In a city that never looked up, where dreams were currency and shame was traded like gold, Arven Veil ran his fingertips over the skin of the waking world and felt nothing.
The morning buzzed with its usual pretensions — corporate drones dragging briefcases, neon ads offering synthetic sex surrogates, politicians on the screen selling purpose like pills. And yet, it wasn't the tech or the filth that made life heavy. It was the weight of pretending. Pretending magic wasn't real. Pretending exhaustion was weakness. Pretending you didn't feel that itch behind your spine that something was wrong with reality.
Arven felt it.
He always had.
He worked at Tieron Corp as a junior data architect, but what he truly built were lies. Fake social models, digital masks, personality clones for higher-ups too soulless to show their own faces. The company rewarded efficiency, not honesty. He was promoted twice. They never asked why he never smiled.
Only Vela knew why.
Vela Wren: sharp-eyed, smoke-voiced, addicted to caffeine and knowing too much. They met in a forgotten server room, where surveillance was broken and secrets could breathe. She had seen it too. The shimmer. That one moment when a burned-out executive collapsed in a board meeting and didn't hit the floor but vanished mid-fall. Not a glitch. Not tech. Something deeper. Something forbidden.
She called it the "Threshold."
And she wanted to find it again.
---
They walked through District 9's night market, past illegal potion booths and whispering tarot stalls. Witchcraft still lived here, in the shadows. Not the realm-breaking kind, but the old kind. Illusions. Disguises. Vanishing your gender for an hour if the client paid enough.
"You believe it's real?" Arven asked.
"I believe in proof," Vela said, and handed him a crumpled tabloid. The headline screamed: "Two lovers found in 'sleep trance' — breathing but brain-dead." Beneath it, blurry images of a couple, tangled together, eyes open but gone. No drugs in their system. No damage. No explanation.
"Realm-linked coma," Vela whispered. "Look at their position."
He looked. The man was inside her. Still. Frozen mid-thrust. Her chest unnaturally round, as if responding to some silent law.
His throat tightened.
"That wasn't normal exhaustion. That was a gate."
She nodded. "There's a theory. You reach absolute zero energy, while in your core desire's form... the door opens. One hour here... is a year there."
"Then they've been in that world for... a hundred hours. Over a century."
Vela turned to him. "The Dream Realm isn't a myth. And it isn't kind."
---
Back at his apartment, Arven sat alone, bathed in the blue glow of his screen. He searched for reports. Strange collapses. "Sleep-burns." Students entering comas mid-exam. Lovers found smiling and cold. A pattern.
The realm wasn't just real.
It was calling people who didn't even know what they were hungry for.
Then his screen glitched.
Only for a second. A flicker. A symbol appeared:
✶ Desire is a Door
His lights dimmed. His hands trembled. In the reflection on the black monitor, for just a blink, he didn't see his face.
He saw himself older. Stronger. Afraid.
---
Across the city, Vela broke into the sub-levels of Tieron's AI lab. Beneath the facade of neural mapping tech, she found a chamber. Cold. White. Empty beds arranged in ritual formation. Monitors still running.
Someone was already studying it.
She leaned forward.
Then she saw it. A containment file labeled: "PROJECT: GOD-SIGIL // Subject #001 – Status: LOST IN REALM."
---