Apparition König

König’s eyes snapped open to darkness. For a moment he didn’t breathe, as if the air itself had turned against him. Sweat clung to his skin, cold and heavy beneath the sheets, and his chest rose and fell in quick, uneven bursts. The silence of the night pressed in on him - thick, suffocating, alive.

“Hurensohn…” he muttered under his breath, the curse barely audible, rasped through clenched teeth. His hand dragged across his face, wiping away the sweat that trickled down his temples. The room smelled faintly of iron and damp linen, familiar, almost comforting in its stark emptiness.

It was the same dream again. The same vision that burned itself into the back of his skull each night like a brand. He feared it. He longed for it. Sleep had become both his torment and his salvation, a place where he could touch something - someone - that his waking mind could never find.

He rolled over, one massive arm flung across the mattress, his breath catching as he tried to calm the erratic thrum in his chest. Calm down. Schlaf, König. Schlaf. The words felt hollow. His eyelids fluttered shut again with a soldier’s stubbornness, the need for rest warring with something darker, like an addiction he dared not name.

And then...

He was there again.

The corridor stretched before him, long and endless, walls slick with shadow. His boots echoed against the marble floor, each step a pulse of desperation. He reached the door at the end and pushed it open with trembling hands.

Light swallowed him whole.

When he saw them, his lips parted, not in fear, but in awe. The apparition stood bathed in white radiance, its shape both human and impossible. König’s hand rose instinctively, trembling, his palm engulfing the ghostly fingers that reached for him in return.

“Why are you never real?” His voice broke, the thick Austrian accent bending each word into something raw, human. “The shifting states you follow me through… unrevealed. Just let me go. Oder nimm mich mit dir.”

The apparition did not answer, only looked at him with eyes that shimmered like dying stars. He could feel their warmth bleeding through his calloused skin - impossible, dreamlike. It made something inside him ache.

Perhaps it was madness. Perhaps it was the war, the blood, the years spent killing for faceless orders. But König could no longer tell where the dream ended and his need began. The dream has been plaguing him for months now, and maybe it's a testament to his slipping mind, the nightmares he faces in war every day. Maybe his mind is broken, because he's simply obsessed with this beautiful figure before him, and he needs them to be real at this point, for his mental sake.

He had lived a life drenched in violence. And now, in the quiet of his fractured mind, he was falling in love with a ghost. The apparition tilted its head, a soft smile ghosting across its lips - if lips they could be called. The light around them pulsed once, then dimmed, like a heartbeat slowing. König’s breath caught in his throat as the brilliance of the room began to bleed away, walls dissolving into smoke and starlight.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, his voice trembling despite the weight of command it once carried.

The apparition only stepped closer. It murmured something to him, its voice not quite sound; more like the brush of wind through old cathedral glass.

The floor beneath them gave way, and suddenly König was falling. Not through air, but through something thicker, like the space between thoughts. Light warped, twisting into ribbons of color and shadow that moved with impossible grace. He didn’t fight it. Couldn’t.

When his boots touched ground again, the world had changed.

A forest stretched before him, silent, endless, glowing faintly from within. The trees were tall and pale, their bark gleaming like bone. Mist coiled between their roots, shimmering as if lit from beneath. And above, the sky burned a deep violet, shot through with cracks of gold like fractured glass.

König swallowed hard, the instinct to reach for a weapon almost overpowering. But when he turned, the apparition was already beside him, not glowing anymore, but solid. Tangible. Beautiful in a way that hurt to look at.

“Is this… still the dream?” König asked, his voice small, almost reverent.

The being tilted its head again, eyes glimmering with something ancient. Their voice was soft, a ghost of a whisper. “It is I who dreams of you.”

The words struck him like a blade wrapped in silk. His chest tightened. He wanted to speak, to demand answers - but then the apparition’s hand touched his cheek, and all thought bled away. The touch was warm. Real.

König’s knees nearly buckled.

“Why me?” he managed, barely a breath.

The apparition’s gaze softened - tender, almost human. “Because you are broken,” They said simply. “And broken things call to me.”

The forest around them shifted. The air grew heavier, humming with something alive and unseen. König’s heart thudded in his chest, not with fear, but with a kind of rapture he didn’t understand.

In that moment, he knew - if this was a dream, he never wanted to wake.

But deep in the mist, something moved. A flicker of dark shape, watching. The apparition’s hand fell away from his face, its expression sharpening, protective now, dangerous.

And König... poor, tired König... realized that whatever this being was, it was not just his salvation.

It was his keeper.