I used to think I was good at pretending. Smile for the professors, nod at my classmates, act like everything was back to normal.
Sure.
Fake it till you make it, right?
Except nothing feels normal when you're trying to live like an entire other world didn't tear you apart and stitch you back together with nightmares.
I told myself Zethara was just a game. A hallucination. A dream I fell too deeply into. Anything but real.
So I walked through campus like a corpse pretending to breathe and told myself this was my life.
Not the sword.
Not the blood.
Not Kael's laughter or Zeref's worried eyes or the smell of burning stone when the raid went wrong.
Just school. Just people. Just Me.
When my classmates dragged me along to the mall that weekend, I let them.
Easier than explaining anything.
Easier than being alone with the flashbacks that sometimes hit like someone hammered a spike through the center of my skull.
