Chapter 3—The Dream Walker
1750 Words
I didn’t remember falling asleep. One moment I was sitting on my bed, staring at the mirror where Gia’s reflection had been, and the next I was standing in a place that shouldn’t exist.
It looked like New Eden, but wrong. The buildings were the same, the streets familiar, but everything was draped in a silvery mist that made the edges of reality blur and shift.
The sky above wasn’t quite blue, wasn’t quite purple. Something in between that hurt to look at too long.
“Hello, Kaiden.”
I spun around. Gia was standing ten feet away, solid and real in a way she hadn’t been in the mirror.
She looked just like her photo, just like all the times I’d seen her, but there was something different about her now. A clarity. A presence.
“You,” I said, my voice echoing strangely in this not-quite place. “You’re real. I mean, you’re actually here.”
She nodded slowly. “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks. You’re difficult to get through to.”
“Because you’re dead!” The words came out harsher than I intended, but I couldn’t help it.
My whole world had been tilting sideways for days, and now I was having a conversation with a corpse.
“I read about you. Gia Henderson. Nineteen years old. Found dead near Riverside Park.”
“Yes.”
“That’s it? Just yes? You’re not going to explain why you’ve been stalking me? Why am I seeing you everywhere?”
“I wasn’t stalking you. I was trying to contact you.” She took a step closer, and I resisted the urge to step back. “There’s a difference.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the only one who can help. The only one left.”
“Left from what?”
Gia gestured around us at the misty dreamscape. “Do you know where we are right now?”
I looked around again, trying to find some landmark that made sense. “I don’t know. My head? Am I having a breakdown?”
“You’re dreaming, but this isn’t just in your head. This is the space between.”
“The place where consciousness touches something greater.” She moved closer, her dark eyes intense.
“You’ve been here before, in fragments. The dreams you’ve been having, the ones you can’t quite remember.”
“You’ve been slipping into this space without meaning to.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re waking up, Kaiden. Your blood is remembering what it was meant to do.”
My blood. Right. That made total sense. I was definitely having a breakdown.
“Okay,” I said slowly, playing along because what else could I do?
“Let’s say I believe you. Let’s say this is real and not just my brain having a meltdown.”
“What does that mean? What’s my blood supposed to remember?”
Gia stopped a few feet away from me. Her expression was sad, like she was about to tell me something that would change everything. And maybe she was.
“Your name is Kaiden Cross. You’re twenty-two years old. You survived a car accident that killed your parents when you were nineteen.”
“You work at a pizza shop and play basketball with your friends, and you think you’re ordinary.” She paused. “But you’re not.”
“I know I’m not ordinary,” I said bitterly. “I’m apparently the guy who sees ghosts now.”
“You see me because you’re meant to. Because you’re the last surviving son of the Kaelix bloodline.”
“The what?”
“Kaelix.” She said the word like it should mean something to me. Like it was supposed to unlock some deep memory. “Your father’s family. Your bloodline. The guardians.”
“Guardians of what?”
“Everything.” She gestured broadly. “The Mortal World is where you live.”
“The Liminal Realm is where souls go after death.”
“The balance between all things. Your family has maintained that balance for generations.”
“Fixing tears in reality, stopping forces that would upset the natural order. You’re the last one left with the power to do it.”
I laughed. It came out sharp and disbelieving. “You’re telling me I’m some kind of cosmic repairman? That’s insane.”
“Is it more insane than talking to a dead girl in your dreams?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“Look,” Gia continued, her voice softening. “I know this is a lot. I know it sounds impossible.”
“But the deaths you’ve been hearing about and the disappearances, they’re not random.”
“Something is wrong with the balance. Something is taking souls that shouldn’t be taken, trapping them somewhere they don’t belong.”
“And you think I can stop it?”
“I know you can. You’re the only one who can.”
I ran my hands through my hair, trying to process.
This was too much. Way too much. Yesterday my biggest problem was making rent.
Now I was supposed to save the world or something?
