The City That Sleeps Inside Me

I have two lives.

One begins when I wake up in my small apartment, drink bitter coffee, and trudge through gray streets beneath flickering neon signs. That’s the world everyone sees—the one made of alarms, errands, emails.

The other begins the moment I close my eyes.

That world is not a dream. It never was.

I call it Ilyra.

A city of silver trees and violet skies, where the air tastes like rain before it falls. Where bridges float in the sky and buildings hum softly like sleeping creatures. Where the moon is not just a light, but a face—watching. Remembering.

I’ve been walking its streets since I was six.

At first, I thought it was just a vivid dreamscape, a place my mind escaped to when real life got too loud. But dreams fade. Ilyra stayed. And it grew with me—changed with me. New streets appeared. Familiar shops evolved. The same faces reappeared again and again. Some of them even remembered my name.

Especially Soren.

He’s always waiting at the fountain in the central plaza, hands in his pockets, smirking like we’ve shared a hundred secrets I can’t quite recall. His voice is like wind over water—gentle, but never soft. He speaks in riddles. But he’s the only one who never forgets me.

“Your world doesn’t want you anymore,” he said last night.

I laughed. “Tell me something new.”

But he didn’t smile.

“The veil’s thinning,” he whispered. “One day you won’t wake up. You’ll have to choose.”

When I woke this morning, my sheets were soaked with sweat. My hands were trembling. And on my right wrist—a new mark. A curved symbol like an eye carved into a crescent moon.

It wasn’t a bruise. It wasn’t ink.

It was part of me.

I tried scrubbing it off. Nothing worked.

That’s not the first mark.

Three weeks ago, it started with a spiral on my shoulder. Then a line of stars down my back. No doctor could explain it. No scanner picked up anything. It was as if my skin was being rewritten from the inside out.

Each time I dream of Ilyra, the marks grow.

And each time, I remember more.

Last night, the city was different.

The towers were dimmer. The sky was cracked with red lightning. People were gone—vanished from the streets. The fountain had dried. And Soren was nowhere.

Instead, I heard music. Soft and slow. A lullaby I didn’t know, but somehow recognized.

It came from the Mirror Garden—an ancient part of the city I was told never to enter.

They say the mirrors there don’t show your reflection.

They show who you used to be.

I walked toward it anyway.

With every step, I felt my real body fade—like I wasn’t asleep anymore, but leaving something behind. Like I wasn’t dreaming, but remembering.

I stepped into the garden.

Mirrors lined the trees like hanging leaves. But they didn’t reflect me.

They showed versions of me—hundreds of lives lived and lost. A warrior with silver eyes. A healer made of starlight. A child holding a pearl that glowed like memory. All of them… me.

And then, in the center, stood Soren.

“You remember now,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

“You never left,” he replied. “You were born here. Your other life was the dream.”

The garden trembled. A crack opened in the sky.

And I didn’t wake up

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