The rain hadn't stopped for hours. It drummed ceaselessly on the windshield like a thousand ticking clocks, each second another warning. Kieran Vale blinked through the blur of city lights and stormwater, his hands white-knuckled around the steering wheel. One more hour. Just one more hour to reach the hospital. Then he could breathe.
He never got there.
The screech of tires came first. Then the impact. Steel folding like paper. Glass erupting like crystal rain. And just like that, the world went silent.
When Kieran opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was snow.
Not the digital blue glow of hospital lights. Not the sterile white ceiling of the ER where he'd spent so many sleepless nights. No—the snow here was real. Cold. Falling gently against his face as he lay on his back in a forest unfamiliar and wrong.
His breath caught. The sky above was steel-grey, the clouds swollen with more snow to come. Trees stretched like skeletal arms, dark and ancient. There was no sign of the city, no sound of passing cars. Only the whispering wind, carrying the distant cry of a wolf.
He tried to sit up—and winced. His body ached, but not with the pain of trauma. He was... intact. Whole. And younger?
He glanced down at his hands. Slimmer. Paler. The fingernails were unfamiliar. The skin unscarred. He stood slowly, shakily, and caught sight of himself in a frozen puddle.
The reflection staring back was not his own.
The face was roughly eighteen, angular and high-cheekboned, framed by thick black hair that brushed his ears. His eyes were still dark, but they gleamed with something—an eerie glimmer, as if they held starlight in their depths.
And at the center of his chest, resting just beneath the ragged furs that clothed him, was a pendant. Black as obsidian, circular, pulsing faintly with blue light.
System Initiating...
The voice echoed not in his ears, but deep within his mind. Cold and clinical, yet oddly gentle.
"Welcome, Kieran Vale. Host synchronization complete. Preparing Arcane Core Protocol..."
He stumbled backward, gasping. "What the hell is this?"
Images flashed before his eyes. Diagrams of mystical symbols. Notes on ley lines, aetheral planes, and something called the Mirror Realm. And then, one word carved into his memory like fire:
Kamar-Taj.
His heart pounded. "This... this can't be real. Am I dreaming? Is this some coma fantasy?"
But the snow was too cold. The hunger in his belly too sharp. The pain in his spine too real.
This is not Earth, he realized. And I'm not who I was.
Night fell fast. With no other option, he wandered through the trees, each breath visible in the frigid air. He found shelter beneath a rocky outcrop, shielded from the wind, and collapsed there. The pendant pulsed again—warmer now, and steadier.
He closed his eyes, exhausted.
And the dreams came.
Visions of a world on fire. Dragons in the sky. Wolves howling beneath the Northern lights. A throne of swords... and a boy with three eyes watching him through ravens.
"You are not of this world," a voice whispered in the dark. "But this world is breaking—and you are the crack."
He awoke in a cold sweat.
Somewhere nearby, a wolf howled again.
By morning, the snow had softened. Kieran pushed forward, guided by something unseen. Hunger gnawed at him, but the cold had dulled it. That, or the adrenaline. Eventually, he reached the edge of a cliff. Below, a small village lay nestled in the frost.
Smoke rose from a few chimneys. People moved. Horses. Steel glinted in the pale light. Civilization.
And yet... he hesitated.
This wasn't his world. He didn't know the rules. But if he wanted answers, if he wanted to understand the system in his head, the pendant at his chest, the magic trying to claw its way into his mind—he had no choice but to descend.
Kieran Vale, once a med student, now something else entirely, turned away from the past.
He took his first step toward the future.
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