Sleepwalking in another world

The granary was on fire, which Kaito thought was a bit much.

He shifted his weight on the rafter,distributing it slowly, and watched the soldiers move through

the smoke below. Six of them. Heavy boots,which was useful, he could track them by sound

even when the haze thickened. They were searching methodically, which meant they'd been

trained,which meant whoever sent them had resources.The torches were a choice he found

genuinely confusing given that the building was already burning, but he supposed intimidation

had its own logic.

He counted patrol intervals. Noted the one on the left favored his right side,probably an old

knee injury. Noted the one nearest the door kept glancing at his superior for approval before

moving,which meant he'd hesitate under pressure.

Somewhere in the back of his mind,half-submerged,was the awareness that he could not

remember falling asleep.

He'd been at his desk. History notes. The economic causes of something-or-other. And then,

granary. Rafters. Fire.

He wasn't particularly alarmed. The dreams had always been vivid. He just didn't usually pick up

mid-scene. The soldier with the knee issue paused almost directly below him and raised his

torch.Kaito went very still, not the held-breath stillness of panic but something quieter and more

complete, like a house with all the lights off. The soldier's gaze swept upward,passed over him,

and moved on.

Kaito exhaled slowly and went back to counting.

Getting out was less complicated than it had any right to be.

The soldier nearest the exit had a particular way of carrying himself, shoulders slightly forward,

chin down,the careful posture of someone who had leaned not to draw attention. He dropped

from the rafter and his feet found the floor, and somewhere between the landing and the first

step he was just…walking. The soldier nearest the exit didn't look up. Neither did the one

behind him. There was nothing to look at, just another set of boots moving with the particular

forward-shouldered purpose of someone with somewhere to be.

The night outside was cold and smelled like woodsmoke and something else,something

underneath, like wet soil and old metal. He stopped a few steps from the granary wall and

looked up.

Two moons. One larger,one trailing behind it like a thought that hadn't finished forming. The

mountains in the distance were wrong in a way he couldn't immediately articulate,too

symmetrical on the left face, like they'd been constructed rather than grown.

He filed this away and looked left.

The girl was pressed flat against the outer wall,deep in the shadow between two support

beams, doing an objectively excellent job of being invisible. He wouldn't have spotted her if he

hadn't been looking at exactly the right angle at exactly the right moment.

She was around his age. Dirt on her face,torm hem on her coat, the particular stillness of

someone who had been holding their breath so long they'd forgotten they were doing it. Her

eyes,when they found him,went wide, not with relief.

He crossed the short distance between them and sat down against the wall beside her.

She stared at him.

He kept his voice low,working with the shape of the language he'd been pulling apart since he

woke up. The grammar was close to something he knew. The vowels were longer. When did

you last eat?

Her expression didn't improve. If anything,it got worse.

He tried again, slightly adjusted pronunciation. She understood this time, he could tell from the

minute shift in her posture, and chose not to answer, which he respected but found more

concerning than the soldiers.

The false alarm took approximately four seconds to execute.

He pitched it from the far corner of the granary wall, cupped his hands, and called out in the flat,

carrying tone of someone relaying information they found mildly annoying:

"North side —they've found the trail.Move up."

A beat of silence. Then boots,redirecting. Voices confirming. Someone inside said something

that ended in a question and someone else cut them off with exactly the kind of impatient

authority that ended questions.

He'd had enough of the language by then to get the register right, not the words a soldier would

choose but the shape of how a soldier in this unit would deliver them, clipped and directional,

carrying the specific authority of someone repeating an order rather than issuing one.

The girl watched him do this with an expression he didn't have a word for.

They moved.She led,which was the right call,she knew the territory and he was willing to defer

to competence. He followed two steps behind,matching her pace, which she seemed to find

more unsettling than if he'd struggled to keep up. At some point she glanced back at him and he

asked again,genuinely, if he had something on his face.

“Who are you?”

