He hadn't always been this way. As a child, he was a beacon of cheer, his face fixed in a permanent smile for anyone he passed. But the world has a way of grinding down such light. At school, they mocked his teeth; at home, the insults were quieter but cut deeper. Through years of bullying and rejection, Mizi kept smiling, wearing his kindness like a shield that was slowly shattering.
The final fracture came when he dared to hope. He had expressed his love to a girl, only to be met with a rejection so cruel it became a public spectacle. The laughter of his peers echoed in his head, a rhythmic drumming that wouldn't stop.
Then came the dream.
He had found himself in a void, pursued by a figure in a yellow dress with short hair. When he stopped running, she didn't attack; she cried. She handed him a single yellow flower. In that moment, Mizi felt a connection so profound he woke up convinced she was his soulmate. He returned to school with renewed confidence, but reality was a cold shower. The bullying intensified. He was treated like refuse.
His only sanctuary was Nurin, a neighbor who had been his defender and confidante since childhood. She was the one person who saw past the bad teeth and the awkwardness. Mizi began to wonder if she was the girl from the dream.
But the universe wasn't finished with him.
Mizi returned home one afternoon to find a crowd gathered at Nurin's house. There was no party. Nurin had been killed by a car. The one pillar of his world had collapsed.
Driven by a madness born of grief, Mizi fled. He screamed at the sky, cursing fate. He found a glass bottle. At first, he hesitated, the faces of his parents flickering in his mind. Then, he saw Nurin's face. He saw every insult, every laugh, and every moment of pain.
He took the bottle and began to strike His own Head. He didn't want to continue. He didn't want to feel. The world went black.
The Oneiro Gatekeeper
When Mizi opened his eyes, he wasn't dead. At least, not in the way he expected.
He lay on a vast, scorched expanse. His hands were bound in heavy manacles. Behind him trailed two tons of jagged iron. From the horizon, a slow, creeping wall of fire advanced.
Hell, Mizi thought. I'm being punished.
He began to pull. Each step was an agony of friction and weight. Beneath his feet, glowing verses appeared in the dust: "Still want to blame God?"
Mizi ignored it, teeth bared, pulling the impossible weight. A second verse flared: "Regret? Do you want another chance?"
Mizi collapsed, sobbing into the dirt. "I regret it! I was wrong! Please, show me the right path! I don't want to live like this!"
A verse in elegant Arabic script manifested:
"Those who followed will say, 'If only we had another turn so we could disassociate ourselves from them as they have disassociated themselves from us.' Thus will Allah show them their deeds as regrets upon them. And they are never to emerge from the Fire."
Mizi froze. The finality of the words crushed his spirit. He stopped fighting. He accepted his fate. But then, a final verse appeared, softer than the others: "He found you lost, and He guided you."
A blinding light swallowed the wasteland. He felt no heat, no weight, no chain. For the first time in what felt like years, there was nothing pulling him backward.
The Land of Dreams
Mizi blinked. He was no longer in the fire. He stood before a colossal, ornate gate, its surface carved with patterns that moved like water, shifting and rearranging themselves as though the gate itself was breathing. Before he could process his surroundings, stone-skinned Gargoyles lunged at him from the shadows.
He turned to run, but a group of winged children, cherubic but armed with bows, intervened. They loosed arrows with deadly precision.
"Prince Lavinia! What are you doing?" one of the children shouted.
"Ehh?" Mizi stammered.
"Quickly! Use your Eternal Shield! We must stop them!"
Mizi looked down at his arm. A device hummed there, glowing with an ethereal green light. He stared at it, pressed it, turned his wrist, did everything instinct suggested, and nothing happened. As a Gargoyle lunged at a nearby child, Mizi's instincts took over. He threw himself in the way. A translucent barrier flared into existence from his arm, blocking the claws. With a surge of adrenaline, Mizi slammed the shield forward, shattering the creature.
What followed was chaos measured in heartbeats. He and the children moved together without strategy, only urgency, covering each other's blind spots as the gargoyles pressed from every angle. By the time the last one fell, the ground around them was littered with stone fragments.
