FLASHBACK
In the vast, echoing silence of the Vexley estate's grandest bedroom, nine-year-old Rafael twisted beneath the tangled, sweat-soaked sheets. The room, with all its antique splendor and velvet drapery, felt less like home and more like a forgotten stage—too big, too cold, too quiet.
His dreams had been sharp and brutal: the screech of tires, the metallic crunch of impact, his mother's voice rising—then snapping—into silence. He jolted awake, breath hitching, chest heaving. But the world he woke to didn't feel right.
It wasn't just night.
It was void.
A thick, sightless blackness that wrapped around him like tar, swallowing every corner of light. No shapes. No shadows. Just a suffocating absence. One month since the accident, and still—no color, no dawn, no escape.
"Mommy?" His voice wavered, a broken whisper in the vast dark. It barely rose above the stillness. "Mommy, where are you?"
Nothing answered. Not even the creak of furniture.
