Haze // DEADLOCK

The smoke curled around me, thick as velvet, the kind you could drown in if you weren't careful. That's how most dreams feel at first - warm, suffocating, and just a little too perfect. I slipped through the cracks, not as flesh and bone, but as a shadow, a whisper, a trespasser in a mind that wasn't mine. That's the job. Doesn’t mean I like it.

They call it dream infiltration. I call it walking barefoot through someone’s secrets. Every corner hides a fantasy they'll never admit out loud, every shadow carries the scent of their guilt. I've seen it all - desires polished clean, filth caked under the soul, the kind of things that stick to your skin long after you wake.

My eyes burned like twin lanterns in the dark, casting a glow that doesn’t belong here. The mark's mindscape stretched before me, too neat, too sterile. That’s always the giveaway - it means they’re hiding something. And sure enough, the walls bled whispers, muffled screams tucked behind a smile. People's dreams are cages of their own making; mine’s just to pick the lock and look inside.

I felt the weight of my knives against my hip, phantom tools in a place where nothing's real and everything cuts deeper. If this was another routine check, I’d be gone in minutes. But the Sandman Division doesn't send me in for "routine." There's rot here, something ugly squirming beneath the polished veneer. My instincts never lie.

I tell myself it's just work. That I'm nothing more than a scalpel carving away the lies. But walking through another person's fantasies has a way of eating at you. Makes you wonder what they'd see if they crawled inside your head.

The mark's laughter echoed down the hall. I followed, smoke trailing like a cloak around me. And as always, I reminded myself of the only rule that keeps me sane in this business: don't get lost in someone else's dream. Because if you do, you might not find your way back.