Chapter 4: The Name In The Darkness [R-18 Contents!]
The first time I noticed Isabella’s nightmares, was actually my very first nights in this world. Our small cottage in Millbrook had thin walls, and my makeshift bed was positioned close enough to hers that every restless movement, every whispered word, reached my ears through the darkness.
At first, I dismissed them as ordinary dreams—the kind everyone has when memories resurface unbidden in sleep. But as weeks turned to months, I began to recognize a pattern. The nightmares came with increasing frequency, sometimes multiple times in a single night, leaving Isabella exhausted and hollow-eyed by morning.
I would lie still in my bed, listening to her toss and turn, her breathing growing rapid and shallow. Sometimes she would whimper, other times she would speak in fragmented sentences that made little sense. But there was always fear in her voice—a deep, primal terror that seemed to claw its way up from somewhere dark within her soul.
"Please... no..." She would whisper, her voice barely audible above the creaking of the old wooden floorboards. "I won’t... I can’t..."
But it was the name that caught my attention most of all. Through her fitful sleep, through her desperate murmuring, one word emerged with chilling consistency:
Neospheres.
The name meant nothing to me initially. It sounded foreign, unfamiliar—like something from a distant land or perhaps from the old stories the village elders sometimes told around the fire. But the way Isabella spoke it, with such visceral fear, made my young heart race with curiosity and concern.
One morning, after a particularly restless night where she had called out the name three times, I decided to investigate. I slipped out of our cottage while Isabella was still sleeping off her exhaustion and made my way through the village streets.
Millbrook was a small place where everyone knew everyone else’s business. If this Neospheres person had any connection to our village, surely someone would recognize the name. I started with old Henrik, who ran the blacksmith shop and had lived in Millbrook longer than anyone else.
"Neospheres?" He paused in his hammering, wiping sweat from his brow with a soot-stained rag. "Never heard that name before, lad. Sounds like something from the eastern kingdoms, maybe? Why do you ask?"
I gave him a vague answer about hearing it in a story and moved on to the next person.
By the end of the day, I had spoken to nearly everyone in Millbrook, and the result was always the same: blank stares, shaking heads, and the uncomfortable feeling that I was asking about something that didn’t belong in our peaceful little world.