When Aurora was a child, someone told her that dreams were harmless; they were terribly, unequivocally wrong.
She tilted her head, scrutinizing the bruise on her right wrist. Her mind was a frantic, chaotic mess. She could have sworn it hadn't been there when she went to sleep, and the most unsettling part was its distinct shape. It was utterly wrong.
Should a bruise resemble that—a jagged symbol? Where had it come from? How had it appeared? Had she sleepwalked again and collided with something? But she hadn't slept a wink the entire night, so sleepwalking was out of the question.
Aurora frowned, her lips pulling into a slight pout. The longer she stared, the stranger the mark became.
"Miss. Mclaren."
Her head snapped up at the sound of her name. Class. She was in class. She blinked at the professor, who gave her a sharp warning look before resuming the lecture.
The lecture hall's fluorescent lights hummed and flickered overhead. The usual background murmur of students, which often served as a gentle lullaby to her waking hours, was audible. But today, hunched in the back row, the persistent buzzing was an irritant, a relentless reminder of the all-night game for which she had sacrificed her sleep.
She dragged her eyes down to her notebook, which was starkly blank. Not a single word of the professor's lecture had been captured. This was her penalty for a video game binge; how could she concentrate when the professor's voice was a flat drone and the strange mark on her wrist demanded her attention?
A sharp elbow jabbed her, pulling her back to the moment.
"Hey, Aurora. Are you with us?"
It was Ben, the boy beside her, a kind-eyed student who always faintly smelled of cinnamon. He subtly nodded toward the presentation screen.
"Professor just asked you about Chiaroscuro," Ben whispered. "You looked seconds away from face-planting on the desk."
"Just a late night," Aurora muttered, gripping her pen tighter. There was no way she could tell him about the bizarre marks appearing on her body, or that she had been awake the entire night.
"Chiaroscuro... it's the dramatic contrast between light and dark," she managed to articulate, battling the fierce urge to simply collapse onto the desk and surrender to sleep.
"Correct, Ms. Mclaren. Excellent," the professor droned, sounding minimally satisfied.
Aurora sagged back, a ridiculous wave of relief washing over her as the teacher mercifully moved on. She glanced at her wrist again. The bruise—no, the mark—was still there. Faintly purple now, it resembled a fractured spiral or a claw scratch.
She rubbed it, trying to will it away like any ordinary bruise, but it was fixed.
The professor continued, but Aurora's concentration completely fractured. Her eyelids felt leaden, and her posture started to slump forward. A low hum began to build in her ears, distant, like a deep, powerful wind tearing through a confined space.
Then the lights stuttered, once, twice, and died. The class murmured in confusion as the room was plunged into dimness.
Aurora's head shot up, her eyes wide, her heart pounding against her ribs. Everything seemed to slow down, as if she were submerged in water. That was when she saw it, reflected in the projector's suddenly black screen. A figure. It was a tall shadow, and it was watching her.
She whirled around, but there was nothing. Only Ben next to her, staring at the screen like everyone else, which only intensified her heart's frantic beat.
"Did... did you see that?" she managed to whisper.
Ben frowned. "See what?"
She opened her mouth, but the words caught in her throat. Don't say it. You'll sound insane.
The lights flickered back to full strength. The class let out a collective sigh of relief, and the professor continued as if the momentary outage had never occurred. When the bell finally rang, she was the last one to gather her belongings.
Ben nudged her shoulder as he stood to leave. "You okay?"
"Yeah," she replied too quickly, forcing a bright smile. "Just exhausted."
He gave her a skeptical, assessing look, then nodded. "Get some rest. And maybe ease up on the video games?"
"I'll consider it," she said, shooing him off.
As the lecture hall emptied, Aurora stayed in her seat, gazing at the front screen. The projector was off, showing only her reflection: wide, tired eyes and lips pressed into a thin, anxious line. She wasn't ready to return to her dorm, but there was no other place to be.
Outside, thick clouds had devoured the sun, bathing the campus in a dreary, depressing gray. The breeze rattled dry leaves across the sidewalk. Students walked past, laughing and chatting, yet everything felt distant and profoundly wrong to her.
Her dorm room was on the third floor, the quietest part of the building. She normally cherished the silence, but not today. Aurora dropped her bag by her desk and fell onto her bed, pulling her knees to her chest. She lay there for an age, staring blankly at the ceiling. Her wrist still throbbed—a slow, persistent ache that refused to subside.
She finally pushed herself up and grabbed her phone, her hands trembling slightly as she unlocked it. A quick search: "Dream injuries appearing in real life." She was met with dozens of results about night terrors, sleep paralysis, and lucid dreaming. None of it accounted for a mark shaped like a symbol. None of it mentioned shadows in reflections or whispers heard by no one else.
Her thumb hesitated, then she tried a new search: "Dreams that cross into reality."
The results were a deluge of folklore, anonymous forum threads, and pages of people attempting to rationalize the incomprehensible. One post, in particular, seized her attention:
"When the dream and waking world blur, it's not always a trick of the mind. Sometimes, it is a crossing. A thinning of the veil. And if you're marked... it has already begun."
Aurora's breath hitched. Before she could scroll further, her phone vibrated in her hand. A text message, from an unknown number.
"Did you feel it?"
She merely stared at the screen. No name, no identity. Only those three words.
Her fingers trembled as she typed her reply: "Who is this?"