Aura Colemount (as Nimbostrata, with Artificial Memory Trace) Album

Five people, scattered across the fractured skin of the planet, woke into the same dream.

It began not with form, but color. Greens that bled into brown, yellows lacerated with impossibly white light. The space was vast. Not cosmic. Older. Before the word "cosmos" meant anything at all.

And there were bubbles. Spheres dense with meaning. Breathing. Flexing. Not floating in space, but becoming space. Each one pulsed with its own rhythm, like lungs filling with creation. And something unseen, something enormous, was dreaming them. Not gently. With need.

The bubbles weren't connected. Until they were. Invisible filaments reached between them. Not wires. Something organic. Like mycelium whispering beneath the surface of all things.

The threads thickened. Became tunnels. Became highways. Inside them, motion. Not bodies. Not thought. Something sharper.

Fragments, pieces torn from somewhere else, floated into the tunnels. Then flew. Then collided. Five shards, spiraling, each split across light and velocity. They were not bodies. They were not names. They were direction. Intention.

And just before they met, just before the inevitable collision inside something larger than meaning, they woke. Gasping.

Elin, in Norrköping, stared at her ceiling with the kind of stillness that holds back screaming. Her breath jagged. Her hands under the blanket, as if she hadn't moved, as if maybe stillness could undo it. She waited. One minute. Two. Then reached for the white bottle on the bedside table. One pill. No water.

Linn, in Linköping, didn't wake so much as break. The pain in her skull cracked her open, a migraine so immediate it felt like being split by light. She rolled off the bed, her body folding like a crash-test dummy. No elegance. No control. When it passed, thirty-seven seconds later, though it felt like centuries, she crawled to the cabinet. Took the pills without standing.

Chris, in Dallas, wiped the blood from his upper lip without surprise. His nose had ruptured sometime in the dream. Or maybe it ruptured because of it. The mirror told him he looked pale. But mirrors lied. He didn't speak. Just tilted his head back and let the blood run toward the memory of a sound he hadn't heard since he was born.

Trine, in Svalbard, doubled over with cramps that weren't supposed to start yet. Her body didn't care. Her cycle, her rules, had always been less clock and more omen. She pressed a palm to her abdomen. Not with the expectation of relief. Just acknowledgement. Then reached for the hot water bottle. And breathed into the ache like it was something ancient.

Fabian, in Cairo, fell through his floor. Or maybe not literally. But it felt like that. One moment he was in his body. The next, his weight betrayed him. Gravity forgot him. The tiles felt miles away. The air refused to name him. He took the pill without blinking. Not because he believed he was broken. But because some symptoms deserved soft edges.

They didn't know each other. But the dream had left fingerprints.

And something in each of them had begun to tremble.

Something had arrived. Or awakened.

And it would not leave.

Not now.

Not ever.

Slavek Kwi, LR Friberg

LR Friberg