The school bell rang, sharp and insistent. Students poured into the classroom, laughing, jostling, some dragging their bags behind them like reluctant shadows. In the middle of the chaos, moving neither too fast nor too slow, just enough to blend in, walked Aarav kumar.

  He was neither a topper nor a backbencher — he belonged somewhere in between. A boy who smiled just enough to avoid questions, laughed just enough to seem normal, but carried eyes that never sparkled. On the surface, he seemed happy, but beneath that casual mask lay a silence — a quiet no one dared to notice.

  Aarav navigated the curving hallway toward the ground. At lunch, Vinayak clapped him on the back.

  “Bro, you look tired. Didn’t sleep well last night?”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Aarav forced a grin. “Yeah… maybe the dreams wouldn’t let me.”

  Dreams. That was the truth. Almost every night, he wandered through a corridor darker than any shadow, where whispers — soft, unrecognizable — slithered out of Sector A. He would wake up in panic, hands cold, blood running sluggish in his veins.

  Class passed as usual. Mrs. Vandana was writing equations across the board, but Aarav barely registered them. His mind was elsewhere, tangled in the remnants of the nightmare.

  And then… something shifted.

  A sudden chill swept the room. Aarav looked down, and his notebook — ordinary just a moment ago — seemed to pulse. The letters began to twist, writhing like living creatures. Slowly, impossibly, they assembled themselves into a shape. And then, fire flared, scorching the page.

  Panicked, Aarav flung the notebook away.

  “What are you doing?!” Mrs. Vandana's voice cut through the chaos.

  “I-I’m sorry,” he stammered, retrieving the notebook with trembling hands.

  The bell rang, and he left the classroom, heart thundering. Something was wrong. Something was waiting.