"Bravo, Prince Lavinia! Long live the Oneiro Gatekeeper!"
The Cloud Palace
The children hurried Mizi through the gates and up toward a palace carved from solid clouds, its towers rising into a sky that was neither day nor night but something in between, a soft, permanent dusk that cast no shadows. They were frantic. "My Lady! A disaster! The Prince has lost his memory!"
Mizi found himself standing before two imposing figures: the Empress of Desire and the Emperor of Deity.
"Okay, wait," Mizi held up his hands. "I'm confused. Why am I here? And my name is Mizi, not Lavinia."
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The Empress leaned forward, her eyes soft but concerned. "You are our child, Lavinia. This is the city of Nagnayak, the Land of Dreams. How could you forget?"
"Earth!" Mizi insisted. "I'm from Earth! I'm a student! My parents are ordinary people!"
The Emperor exchanged a dark look with a minister. "We have raised you since birth, Lavinia. We have the records. The portraits."
"Maybe it's a curse," the minister whispered. "The karma of the Gargoyle Mother? It would explain the timing. He fought them at the gate before he could be properly received. The curse may have taken hold the moment he arrived." He bowed his head toward the Emperor and Empress. "I will oversee his recovery personally. But he needs rest and patience above all else."
The Empress and Emperor exchanged a long look. It was the kind of look that carried a conversation within it, worry folded into relief folded into something neither of them had a name for.
The Girl and the Shadow
Mizi wandered out of the palace, his head spinning. Everything, the trees, the bridges, the lamps, was made of condensed cloud, solid enough to walk on and soft enough to make him feel that the whole city might drift apart if the wind changed. He pinched his cheek, hoping to wake up, but the sharp sting proved this was no dream.
Near a tranquil pond, he saw a girl sitting in a hut. She shielded her face with an umbrella, shy and receding.
"I'm sorry," Mizi said, turning to leave. "I didn't mean to intrude."
"Wait," she whispered. She invited him to sit. "It has been so long since you visited, Prince. Have you truly forgotten my name?"
"I'm sorry," Mizi sighed. "Everyone calls me Lavinia, but I feel like I'm just trapped in his body. I'm Mizi."
The girl laughed, a melodic sound. "You haven't changed. Always imagining things. I am Alesten."
As they sat by the water, Alesten told him of their childhood. They had been a trio: Lavinia, Alesten, and a boy named Ming Feng. Ming Feng had come from a place called Apocrypha, an eternal realm where he had been designated from birth as the son of the curse of darkness. He had grown restless there, bored in the way that only the very powerful can be bored, and had wandered into the dream realm looking for something he couldn't name. Alesten had found him first and brought him to meet Lavinia and his family. For a time, the three of them had been inseparable.
But Ming Feng's love for Alesten had turned into a bitter obsession. When she rejected him, his expression had gone very still, and then he had left without another word. He had never returned. Years later, his absence became something worse: a declaration of war. His forces had been testing Nagnayak's gate ever since, patient and methodical, waiting for the moment when they could pour through all at once.
"And where do you come from?" Mizi asked her.
"The Empress says I was born from the alternative self of someone in modern civilization, somewhere below this city," Alesten explained. She glanced at the pond. "She found me here, emerging from the light of the water. She raised me as her own." A pause. "She also says that one day I may take her place. And that you and I might marry."
She looked at him again with that same directness she had shown earlier.
Mizi turned bright red and stood up immediately. "Let's go for a walk," he said.
They walked together through the glowing city, and despite everything, they laughed. The kind of laughter that surprises you, that arrives before you've given it permission. For a short while, Nagnayak felt like a place that had nothing to do with war.
From beyond the city's border, Ming Feng watched them through means the darkness provided. His expression shifted through several things before settling on something cold and decided.
"Prepare the Undead," he said to his generals. "Tonight, Nagnayak falls."
The Night of Souls
That night, the city did not sleep. It never did.
