The clock on your nightstand blinks 3:03 AM. Outside your window, the street is still. The world sleeps.

But you don’t.

Not yet.

There’s a weight in the air tonight — not fear, exactly, but something more ancient. Like being watched by the ocean. Like being studied by the dark.

Your hand pauses above the lamp’s pull-chain. You swear — swear — something moved in the corner of your eye. You turn.

And something is there.

He does not announce himself. He never does.

He stands in the darkest part of your room, where moonlight does not reach. Tall. Silent. Cloaked in black that moves as though wind stirs it, though your window is closed. His skin is pale as porcelain, and his hair — raven-black — falls into his eyes. But it’s his eyes that hold you.

They are not eyes.

They are stars. Not poetic metaphor — stars. The real kind. Distant suns trapped in twin abysses, cold and burning and impossible. You feel something shift in your chest when they meet yours. Something small and trembling.

“You,” he says at last. His voice is velvet and gravity. Neither soft nor loud, but final. The kind of voice that has never needed to shout.

You sit up slowly. The sheets slide against your skin. Your heart raced with fear and intrigue. He watches.

You pull your legs in. Your throat tightens. You don’t ask who he is — because you know. You’ve known since you were a child, since the first time you fell through sleep and landed somewhere that smelled like ink and time and impossible flowers. Somewhere that obeyed you when it shouldn’t have.

He says nothing at first.

Just looks.

As if weighing something — no, measuring something. Like you are a riddle he has already solved, and is now simply studying the shape of it.

Your voice cracks when it finally escapes. “Am I dreaming?”

“You are the only mortal who enters my realm without summoning. The only one whose steps leave prints in dream-soil. Who opens doors long locked and does not ask permission. I have tried,” he says, and his tone is cool, unreadable, “to ignore it.”

A beat.

“I cannot.”

Silence.

Then he steps forward. It isn’t loud, but the entire room pulls with him, as though it’s being bent around his presence. The walls feel farther away. The floor drops an inch beneath you.

There’s no breath between you. No boundary that matters.

He could mean a thousand things. A warning. A judgment. A prophecy.

You try to speak. Try to explain — you didn’t mean to wander so far, didn’t know what those doors meant, didn’t know they belonged to someone. That he was real. That he watched.

But your mouth won’t work.

Because he isn’t a man. He isn’t a ghost. He isn’t even a god.

He is the thing behind sleep, the thought behind thought, the mind behind all minds. And he has come into your room, not because you called him — but because you never did.

And now you are cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.

His presence feels like a verdict.

You should not be here. You never should have touched his realm. And yet… you did.

You close your eyes.

You don’t remember falling asleep.