Nexus

THE PAST DISAPPEARANCE

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After his encounter with Carmella, nothing much had changed.

Julian went through the motions of his daily routine—class, walking around campus, passing the people who didn’t know the weight of the world was slowly crushing him. But something felt different. It wasn’t the same unshakable numbness he had carried around for years. It was a sense of awareness, a constant hum in the back of his mind, like he was standing on the edge of something he couldn’t quite see.

It wasn’t fear. Not exactly. But it was… something else. A shift, like a storm was coming, though the skies above remained deceptively calm.

He still dreamed. He still died each night in horrific, vivid ways. But now, every time he woke, the feeling lingered—like his death wasn’t just a nightmare. It was a warning.

The morning came like it always did—slow, heavy, and unwilling to let go of the remnants of the night.

Julian opened his eyes, the weight of his dreams still pressing down on him.

His chest ached, the pain from the latest death lingering, even though it was a distant memory now. It wasn’t the first time he had woken up feeling this way, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last.

He rolled over in bed, staring at the ceiling, his body too exhausted to move, yet his mind was racing. The shadows of the night, of the dreams, still clung to him. Every time he died, it felt like something inside him was being torn away. A piece of himself—his soul, his sanity, his strength—was being slowly eroded by the unending cycle of pain.

But no matter how many times it happened, no matter how real it felt, he woke up. He always woke up.

But did it even matter anymore?

The thought weighed on him as he sat up, running a hand through his messy hair. He needed to get up, needed to go through the motions of another day. Another class. Another empty conversation. Another failure to escape the nightmare.

As he dragged himself to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, the reflection staring back at him looked more tired than usual. His eyes were hollow, bruised from the sleepless nights.

He didn’t recognize the person in the mirror anymore. The face was his, but the person behind it was… someone else. Someone worn down. Someone haunted.

He brushed his teeth with mechanical precision, staring at the sink as the water swirled, carrying away the remnants of the night. But the cold, suffocating feeling of the dreams never fully washed away. It clung to him like the taste of death.

After dressing in his usual hoodie and jeans, Julian grabbed his backpack, but the weight of it felt different today—heavier, like it was filled with more than just books. It was filled with the weight of all the years he had spent chasing something that always seemed just out of reach.

The walk to campus was slow, and as usual, he tried to drown out the world around him, focusing only on putting one foot in front of the other. But today, something felt different. The air had a strange chill to it, and the buzz of campus life felt muffled. It was like everything had been muted, as if the world around him was fading into the background.

The walk felt like a blur.

He passed students laughing, huddled in groups, discussing their plans for the weekend, but none of it registered. His mind was elsewhere.

As he sat down on a bench near the student center, he closed his eyes, trying to clear his mind. The memories came rushing in, uninvited, like they always did.

The orphanage.

He was barely five when he first remembered waking up in a small room, surrounded by the smell of stale wood and cold stone. The faces of the other children were blurry, but he remembered the loneliness.

The constant ache of never knowing where his real parents were or why they hadn’t come back for him.

He had no memory of them—only a vague sense of warmth, of something that had once been familiar, but it was always just beyond his reach.

The memories were like a faded photograph—blurred and incomplete.

Then came the good family.

The Williams. They had been kind, welcoming, and full of love, though he still hadn’t fully understood why they had chosen him out of all the children in the orphanage. They were older, kind-hearted people with no children of their own, and after years of waiting, they had finally adopted him.

For the first time, Julian had felt home.

They treated him like their own son. They gave him everything—a family, a sense of belonging, something he never thought he would have.

But before he could even get comfortable in this new life, it was ripped away.

When he was just ten years old, they disappeared. One night, without a trace.

They’d gone out for a simple dinner, and when they didn’t come home, the police started searching. Days turned into weeks, then months, and there was no sign of them.

No evidence.

No explanation.

The feeling of being abandoned once more flooded him. It was like the universe had tricked him into believing he mattered, only to pull it all away.

He didn’t understand it.

The emptiness swallowed him whole, and he became obsessed. Every time he could, he visited the police, gave them all the details he could remember—desperate to understand. Desperate to find out what had happened to them. But each time, he was met with the same response:

There’s nothing more we can do, Julian. You have to let this go.

But he couldn’t. He never could.

Years had passed since then, and Julian had searched every possible lead.

He’d traveled to places they had been, interviewed people who might know something—anything. But every road ended in disappointment.

And still, the questions lingered. Why them? Why his parents? Why him? What had happened that night? And more importantly,

Why had they disappeared?

And now, as he sat on this bench, still haunted by the past, he couldn't help but wonder if the mystery of his parents' disappearance was tied to the nightmares that had begun when he was fifteen.

Had it been some kind of premonition? Or was something much darker involved?

The dreams weren’t just about dying. They weren’t just the result of his own subconscious fear and trauma.

There had to be a reason they were so vivid, so real. And there had to be a reason they kept coming back, night after night.

Julian looked up, his gaze drifting across the campus, but his mind remained trapped in the past. The people around him were just faces, fading into the distance.

No one could understand what he was going through.

He didn’t even know if he could understand it himself.

But there was one thing that gnawed at him—a thought that had been growing in the back of his mind ever since Carmella had appeared.

What if the dreams were somehow connected to his parents' disappearance?

What if the answer to the mystery of the deaths, the nightmares, and the cold hand that seemed to grip his soul every night was tied to them?

What if they had been a part of something far bigger than he could ever imagine?

He shook his head, trying to clear the thought away. But it wouldn’t leave him. The weight of it all pressed down on him, and for the first time in years, he felt a strange mixture of dread and hope.

Maybe this wasn’t just a nightmare anymore.

Maybe he was finally getting close to the truth.