A sound. Pebbles tumbling in the wind. Small, faint, but real. Jin's ears twitched, and for the first time in what felt like forever, he wasn't trapped in silence.
Woah. I can hear again.
But instead of marveling at his regained sense, Jin's focus shot inward. He fixed his attention on the streams of glow energy coursing through him, watching closely as they dispersed from his ears. The glow hurried toward his eyes, still chasing his unspoken wish for healing.
Time blurred. Slowly, the glow dimmed from his muscles, releasing its hold. The ability to clutch at the pebbles beneath him, to move his own body, shifted from desperate wish into solid reality. Yet most of the energy continued onward, funneled into the hardest place to mend—his eyes.
A chuckle escaped him, quiet but full of relief. For the first time, he felt genuine affection for this strange, magical gift. But the sound hid a darker truth, masking the seed of fear that had been buried deep in his soul. A fear that had taken root long before Ohner or Melissa.
It had begun the day he learned his father was dead. That day, freedom—the thing he had always prayed for—came rushing toward him. And with it, anxiety. Excitement had barely brushed him before dread gripped tighter, shattering every blueprint he had imagined for his life outside the mansion.
Now, even with control of his body returned, Jin did not move. His mind writhed against him, and his fear boiled over into his limbs. His hands fidgeted restlessly in the gravel, and his teeth tore at his fingernails one by one. Each bite was a silent prayer for the trembling to stop, a desperate order to his thoughts to quiet down, and a fragile hope—that this was only a dream. That he would wake in his bed, prisoner once more.
One thought rose above the chaos, simple and suffocating.
Please return me to my prison.
All the bravado of freedom scattered like ash in the wind. Shackles no longer bound him, yet the fear of living without them had never felt heavier.
His wish, of course, would never come. Time moved forward as it always did, uncaring, unyielding.
Jin's thoughts spun so quickly that his body could barely keep up; his nails were already gnawed down to nothing. A trickle of glow energy parted from his eyes, abandoning its work there to tend to his freshly torn fingertips.
He chuckled softly as he watched the glow slither toward his hands. One last time, he wished for everything to stop—that maybe, just maybe, his new magic would grant him the impossible and freeze this moment before the reality of freedom struck.
Nothing happened. The world did not pause. His magic could not stop time. This was no dream, and soon he would have to face the world.
A sigh escaped him as his face tightened, a single tear carving a line down his cheek.
He gave up. Letting his body sag as if it were still paralyzed, he tried to sink deeper into the pebbles beneath him. He told himself he had to be ready. But a small, poisonous thought lingered at the back of his mind—a hope for a swift end to everything, at any cost.
…
At last, far longer than it should have taken, the glow dispersed from his eyes, retreating to nest at his heart like an ember banked for later, waiting for the next call to action.
He could see now. He knew it. Yet he kept his eyes closed, whispering to himself, Just a few more seconds. Seconds became minutes. Minutes stretched into nearly an hour before he finally gathered the courage to move.
Still lying down, he raised his right hand to his face, dragging the dust and grit across his skin. He smudged the filth down over his cheeks and then lowered his hand, ready to see the world.
Expecting a blinding flash, Jin cracked his eyes open. But the light never came. In fact, there was very little light at all.
Where Jin lay was a barren wasteland, the ground smothered in a blanket of pebbles. Now and then, massive stones jutted upward, like forgotten monuments planted by some wandering giant.
The weight of the scene finally pressed into him, cooling the panic in his chest like a bucket of cold water. His eyes flicked left and right, carefully surveying the emptiness, still unsure if he should risk moving at all.
Then his gaze drifted upward—and froze.
Directly above him hung a perfect eclipse. The sun was swallowed whole, reduced to nothing but a blazing ring of fire outlining its absence. Not a flicker of light leaked through, as though the sky itself had been devoured.
A shiver ran down Jin's spine.
Jin slowly turned his head to the side and found something even stranger than waking up beneath an eclipse. The darkness around him ended abruptly, a clean cut across the horizon, barely a mile away. Beyond that sharp divide, daylight reigned, bright and unbroken. From that lit edge, even at such an immense distance, a steady hiss of steam drifted to his ears.
No way I'm actually hearing that from here, Jin thought, lips twitching. I had decent hearing back on Earth, but this? This is something else. Magic really is great, huh.
With a shrug, he closed his eyes and leaned into the gift. If he was stuck here, he might as well test what his new senses could tell him. He let the sounds wash over him, painting a picture in his mind.
Steam to the left. Steam to the right. Steam ahead. Steam behind. All starting exactly a mile out, circling him perfectly. He was in the dead center of this strange biome.
Listening harder, he frowned. There was nothing in between himself and that ring of steam—no insects, no wind, no shifting of earth. The silence was absolute.
Heh. Maybe that guy actually did give me a safe spot, Jin thought with a thin smile.
Still, hope wasn't enough. He needed certainty. So he pushed his hearing further, no longer flattening the world into a two-dimensional map but stretching his awareness above, below, and all around.
And then, in perfect sync, two sounds broke the silence—one from above, one from below.
Both were distant, about a mile away, but each carried its own menace.
From beneath Jin came a low, guttural rumble, a growl so deep it made the stones tremble where it resonated. The ground itself seemed alive, irritated, restless.
From above came something different, yet no less threatening. Right overhead—right where the eclipse hung—a smooth, rapid swirling of air. It was constant, unnatural, like a massive fan hidden just behind the sun.
Jin let out a long, heavy sigh. So much for peace. A mile of silence, and the only things waiting for me are above and below.
Steeling himself, he pressed his palms into the cold pebbles. The thought of rising only stoked his nerves further, and before he realized it, his newly healed nails were between his teeth again. He jerked his hand away, slamming it down into the stones to anchor himself.
With a slow, deliberate push, Jin forced himself upright. He waited there, hunched, every muscle tense, ears straining for any hint of movement.
And then he heard it.
A slicing swoosh tore through the air above him, followed by a voice—firm, commanding, and utterly foreign.
"Child, now that you have recovered, return to your mansion, I'm not a babysitter."
Jin froze. The voice hadn't come from the sky, nor the ground. It hadn't come from anywhere. It simply appeared in his ears, as though spoken directly into his skull.
Before he could even begin to form a thought, another rumble welled up beneath him. Then a different voice filled his head—loose, elderly, but stubborn, carrying the kind of weight only age could give.
"Don't be so quick to send him back. This one has brought us more food in a single week than we could have gathered in two months!"
The moment the old voice faded, the world responded. Pebbles leapt into the air as a violent gust of wind slammed into the earth around Jin. The firm voice returned, sharper, angrier.
"No. The mongrel gives us nothing in return for guarding one of his. And this one has already overstayed his welcome. Most of his spawn recover and clear the trial within two days. Yet this one… takes seven!"
Jin's heart sank.
Gods, not again. His jaw tightened as a bitter déjà vu washed over him. Two unseen lunatics, probably way out of my league, arguing about my fate like I'm a sack of potatoes. And once again, no one thinks to ask me what I want…