Victor believed death wasn't the end. He believed—but he never truly knew. That was the kind of truth one only discovered after dying… and nobody ever came back to tell the tale.
Yet… he was breathing again.
That realization hit him right after someone slapped his bare butt so hard it nearly flipped him over. If he hadn't already been upside down, it probably would have.
And now, here he was—crying at the top of his lungs, not sure if it was from the sting of the slap or the soul-deep trauma of dying. His tiny body shook uncontrollably, overwhelmed not just by the pain of the shots but by the horror of it all: knowing he'd likely ruined someone's life, someone's career. That he had hurt Pamela and her family. And worst of all, that his own life had been cut short right before things might've turned around.
He had felt it coming—that he'd speak to Pamela properly in just a few days and things would have gone in his favor. He'd been sure of it.
But it was all for nothing now.
Worse still was the ache of not seeing his mother one last time. What would she do now? She was already struggling alone after his father's death, working long shifts as a nurse just to get by… and to send him pocket money when she could so he could continue studying.
Damn it… I ruined everything. And I died in the dumbest way possible too. Damn it, there's no going back now…
Victor wailed louder than any baby had the right to. He didn't stop, not even when a beautiful woman with gentle hands stroked his face and patted his back. Not even when she whispered soft things he couldn't understand trying to get him to stop crying.
It took nearly half an hour before the tears finally stopped. His tiny body trembled one last time, and with a shuddering breath, he fell into a deep sleep. He didn't know who this woman was—his new mother, maybe—but she had been kind, and that was enough for now.
And then… the strangest dreams came.
They weren't normal. He saw places he'd never been or visited before, life like monsters he couldn't have imagined, people he didn't recognize but somehow knew they were real somewhere… and Pamela—crying with her hands over her face—so vividly that he almost reached out to touch her.
Eventually, the dreams narrowed into a single scene. A white, empty world. Blank and featureless.
Just like a normal dream should be.
Until it wasn't.
Victor felt something—a connection. A spark of something magical and indescribable. And slowly, very slowly, the white began to change. He started to shape the space around him. At first, it was difficult, like molding fog with his hands. But gradually, things began to form.
His room.
Back on Earth.
The fat old TV with the busted input port. His game console, still smudged with greasy fingerprints after eating pizza and changing the disk. His rickety desk barely holding up under a mountain of junk and old books he never had the heart to throw away. His bed, which had a few springs purposely cut to make it last longer. The old creaky wooden floor that made it hard to sneak around at night.
The cracked window—the one broken by a random rock during a heavy windstorm.
Everything came back, piece by piece, as if it was slowly being extracted from his previous world. Victor began feeling through the blankets, the books, the more he touched them, the more real they became in the dream. He even noticed that the books were beginning to fill up with the correct words he had remembered, parts he had even forgotten.
He tried turning on the televisions only to notice that electricity was working right at first, but soon he heard the hum of the old box, he was about to press it feeling refreshed.
For a moment… just a moment, Victor felt happy again.
But then the room began to crumble.
No. No! Wait—why?!
"No, wait—!" he shouted, or at least tried to. He concentrated, desperately trying to force the room back into shape.
Meanwhile, in the real world…
The Duke—his father—stood in the nursery, eyes wide. The room around the newborn had begun to distort. The walls flickered, bricks morphing into blue-and-white patterns. Shadows of bizarre, box-shaped objects hovered in corners. A half-formed bed, far too big for an infant, materialized from the crib's reshaping frame.
Furniture began vanishing—dissolving—as if cannibalized to feed this strange constructions which were filling the room that belong to his newborn son. The windows twisted, their frames reforming into a style no craftsman in this world had ever seen.
Soon one of the strange boxes began to hum with strange power, the candles overhead began to change into a strange round object that was beginning to use a weird energy to light the room more powerful then any fire should.
"Damn it… a Dreamweaver of this power?" the Duke muttered, teeth clenched. "And just a newborn…? Impossible."
Before the room could change any further, he rushed to the crib and placed his hand firmly against the child's forehead. He focused, willing the dream-weaving to halt.
And slowly… it did, the room was slowly returning to its original state.
The floor stopped shifting. The phantom furniture faded. The strange colorations bled back into ordinary stone and the strange energy that cracked with power began to fade, the hum of the large box stopped and the candle light returned. The baby—Victor—breathed slowly again, his dream falling back into something normal, something forgettable and ordinary.
"Damn it… Just what were you doing to this room little one…"
The Duke pulled his hand back, his looking around wearily while trying to figure out what was the real source of the previous phenomenon.
Victor, unaware of the commotion he had caused, remained asleep—fully at peace now, wrapped in a warm blacket while having a normal dream that any infant would have.