The Don's Haunted Slumber

Prologue

No Escape

Cassian ran.

His breath tore from his lungs in ragged gasps, each step a battle against the chaos consuming the mansion.

The corridors twisted around him, walls crumbling into black voids, floors dissolving beneath his feet—only to reform in cruel, unfamiliar patterns.

The house wasn’t just changing. It was rejecting him.

The shadows surged closer, relentless as a pack of wolves, their whispers curling around him like a noose. They slithered beneath his skin, a chorus of agony and condemnation. He had defied Morpheus, breached the threshold of the Nightmare Room, and stolen what was never meant for mortal hands.

Ahead, the golden door of the Dream Room pulsed like a dying star—his only chance, his last thread to the waking world. If he could reach it, if he could just—

A force slammed into him.

Ice coiled around his ankles, yanking him backward with inhuman strength. He hit the ground hard, skull cracking against the unstable surface. Pain ricocheted through his bones, his vision spinning as his fingers clawed for the power he had stolen.

A shard of light flickered in his grip—his salvation. Then it slipped through his fingers. The fragment tumbled once, twice, before dimming to nothing.

“No—!” A scream tore from his throat, raw and desperate. But the mansion had already passed judgment.

The shadows dragged him toward another door. Not golden. Not warm. Cold. Endless.

The Nightmare Room loomed before him, its surface a roiling abyss, swallowing every flicker of light, every ounce of hope. The air trembled with the torment of those who had crossed its threshold before him.

Cassian fought. Clawed at the ground. Thrashed against the tendrils of darkness sinking into his skin.

But it was useless. The door groaned open, a gaping maw of shifting black. Inside, there was no floor. No walls. No reality.

Only abyss.

The whispers were no longer distant. They slithered inside his mind, seeping into the marrow of his bones. And then he was dragged in.

The Nightmare Door slammed shut behind him, sealing his fate with the finality of a funeral bell. Silence followed—deep, oppressive, suffocating. The mansion, once alive with shifting chaos, stilled. The golden glow that bathed the halls flickered. Dimmed.

And then, from the abyss beyond the Nightmare Room, Cassian’s screams began: Ragged. Relentless. Unending. Until even the mansion itself seemed to hold its breath.