Alarien Vey had been awake for hours.
Sleep hadn't made sense since the change. Since that morning, two days ago, when the sunlight looked wrong — not in shape or shade, but in feeling. It hit her skin like a sound. It moved like a thought. Everything did.
The hum of the house's security system had a rhythm now. Not random — intentional. Designed. Like it was breathing. The filtered air carried too much information. She could taste last night's storm in it. Hear the stress in the concrete beneath the floors. Feel the faint distortion in gravity whenever a drone passed overhead.
There hadn't been any light shows. No grand moment. No explosion of color or power.
But it was a fact.
She had Awakened.
And when you Awakened, you didn't just sense more.
You were more.
Sharper posture. Sharper thoughts. Her old nearsightedness, the result of too many years staring at screens, had reversed overnight. Her vision now exceeded 20/20 — crisp enough to read microprint off the edge of a moving billboard from across the city.
The dopamine addiction to shortform content? Gone. Her phone lay powered off somewhere beneath a pile of clothes. She hadn't touched it since the change.
Her body had changed. Her mind had changed.
She was still learning how to use it — but already, she could read people. Not perfectly. Not yet. But her parents' body language had become nearly transparent. She could predict the cadence of their speech. The tension in her father's jaw told her what he wouldn't say. Her mother's eyes seemed to play out every word she wished to say, as if they'd already been rehearsed in front of her.
Awakened were not soldiers. Not monsters. Not saints.
They were the next stage.
In just three generations, they had risen from nothing to the apex. World leaders deferred to them. Militaries worked around them. Their strongholds — cities, fortresses, and entire islands — had been designed by Awakened minds. They shrugged off missiles, storms, and siege like weather.
And now, she was one of them.
---
Alarien sat on the edge of her bed, early morning sunlight beginning to creep through the polarized windows. Her suitcase was packed and resting beside the door — reinforced, hard-shelled, filled with clothing, books, tools. Everything she'd need to live away for the next year.
She'd packed it herself.
This wasn't something money could fix.
Not this time.
She remembered the argument.
---
It had been quiet in the study at first — or as quiet as her new and heightened senses allowed.
Then her mother's voice — tight, trembling, already halfway to breaking:
> "She doesn't have to go. I'm sure we'll find someone. There must be Awakened who offer private training—"
> her father responded, flat and final,
"Awakened don't speak to mundane humans unless they're world leaders. Or backed by one of their own."
> "We're the Vey family! We can reach someone—"
> "It's not about reach," he snapped. "They have a abundance of money and influence. If they come to you, it's because they chose to. And if they don't — you're nothing to them."
> "So we just give her up? Just send her to these other worlds alone to die? You've seen the mortality rates. We don't even know what's in those things!"
> "She's an Awakened."
> "She's our daughter."
Alarien had stepped into the study without knocking.
She didn't need to eavesdrop. She already knew how the argument would go. She could see it in their shoulders, in the flickers behind their eyes. Her thoughts were sharper now. Connections formed without effort. She could feel her father's grief buried beneath structure. She could feel her mother clinging to an illusion of control.
Her mother turned to her, eyes red, hands reaching like she could pull her daughter back into childhood. "You don't have to go, Alarien. They can't force you. Not yet. We'll… we'll say it was a false surge. We'll get treatments. Inhibitors. You can finish school from home, and—"
Alarien froze, from predicting her mother's next words, and from actually hearing them.
The buzzing behind her eyes surged into a spike, the migraine from heightened senses.
"Wait—what?" she said, voice too calm for how fast her thoughts were unraveling. "Do you even understand what you're saying? If I stay here, I'll never reach a Nightmare. And if I don't—if I don't go—I'll lose myself. I'll go insane. You're asking me to rot. Quietly. With a smile."
Her mother flinched.
> "You'd rather I waste away in my room than risk doing what every Awakened has to do? You want me to pretend this didn't happen? Just so you don't have to watch?"
Her voice was rising. Her hands were clenched.
> "You don't believe I'll survive, do you?"
Alarien had already heard her mother's answer, before any words were spoken, and it devastated her.
> "You won't survive," her mother choked, voice breaking. "You're too young. That place isn't school — it's war. It's a graveyard."
And then she broke entirely — sobbing.
Not quietly.
Not with dignity.
She collapsed into the armchair like her bones had given out, face buried in her hands, as if her daughter had already died.
Alarien took a step forward — but stopped when she felt a hand on her shoulder.
Her father. His grip firm, but not harsh.
> "Calm yourself," he said.
Her chest heaved. Her mouth opened — closed. Then, quieter:
> "...Sorry," she muttered. "Sorry, Father."
Not her mother.
Deliberately not her mother.
He gave a single nod.
Then he spoke, voice low and even:
> "You've felt it, haven't you? The distortion. The way time pulses. How walls feel like they're watching you when you close your eyes."
She didn't answer.
She didn't have to.
> "You don't have long," he continued. "Just one year. Same as the others. If you don't enter a Nightmare, it turns inward. The pressure eats your thoughts. That's what the Academy is for. Don't confuse it for prestige. It's containment."
Her mother sat silent and weeping, curled in on herself like a child.
> "She'll die in there," she whispered again.
> "She'll die out here," her father replied.
That was the last word spoken.
No more pleading. No more shouting.
Just the cold hum of the house.
And a bitter silence Alarien didn't bother to break.
---
Back in the present, Alarien stood.
She was already dressed — sleek layers, armor-threaded underclothes, nothing flashy. It wouldn't stop a missile, or whatever those other worlds held, but it made her feel like she was preparing.
Even if she knew she wasn't.
Her mind itched at the edges. Colors blurred at corners. Shapes whispered. A world with unturned pages and locked doors — or whatever that quote said.
She stepped into the foyer.
Her mother looked fragile. Her father unreadable — to anyone else. But to her, his grief radiated in a low, controlled hum. He didn't know how to show it. She didn't ask him to.
> "No security. No escort," he said. "The Academy doesn't allow it. You know that."
Her mother reached out and gently brushed a braid back into place. "Come back the same," she said, like a prayer.
And the resentment rose again.
The same?
> "Sorry I'm not the daughter you wanted," Alarien muttered, before she could stop herself.
The words hit hard. Her mother stepped back like she'd been slapped.
Alarien's chest tightened. She hadn't meant to say it.
Not like that.
But she didn't apologize.
She couldn't.
She just turned, opened the door, and stepped into the light.
---
The ride was quiet.
No traffic. No escort.
Just the world parting ahead of her like it already knew what she was.
She didn't look back.
There was no comfort in what she left behind — only the memory of what it had once meant to be normal.
Ahead, the jet sent to retrieve her.
And beyond that: the School of the Awakened.
The only place someone like her could survive what came next.