.png)
Part 1 - The Dream Walker
We never called it dreaming.
Not the way other people mean it.
For most, dreams are fragments - disjointed images that fade with the morning light, leaving behind only a feeling, if anything at all. But for a few of us, it was something else entirely. Something structured. Something navigable.
Something real.
I don’t remember when I first learned to do it. None of us really do. There’s no moment you can point to and say, that’s when it began. It’s more like realizing you’ve always known how to walk, you just never thought about it until someone asked you to.
The first time I understood that I was different, I was standing in a place that wasn’t my own.
It looked like a house. Quiet. Dim. The kind of place where sound doesn’t travel properly. I remember the air felt heavy, like it had been sitting still for too long. There was someone there, a woman, I think. I never saw her clearly. But I could feel her fear.
That was the first thing I learned to recognize.
Fear has a shape in that world. A texture.
It settles into walls. Into floors. It lingers in corners like something waiting to be noticed.
And something else was there with her.
Not human.
You don’t mistake those things once you’ve seen them. They don’t belong to the world they’re in. They press against it, distort it, like they’re wearing reality incorrectly.
I didn’t know what I was doing back then. Not really. But I remember knowing what needed to be done.
I stepped between it and her.
And it noticed me.
That’s when I woke up.
I thought it had been a nightmare.
It wasn’t.
There are others like me.
We don’t find each other in the waking world. There are no meetings, no names exchanged, no confirmations. But in the dream world, you know. You recognize the way someone moves, the way they look at things, not with confusion, but with awareness.
We call ourselves Dream Walkers.
Some of us, less formally, use another name.
Demon Hunters.
It sounds dramatic when you say it out loud. It isn’t meant to be.
Most of what we do goes unnoticed.
A presence that fades. A nightmare that doesn’t return. A house that feels lighter without anyone knowing why. People go on with their lives, never realizing that something had been there… and that something else had intervened.
We are not alone in it.
There are those who guide us.
We call them angels, though I’m not sure that word means what most people think it does.
They don’t appear the way stories describe. There are no wings. No radiant forms. No voices that echo with divine certainty. Their presence is quieter than that. More controlled.
You feel them before you see them. A shift. A stillness. Like the world has paused to make space for them.
They give direction, but rarely explanation.
You’re shown where to go.
You’re given just enough to understand what needs to be done.
And that’s it.
You learn quickly not to ask questions.
Not because you’re told not to.
But because you begin to understand that some answers are simply… not given.
The things we deal with are not all the same.
Some are weak. Residual. Echoes that cling to places and people without much awareness. Those are easy. They unravel quickly once you know how to pull at them.
Others are aware.
Those are the dangerous ones.
They watch. They learn. They attach themselves to people, to emotions, to memories. They feed in ways that are difficult to describe in words that belong to the waking world.
Those are the ones we’re sent after.
Not always to destroy.
Sometimes just to separate.
Sometimes just to make sure they don’t go any further.
It isn’t a war in the way people imagine war.
There are no sides drawn clearly across a battlefield.
No victories that are announced.
No endings.
Just… constant pressure.
A quiet resistance.
There are limits.
You learn that early, even if no one says it directly.
There are places you don’t go.
Things you don’t follow.
Patterns you don’t chase.
Not because you can’t.
But because something in you knows… you shouldn’t.
I’ve felt that boundary before. The edge of something deeper. Something that doesn’t feel like a place so much as a direction you’re not meant to move toward.
I’ve always turned away.
Until the night I didn’t.
It started like any other assignment.
There was no voice. There never is.
Just a shift.
A pull.
And then the knowing.
A location.
A presence.
Someone needed help.
When I stepped into it, I found myself inside a house.
Old. Quiet. The kind of place that settles into itself over time. The air was thick with that familiar weight - fear, yes - but something else layered beneath it.
Something I couldn’t immediately place.
There was a man in the house. Middle-aged. Alone. Sitting in a chair like he had been there for hours… or days. It’s hard to tell the difference in that place.
He didn’t look at me.
They never do.
Not unless something has already gone very wrong.
The presence was there.
I could feel it immediately.
Close.
Watching.
I moved through the space slowly, letting it reveal itself the way these things tend to do.
At first, it behaved the way I expected.
A distortion along the walls.
A subtle shifting in the corners.
The feeling of something just out of sight, trying to stay that way.
I’ve handled worse.
Much worse.
I stepped forward, preparing to draw it out.
And that’s when something changed.
Not in the room.
In the feeling.
It wasn’t stronger.
It wasn’t more aggressive.
It was…
Wrong.
Not wrong in the way these things usually are.
Not hostile.
Not chaotic.
Just… misaligned.
Like I was looking at something that didn’t quite belong to the category I had placed it in.
I paused.
That was my first mistake.
I had handled worse before.
But something about this one didn’t feel like anything I had ever faced.
(To be continued in Part 2: The Thing Behind It)