“Kaito.” He considered how to explain the rest and settled on honesty. "I'm fairly sure I'm

dreaming,so you dont need to worry too much about any of this."

She did not appear comforted.

The safe house was a cellar beneath a collapsed mill,accessed through a floor hatch buried

under what looked like three years of debris. Inside:a single lantern,three other people,and the

specific atmosphere of a space where everyone had agreed not to talk about how bad things

were. All three looked up when the girl descended.All three looked at Kaito when he followed,

and something moved behind their eyes,not recognition,not hostility exactly,just a shared,

involuntary discomfort they had no immediate language for.

He sat down in the comer that gave him the best sightline to the hatch and listened.

He didn't ask questions so much as he created space for answers. A comment here. A clarifying

sound there. People talked into attentive silence the same way they talked into direct

interrogation, and considerably more honestly.

The region had a name —Vardenmoor. The soldiers had a faction —the Ashen Order. And

spreading from the eastem border was something they called the Hollow March,a zone where

the land itself had gone wrong, where things came out of the dark that didn't behave the way

living things behaved. The soldiers weren't protecting anyone from it. They were getting ahead

of it,clearing villages before it arrived,which meant the villages bore the cost of a catastrophe

they hadn't caused and might not have survived anyway.

Kaito thought this was a remarkably efficient cruelty and said nothing.

The girl sat across the cellar and watched him with an attention that was different from the

others'. They watched him the way you watched something you couldn't categorize. She

watched him like she was trying to remember the words to a song she'd heard once, a long time

ago,in a room she couldn't quite place.

Once,when the lantern guttered and the cellar went dim for a moment, her face changed. Just

briefly. A shadow crossed her expression that had nothing to do with the light,something behind

her eyes,deep and dark and very tired.Kaito's head turned toward her a fraction of a second

before he caught himself, arrested the movement, looked back at the wall.

He sat with that for a moment.

Then one of the other refugees asked him something and he answered, and the moment

passed.

He fell asleep somewhere in the middle of his own sentence.

The ceiling of his bedroom was the same as it always was. Water stain in the upper left corner

that looked like either a running dog or a very bad map of Scandinavia,depending on the

morning. His alarm had been going off for eleven minutes.

He sat up and looked at the water stain. Then he quietly ran through three sentences in the

other language, testing the retention. Grammar held. Vowel length held. The specific cadence of

the soldier's voice he'd borrowed was already degrading at the edges, but the structure of it

remained.

He got up.

Breakfast, notes, bag, the morning had a sequence and he ran it without having to think, which

was the point. His room was organized the way a complicated life required organization,not as

a personality trait but as basic infrastructure. Two planners on the desk,both current, neither

explained.

On the train, he sat with his forehead against the glass and watched the city move past and

thought about geography.

Dreams had their own geography, loose, connective, following emotional logic rather than

physical. You could not travel consistently between invented places. You could not return to an

invented landmark and find it exactly where you left it, with the same weathering, the same

structural damage, the same mountain silhouette catching the light of two moons at the same

angle.

He had been to that valley before. He recognized the way the ridge broke on the eastern face.

He filed this under interesting and watched the city.

History class.The economic causes of something-or-other. He answered when called on,

correctly,without theater.

His friend Riku,who occupied the seat to his left and had long ago made peace with the full

range of Kaito's behavior, leaned over after class and asked if he'd slept alright. He had the look

of someone who had noticed a difference they couldn't name.

Kaito thought about the question with the brief,genuine consideration it deserved.

"Mostly," he said.

Walking to the next class,he made a private note, not in either planner, just in the back of his

mind where small administrative failures were stored, that whatever version of himself showed

up in that cellar next time should really eat something first. Running on empty in a crisis was

embarrassing. He had a reputation to maintain.

He wasn't sure what reputation, exactly. But still.

*Authors note

Hi, everybody it's been some while. here's a new story that i hope you will like, as for the previous don't worry i will keep on continuing it too till finished. Thank you and have a great evening.