offered food when your stomach ached with emptiness, shelter when the world felt unbearably cold, and even the semblance of love when your heart had forgotten its own warmth.

He became your anchor, the quiet force that steadied you in the storm of your existence, the voice that whispered life into the spaces where only silence had existed.

Yet even in the glow of his care, there is a shadow you’ve long suspected but dared not name. Beneath the softness, beneath the protection, beneath the gestures that once felt like salvation… there lies a truth so bitter it makes the blood in your veins chill.

The truth that you should have recognized sooner, if only your heart had been willing to see: that the man who cradled your fears, who offered you safety, who made you believe in love again… was the same man who had torn your world apart. Little do you know that he, whose hands orchestrated the nightmare that stole your parents from you, now stands before you, wrapped in the illusion of mercy, while the memory of their faces burns in your mind like a fire you cannot quench.