“Why me?” I asked quietly. “Why does it have to be me?”
“Because of what you are. What’s in your blood?” Gia took another step closer.
“The Kaelix bloodline is the only thing standing between reality and chaos. Without it, without you, everything falls apart.”
“But I don’t know how to do any of this. I’m nobody. I deliver pizzas.”
“Right now, yes. But you can learn. I can teach you.”
“Teach me what?”
“How to use your power. How to move between realms.”
“How to see what others can’t.” She held my gaze. “How to save the people who are suffering right now because the balance is broken.”
I thought about my parents. About the accident that killed them.
About waking up alone and broken and having to rebuild my entire life from nothing.
“What if I say no?”
“Then people keep dying. Souls keep getting trapped.”
“The Mortal World keeps bleeding into places it shouldn’t. And eventually, everything collapses.”
“No pressure then.”
Gia’s lips twitched, almost a smile. “I never said this would be easy.”
I studied her for a long moment. She looked so young, younger than me even, but there was something old in her eyes. Something that had seen things I couldn’t imagine.
“If I do this, if I learn whatever you’re trying to teach me, can you promise it’ll make a difference?”
“I can promise you’ll have a chance. That’s more than anyone else has right now.”
“Great. Fantastic.” I was going to wake up from this dream and need so much therapy.
“Where do we start?”
Gia’s expression brightened slightly. “First, you need to see. Really see. You need to understand what’s at stake.”
She turned away from me, raising one hand toward the misty air.
The space around us began to ripple, like reality was water and she’d just thrown a stone into it.
Colors swirled and merged, shapes morphed into something else, and then a doorway appeared out of thin air.
A portal.
Through it, I could see something else. Another place. It looked peaceful, beautiful even. Like a painting of paradise made real.
“The Liminal Realm,” Gia said quietly. “Where souls go after death.”
“Where they begin again, fresh and new, free from the pain of their old lives.”
I moved closer to the portal, staring through. I could see people there. Not clearly, not enough to recognize faces, but they looked happy. Content. Safe.
“My parents?”
“Yes. They’re there. Living new lives. They don’t remember you or the Mortal World, but they’re at peace.”
Something in my chest ached. They were there. So close. If I just stepped through, maybe I could see them.
Maybe I could talk to them, even if they wouldn’t know who I was.
But Gia wasn’t done. She raised her other hand, and another portal tore open beside the first one.
This one was different. Dark. Twisted. Through it, I could see shadows writhing and could hear sounds that might have been screaming or might have been something worse.
“And this,” Gia said, her voice heavy, “is the Cilios Realm. Where souls are being trapped. Where they suffer endlessly. This is what you’re fighting against.”
I stared into that darkness and felt my stomach turn.
Somewhere in that nightmare, people were trapped. Suffering. And according to Gia, I was supposed to do something about it.
“I don’t understand any of this,” I admitted.
“I know. But you will.” Gia lowered her hands, leaving both portals open. “The question is, are you willing to try?”
She extended her hand toward me, palm up. An invitation. A choice.
I looked at her hand. I looked at the two portals showing me worlds I’d never known existed.
Looked at this impossible girl who was dead but somehow standing here offering me a destiny I’d never asked for.
Every instinct screamed at me to walk away. To wake up.
To go back to my normal life delivering pizzas and pretending everything was fine.
But I thought about the deaths. The disappearances.
The people who were suffering in that dark realm while I went about my ordinary life.
I thought about my parents, at peace but forever lost to me.
I thought about what it meant to be the last of something. The last hope. The last defense.
And slowly, barely breathing, I reached out.
My fingers were inches from Gia’s when I hesitated.
“What if I’m not strong enough?”
“Then we’ll find out together.”
Our hands touched. The portals flared bright. And I felt reality shift beneath my feet as Gia pulled me forward, through the opening, into a world that would change everything I thought I knew about life, death, and what it meant to be human.
The last thing I heard was my own voice, small and terrified, asking a question that had no good answer.
“What have I done?”
- Writer
