As Sunny collapsed onto his bed, exhaustion gripped him like a heavy cloak. His body felt like it was made of lead, and his mind screamed for rest. He closed his eyes, slipping into the blackness of sleep, the familiar pull of a dream washing over him.
In the dream, he stood at the edge of a vast, desolate landscape—an endless stretch of cracked earth beneath a sky that was neither day nor night, but an oppressive twilight. The air was thick, the silence suffocating. Then he saw figures approaching, cloaked in shadow.
As they drew closer, their faces became clear—people whose memories he had touched. Faces of strangers, of enemies, even of allies—people whose lives had bled into his own, only to fade away.
One of them stood before him. It was Lysander, his calm demeanor still intact despite the chaos that surrounded them. Lysander smiled, a smile full of warmth, but it was cold in Sunny's dream. The words he spoke were not a greeting, but a heavy judgment.
"Do you understand now, Sunny? You've become a vessel, a collector of memories. But what will happen when the weight of them breaks you? When there's nothing left of you, only fragments of lives that are not your own?"
Sunny tried to speak, but his voice failed him. The shadows around them grew darker, pressing in on him like a vise. His heart pounded in his chest, and he felt a terrible dizziness overcome him, as though the dream itself was consuming him.
Then, in the distance, he saw something familiar. A figure he knew all too well—Ren, but not the Ren he had last seen. This Ren was different, his eyes hollow, his expression twisted in grief. He reached out to Sunny, but his hands were bound by chains of light, glowing with an ethereal, painful brilliance.
"Ren...!" Sunny cried, reaching out, but before he could take a step, the chains snapped, and Ren fell into the abyss. His scream echoed in the emptiness.
Lysander's voice pierced the silence again: "You are not meant to save anyone, Sunny. You can't save yourself. You are already lost."
The words stung, as if they were branded into his soul. Sunny tried to fight, to reject the dream, but it was as if he was being drawn deeper, pulled by forces he couldn't understand.
As he struggled, another vision flashed before his eyes—a series of blurred memories, the faces of people he didn't recognize, his own hands stained with blood. He felt the pain of each life, the sorrow, the regrets, as if they were his own.
A sharp pain lanced through his head, and he collapsed to the ground. The world around him spun, and then, in a brief moment of clarity, he saw it—a symbol etched into the ground, glowing faintly. It was a seal, but it was cracked, its power beginning to fade.
The darkness closed in on him, and he could hear Lysander's laugh, echoing in his ears: "All of this is just the beginning. You cannot escape your fate, Sunny. The seal is weakening, and when it breaks, everything will change."
With that, the dream shattered like glass, and he was left in darkness.
Sunny gasped as he awoke, drenched in cold sweat. His body trembled, and his heart raced. The weight of the dream lingered, like an invisible chain around his chest. He tried to shake it off, but deep down, he knew—something was coming. The seal was weakening, and whatever it meant, it wouldn't be long before the consequences of his powers, of his very existence, would come crashing down on him.