Page 1 of Somno Slave

Chapter One

Deogal

The darkness is sovereign.

There is no sky, no horizon, nothing for the mind to cling to.

I drink in the silence, the sweet stillness of nothing. My dreamscape has swallowed itself again, folded inward like a disobedient animal flinching from its owner.

But it can’t hide from me.

Hunger pains blister in my stomach, and my patience slips.

I step forward, and my Realm unwillingly responds.

Under the weight of my boot, a pulse of electricity bursts outward. Light tears through the darkness, illuminating the vast fleshy landscape.

My Dreamscape is a restless thing: thin, pale, stitched together from the leftovers of human sleep, stretched tight like the skin on a drum. Billions of unconscious souls are trapped beneath the surface, held hostage inside orbs that ripple like raw muscle. They scream beneath my boot, sick and alive.

This is the Realm of Unconsciousness, where minds rot and nothing leaves whole.

Light years away, their human bodies are bound to Earth; achy, twitching desperately, tossing between stuffy sheets and pools of sweat. I feel the tense flutter of their eyelids, as though they can fight toopen their eyesand stop the night terror. My silhouette dances in the depths of their minds, creating twisted stories that drag out their worst fears.

The more they suffer, the more I feed.

And when they struggle, it’s a goddamn banquet.

They call me many things. None of them matter.

Humans spit sounds into the dark as if syllables could bare my fangs. But what is a name to a monster that fucks itself over sleeping bodies? To a thing that devours dreams from between vulnerable thighs.

This place belongs to me, because nothing else survived it, because nothing else thrives in taking what’s not theirs.

My stomach growls again, sharper this time, more like a final warning.

I glance down at the orb closest to me. It collapses under the heat of my attention and shrieks. I taste it’s breath on my tongue—salt, sugar, static—brief and forgettable, but it explodes with fear and the cry is intoxicating.

My pupils burst.

I grind my heel into it, light at first, drinking in its sorrow. It splutters violently, and with every wave of agony ripping through its mind, I press down harder.

Something beneath the surface gives. The night terror ruptures with a wet, meaty pop, and gore splashes up my calf, steaming as it hits the frozen air. The creature’s scream doesn’t come from a mouth; it tears out of the ground instead, a shrill, bubbling wail as its exposed nerves twitch and curl like severed worms.

It’s pain detonates outward, a shockwave of stolen dread slamming through me. For a split second, flashes of the dream burn behind my eyes: teeth spilling like pearls onto tile, a faceless figure dragging them backward into a narrowing hallway, the sensation of sinking with no bottom. The energy from the dream bleeds into my stomach, hot and violent, until the hunger cramps start to subside.

I exhale, steadied. Fed, but not full. I need more. So much fucking more.

I sink deeper into the abyss, pressure wrapping around my skull. Down here, the air thickens, spooled with shadows. Something damp clings to the back of my tongue.

The landscape tunnels, and the walls breathe around me in a slow, corpse-like rhythm. Wet stone glistens with sheen, silhouettes writhing just beneath the surface like trapped insects. My cock twitches with the promise of release.

I descend deeper.

But then, a pulse cuts through the haze, clean and violent. I see it in my mind vividly as if it hangs before me, suspended in the dark. Small. Sweet. Not the shivering blue of common dreams, but a deep, scarlet throb.

I close my eyes and listen.

Female—breathless, soft, bitten-off whimpers bleeding through the dark. The sound drags my attention toward her like blood in water.