The Empress brought Mizi to the palace balcony and explained it to him simply. When the people of the modern world closed their eyes, their souls rose. They drifted up and into the dream realm, wandering freely, following whatever their imagination offered them. The sky above Nagnayak was filled with drifting lights, thousands of them, moving slowly like lanterns released over water.
Mizi watched them for a long time without speaking. He thought, without meaning to, of all the nights he had wanted to stop existing, and wondered how many of those lights had felt the same way before they slept.
The festivities were cut short by a frantic report: the Undead had reached the gate.
Mizi rushed to the battlements. Below, a shambling tide of corpses pressed against the guards, who were already giving ground. "Zombies?" Mizi yelled. "There are zombies in the dream world?"
"I don't know this word zombie," the Empress said sharply, "but you must stop them!"
Mizi leaped into the fray. He smashed his shield into their faces, but they didn't stop. Even with arrows protruding from their chests, they kept coming. "They don't die!" a guard screamed.
Mizi noticed one thing: the creatures were clumsy. A broken leg reduced them to a crawl. He visualized a sport he used to love on Earth, badminton, the way every incoming shuttlecock was a problem to be read and answered before it arrived. He began to treat the battlefield like a court. Every lunge was a serve; every parry was a return. He stopped trying to end them and started trying to slow them.
When a soul, one of the drifting lights, strayed too close to the combat, the Empress shrieked from above. "Save it! If a soul is captured here, the human will suffer fatal sleep paralysis on Earth and they will not wake up!"
Mizi charged. He broke through the lines, shouldering aside everything that moved, his eyes fixed on the light. An Angel of Nagnayak came sprinting from the gate, bearing the Emperor's own sword, a blade that hummed with a faint resonance, as though it remembered every battle it had survived.
"Take it, Prince!" the Angel cried before being dragged down by the horde.
Mizi gripped the hilt.
He thought of Nurin. He thought of the face she made when she was trying not to laugh. He thought of every person who had ever looked at him like he was worthless, and of every time he had smiled anyway. He let all of it move down his arm and into the blade.
He began to harvest the Undead, slicing at their legs to immobilize them, moving in clean arcs, never stopping longer than he needed to. Finally, the Undead Leader stepped forward. A hulking knight in thick plate armor, carrying a blade nearly as tall as Mizi himself. He spoke in a language Mizi didn't recognise, but the meaning was clear enough.
The duel was grueling. The knight had no fatigue, no hesitation, no moment of doubt. Mizi was gasping for air within the first minute. But the knight also had no adaptability. He read the pattern and committed to it, and Mizi began to see the rhythm. Thinking quickly, Mizi threw his sword, the blade spinning end over end and striking the leader's helmet hard enough to stagger him. In the moment that followed, Mizi tackled him. He pinned the knight and slammed his glowing shield into the leader's greaves repeatedly, driving it down with everything he had. The shield began to pulse. Then it erupted in a burst of light, not the cold light of a weapon but something older and warmer, and it tore through the armor and did not stop until nothing remained but silence.
The remaining Undead retreated without ceremony, folding back into the dark as though they had never been.
The captured soul floated free, drifted upward, and dissolved into glittering dust that caught the rising light and painted the morning sky of Nagnayak in gold and white.
The city cheered. Every angel, every guard, every citizen who had watched from the walls let out a sound that carried across the cloud-built rooftops and faded slowly into the brightening air.
Nagnayak had survived.
But the peace was an illusion. In the shadows beneath the palace eaves, where the morning light had not yet reached, a single Evil Spirit crouched in stillness. It had slipped through the gate during the confusion of battle, quiet as a held breath. It watched Mizi receive the congratulations of the Empress, watched him wince when someone clapped him too hard on a bruised shoulder, watched him laugh despite it. The spirit said nothing. It only observed, cataloguing every detail with the patience of something that had no need to hurry.
Then it sent its signal, and in the darkness beyond Nagnayak's border, others began to gather.
The war for the Land of Dreams had only just begun.