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It began as something Claire barely noticed. The first night, she thought it was nothing. Mark had never talked in his sleep before, but people develop strange habits over time. Stress, maybe. She was scrolling through her phone in bed when she heard him murmur, “No. Not yet.”

She glanced over at him. Mark was fast asleep, his chest rising and falling in the rhythm of deep rest. She smiled to herself and went back to scrolling.

The second night was different. Claire was half-asleep, drifting on the edge of dreams, when Mark spoke again. His voice, low and steady, said, “They’ll notice soon.” She froze, blinking into the darkness.

Claire leaned over and shook his shoulder gently. “Mark, wake up. You’re dreaming.”

But Mark didn’t wake. His face was serene, and his lips curved into a faint, unsettling smile as he said, “Don’t let them see you.” Claire pulled back, her pulse quickening. She stared at him, waiting for more, but the room went silent again.

In the morning, she mentioned it at breakfast. “You were talking in your sleep again,” she said, her voice light. She didn’t want to sound too alarmed.

Mark shrugged. “That’s weird. I don’t do that.”

“You were saying some strange things.”

He looked at her, amused. “What kind of things?”

“Something about someone watching. It didn’t make any sense.”

“Probably just a dream,” he said, brushing it off. “You know how work’s been lately. Stress can do weird things.”

Claire nodded, though the memory of his words lingered in her mind. She tried to forget about it, to convince herself it didn’t mean anything.

As the week went on, Mark’s sleep-talking became a nightly event. At first, it was just fragments, words that could have meant anything: “Not yet,” or, “It’s under there.” But soon, the phrases became sharper, stranger. One night, he murmured, “Don’t open it. If you touch it, it’ll know.” Another night, it was, “They’re in the walls. They know you’re listening.”

The worst was when he said her name.

“Claire,” he whispered in the dark. “They’re watching you now.”

Her blood ran cold. She turned to him, shaking him awake. He groaned and opened his eyes, bleary and confused.

“You said my name,” she said, her voice shaking. “You were talking in your sleep again.”

“So? People talk in their sleep.” “Not like this,” she insisted. “You keep saying these… creepy things.”

Mark frowned. “It’s just dreams, Claire. You’re overthinking it.”

But Claire couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She started staying up later, trying to catch the exact moment when he began talking. Each night, his words became more detailed, more unsettling. He spoke of things that made no sense—places they’d never been, people she didn’t know. And always, always, there was a warning.

“It’s getting closer,” he said one night. “You shouldn’t have listened.”

By the second week, Claire noticed other things. Mark began acting differently, even when he was awake. He’d zone out mid-conversation, staring at nothing. Sometimes, he’d hum a strange tune under his breath, one she didn’t recognize. He seemed… distant, like a different person wearing his face.

The noises started shortly after. At first, they were faint: the soft creak of floorboards, the distant sound of footsteps in the hallway. She dismissed them as the house settling. But as the nights went on, the sounds grew louder, more deliberate.

One night, while Claire lay in the guest room trying to sleep, she heard Mark’s voice drifting down the hall. “They’re here now,” he said.

Her heart raced. She sat up, clutching the blanket. The sound came again, clear and deliberate.

“They’re waiting for you.”

Claire crept toward the bedroom, her phone clutched tightly in her hand. The hall was dark, the kind of dark that felt heavy, alive. As she reached the door, she saw Mark standing by the window.

“Mark?” she whispered.

He didn’t turn around. His shoulders were hunched, his head tilted at an unnatural angle.

“Mark, what are you doing?”

“You shouldn’t have listened,” he said, his voice hollow and strange. Before she could move, the lights flickered and went out.

The next morning, the neighbors called the police when they noticed the front door standing wide open.

Inside, the house was empty. Mark’s phone was still on the kitchen table, Claire’s keys hanging neatly by the door. But neither of them was there.

In the bedroom, scrawled across the walls in jagged black letters, were the words:

“DON’T LISTEN.”

They told him it was pneumonia. Something small at first, but it crept in, insidious. Henry Marlow sat in the hospice bed, the white sheets wrapped around his shrinking frame like a shroud.

The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and lavender, the latter courtesy of the nurse who came in once a day to hum cheerful tunes and remind him to eat. He never did. Food felt unnecessary now, a weight he no longer needed to carry. The weight that mattered was elsewhere.

It was the candles that brought the realization.

His granddaughter, Emily, came by one afternoon holding a cupcake. She had a sweet, stubborn smile, and her face was streaked with the grime of playground adventures. The cupcake had a single candle, stuck crookedly into the frosting, and a matchbook dangling between her small fingers.

“Make a wish, Grandpa,” she chirped.

He stared at the candle. One solitary flame waiting to exist, waiting for him to bring it into the world. His chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with his lungs.

The memory came, sharp and unbidden. He was five, standing at the head of the table, his father’s booming laugh filling the room as a cake covered in flickering candles was placed before him. Henry had stared at the flames, the golden points trembling slightly in the summer breeze sneaking through the open window. His mother told him to blow them out and make a wish. But he didn’t want to. The idea of extinguishing something so alive, so bright, had filled him with an unnamed dread. He refused, and his father grumbled, his mother sighed, and eventually, the candles had been pinched out by impatient fingers.

That was the first time.

Over the years, there were other birthdays. Some he remembered, others blurred together like smudged ink. Each one followed a similar pattern: the cake, the candles, the chorus of voices urging him to blow them out. Sometimes, he did. But not always.

