Ansel never believed geography could alter the landscape of the mind. He always assumed wherever he went, the unwelcome companion would follow, like a shadow stitched to his heels. However, therapy had planted a small, persistent idea in him: sometimes the body must move first, and the mind will follow.

He begins with simple shifts.

Healing rarely announces itself with loud horns and fanfare. For Ansel, it begins in a small, softly lit room with a chair that creaks when he shifts his weight and an online therapist who speaks with a calm that feels almost foreign. Exposure therapy — the phrase alone tightens something in his chest. It sounds clinical and sterile, but the work is anything but. It is raw. It is intimate. It is a slow untangling of fear.

Morning in Shadowbrook often arrives muted, the sun filtered through layers of fog and mist. Yet for Ansel, even this dim light feels like a reprieve. A fragile democracy restored after the tyranny of night. The coup has ended, the shadow cabinet dissolved, and the Mayor of Despair resumes his post. But something is different. He is no longer content to govern by fear alone. He is drafting mental reform for cognitive transition.

For most, sleep is a gentle surrender. A slow drift into silence or a soft curtain drawn across the day. For Ansel, it is a heightened cliff. Each night he stands at its edge, eyelids heavy, body aching for rest, yet unable to step forward without terror. The descent into unconsciousness feels less like release and more like freefall into a void where his unwelcome companion waits.

Ansel often jokes, bitterly, that he is the “Mayor of Despair.” But beneath the humor lies a truth he cannot escape: his mind is a city governed by fear, and he is both its reluctant leader and its most captive citizen.

Within this city, the streets are crowded with anxieties. Every alleyway hides a catastrophe waiting to unfold. The skyline is dominated by towers of doubt, their windows glowing with imagined disasters. Even the parks and open spaces — places meant for rest — are overrun with whispers of what could go wrong. And at the center of it all sits Ansel, presiding over a council he never asked to lead.

Ansel Kincaid has never lived alone — not truly. Though his apartment in Shadowbrook is quiet, and his phone rarely rings, there is always someone with him. A presence. A voice. A shadow stitched into the seams of his consciousness. He calls it the “unwelcome companion.”

Shadowbrook is a place that seems to exist between worlds — not quite real, not entirely imagined. To outsiders, it’s a town tucked in a valley, surrounded by towering forests and steep hills that seem to eagerly lean forward, as if trying to keep quiet secrets. To Ansel Kincaid, it’s something more: a mirror of his mind, a landscape shaped by fog and memory, where the weather never seems to completely clear and the past never quite lets go.