Daniel dreamt of fire.
It rose in twisting columns, devouring the sky, turning steel and stone to blackened husks. The city that had once thrived beneath his feet was now a graveyard of flickering embers, the scent of burning ash thick in his lungs. The world was ending. Again.
The air trembled with screams-some distant, some achingly close. He turned, searching for them. He knew them, didn't he? The voices. The names. But even as he strained to hold onto their faces, the details blurred at the edges, like ink bleeding across wet paper.
A child's hand gripped his sleeve. Small. Familiar. "Dad?"
Daniel's breath caught. He knew this boy. Knew him as surely as he knew his own reflection. But how?
The answer was simple, and yet impossible.
He had lived this life. Had held this child in his arms. Had watched him take his first steps. Had whispered bedtime stories about constellations and ancient myths, promising there was always more time, that tomorrow would always come.
But there was no tomorrow. Not in this world.
The sky above fractured, splitting apart like glass. From the abyss beyond, something vast and unknowable stirred. The ground quaked beneath Daniel's feet, the final signal that the end had arrived.
The boy clung tighter. "Dad, what's happening?"
Daniel didn't have an answer. He never did.
And then, just as the wave of fire and darkness surged toward them, just as the world collapsed into nothingness, the voices came.
Soft at first. Then louder. A chorus of them.
His wife. His friends. His children from lives he barely remembered.
"Don't forget about us when you wake up."
And then—
Silence.
Daniel woke with a gasp.
His bedroom ceiling loomed above him, familiar and unscarred. No smoke. No fire. No trembling earth. Just the quiet hum of the world outside and the loud buzz of his alarm clock.
He pressed his hands against his face, his skin slick with sweat. The dream was already slipping away, vanishing into the edges of his consciousness like all the others before it. But the feeling remained. The ache. The loss.
And the words.
"Don't forget about us."
He sat up, staring at the wall, his chest rising and falling in uneven breaths.
This is the first time he dreamed of something Vivid.
But who would have realized that this was only the beginning.