Sometimes he made an excuse—a headache, too much fuss, no time for wishes. The candles would remain unlit, sitting like silent accusations on cakes that grew larger with age.

As Emily’s candle flickered to life in front of him, something cold curled around his spine.

“Grandpa, you’re supposed to blow it out,” Emily said, her voice pulling him back to the room.

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

That night, Henry dreamed of flames. Not bright and cheerful, but dull and sullen, burning low in a room that stretched endlessly into the dark. Each flame was perched on a cake he recognized from years past—cakes with uneven frosting, cakes from forgotten office parties, cakes baked hastily by his ex-wife when their marriage was still warm enough to make such gestures.

The flames were waiting.

Henry woke gasping, his chest heaving against the weight of something invisible and oppressive. He could feel them now, the unlit candles of his past. Not just candles but moments, choices. The times he had turned away, refused to engage, let the world’s smallest celebrations pass by unmarked.

The first real consequence came the next morning.

The nurse entered the room to find Henry’s breakfast tray untouched, as usual, but this time the coffee mug had a faint scorch mark on its handle, as if it had been briefly exposed to an open flame. She muttered about faulty machines, swapped out the mug, and thought no more of it. But Henry noticed.

By the end of the week, the scorch marks were on his sheets, the bedframe, even the walls. They spread slowly at first, little singes like the touch of an impatient match, but they grew bolder with each passing day.

When Emily visited again, she brought a photograph she had drawn in school. It was simple—a cake with candles, a figure blowing them out. Henry stared at it for a long time.

But it wasn’t. He knew it now, knew it deep in the marrow of his brittle bones. The candles weren’t just candles. They were moments of life, connections, opportunities to make a wish, to claim something, however fleeting, for himself. Every time he had left them unlit, every time he had turned away, he had left something undone.

The scorch marks became burns. His pillow smoldered one evening, filling the room with the acrid smell of ash before he swatted it away with trembling hands. The flames were growing bolder, hungrier.

By the second week, Henry stopped sleeping. He could feel the heat at the edges of his consciousness, hear the crackling in the silence of the night. They were coming for him, all the unlit flames, all the ignored wishes.

When the nurse brought his dinner one evening, he asked her for a candle.

She frowned. “A candle? What for?”

“Just bring one,” he rasped. “Please.”

She returned with a small white taper, puzzled but obliging. Henry lit it with the trembling matchstick hands of a man desperate for absolution.

The flame flickered to life, and for a moment, the room grew unbearably bright. He stared into it, his vision swimming with shapes he couldn’t quite grasp—faces, places, fragments of things that might have been.

He blew it out. For the first time in weeks, Henry Marlow slept.

But when he woke, the scorch marks were gone, replaced by something worse.

Shadows danced on the walls, shifting and stretching like living things. Each shadow bore the faint outline of a candle, a flame unlit. They were everywhere—on the ceiling, the floor, the windows. His life etched in shades of black.

There was no escape now. The unlit and unblown by the celebrant are candles that were deprived of being a part of ones memories. And every year missed has consequences.

And they will come to collect, on your last few moments.

There was once a star, or so the old stories said, though nobody could quite remember its name. It wasn’t a brilliant thing, like the ones that dotted the constellations or ignited the imaginations of dreamers. 

This one was different. It hung in the sky, unnoticed, tucked between shapes and constellations that were known to the world but forgotten by time. There it sat, still and silent, hardly ever remembered, and yet never truly gone.

They called it “The Forgotten Light,” but the name never quite captured it. They searched for it, but it was never quite where they thought it should be, and eventually, they gave up, as people tend to do when something doesn’t quite belong.

And so the Forgotten Light was forgotten. Not by the sky, of course. The sky never forgets. It waited.

The truth was, the star had never really been lost. It had just been waiting for something—or someone. The kind of person who would understand its riddle, the one who could see beyond the surface of things. 

But it didn’t want a hero or a great discovery. 

It just wanted to be remembered.

But you wouldn’t find the star through a telescope or a dream. It was more than that. No one knew this, not even the most experienced astronomers.

Then, one night, a strange thing happened. 

The star, that forgotten thing, flickered—not like a dying flame, but like a secret just about to spill out. And from somewhere, a cat appeared. Not an extraordinary cat—just a black one with a tail that curled in three neat stripes. It had been around for a while, probably, but nobody had paid it much attention.

It sat, unremarkable, staring into the sky with eyes that glittered in the moonlight. For a long time, it had gazed at the stars, the constellations that people knew by heart. But tonight, its eyes caught something else. 

Something faint. A glow. The star.

For a moment, the cat blinked. And then, something happened. A small shiver rippled across the world—an odd twist in time, barely noticeable to anyone else. The cat’s fur bristled, and its gaze hardened. 

The world didn’t end, and the heavens didn’t crack open. But something strange happened. 

Something changed.

The star didn’t fade away. Threads of light began to snap and drift into the air, not fading, but scattering, breaking into pieces that seemed to stretch across the edges of time. It wasn’t the end of the star; it was its beginning—again, and again, and again.

The cat’s task was complete. It turned, its three-striped tail flicking in the quiet night. And in the distance, the star was gone, shattered into a million fragments of light and shadow, splintering across time in ways no human could understand.

The cat walked away into the darkness, leaving no trace. But somewhere, if you listened closely enough, you could hear the whisper of a memory. 

A forgotten light. A secret star. 

A cat who had seen it all.

And it would never be remembered again. 

Not until it was needed, for there are things that wait. And sometimes, when you least expect it, you’re part of something that’s already been.