He was alone.
The words were a brand on his mind: Find the Mindrift.
Arjun pushed himself up from the ash-strewn ground. The world around him was a monument to endings. Above, the sky was a living wound—a churning ocean of bruised purple and sickly green, swirling around a colossal, impossible structure. It was a jagged spire of black iron and crystal, a twisted root spearing down from an infinite height and plunging into the misty abyss beyond the cliff he stood on. It pulsed with a deep, subsonic hum that vibrated in his teeth and bones.
A wind, cold and smelling of ozone and stone, pulled at his rough-spun tunic. These were not his clothes. The feeling of the coarse fabric against his skin was a constant, wrong reminder.
Find the Mindrift.
The command was an itch in his brain he couldn't scratch. He had to move.
He became a shadow, slipping into the corpse of the city. Towers of steel and glass were skeletal fingers clawing at the angry sky. Everything was silent. It was a silence that felt heavy, like a held breath.
Then, a sound. A voice.
It was rough, carried on the wind, but human. Another joined it. His heart hammered against his ribs. People.
He pressed himself into the hollow of a collapsed wall, its surface webbed with cracks, and looked out.
There they were.
A group of figures, maybe thirty, moving like a single scared animal. Their clothes were like his—drab, patched, practical. But their faces were maps of a hard life, pale and tight with a fear so deep it looked permanent. They carried their lives on their backs—jagged metal, sacks, containers of murky water. Their eyes never stopped moving, scanning the ruins, the sky, the dark places.
A man at the front held not a weapon, but a staff. At its top, a crystal glowed with a weak, sickly yellow light. He would thrust it forward, and the group would freeze, waiting. They were not living here. They were hiding.
Arjun's hope was a physical ache. He could follow them. Lose himself in their number. They had to know something. They had to know about the Mindrift.
But a colder, sharper feeling warned him. They moved like prey. And where there is prey, there are hunters.
The need to not be alone was a stronger force. He had to try.
He waited, then slid from his hiding place. He matched their nervous pace, copying the hunch of their shoulders, the quick, quiet steps. He pulled his hood low. He was a ghost following other ghosts.
For a few heartbeats, it worked.
They turned into a broad plaza, slightly clearer of rubble. The man with the staff relaxed his guard, waving them on faster. The group's collective relief was a thing he could almost touch.
Arjun's boot scuffed a loose piece of rebar.
The sound was a gunshot in the silence.
The group froze as one.
Every single head turned. Every pair of eyes, wide with a fear he was beginning to understand, locked onto him.
He stood alone. Their fear curdled, twisting into something ugly and sharp: pure, panicked hate.
The leader pointed, his voice a harsh, guttural crack. "Val'koth!"
He didn't know the word. He didn't need to. Outsider. Threat.
A woman's scream ripped through the air. The group shattered, scrambling away from him as if he carried a plague.
In the chaos, a small child tripped, falling hard onto the broken ground. A thin, pained cry was swallowed by the panic.
Arjun moved without thought. A memory of a simpler world, where you helped someone who fell. He stepped forward, his hand reaching out. Not to hurt. To help.
It was the worst thing he could have done.
A man with a face carved from terror didn't look at Arjun. He lunged for the child, snatching it away from Arjun's offered hand as if it were fire. Here, kindness was a dangerous thing.
Arjun stared, his mind refusing to understand. His hand hung in the empty air, a stupid, useless gesture.
He never saw the one behind him.
There was no sound. Only a perfect, shocking cold in the center of his back. A cold that burned. He looked down, confused.
The tip of a blade, dark and shimmering with a faint purple light, stuck out of his chest. No blood. Just a dark stain spreading over the grey cloth. The feeling was not of pain, but of a deep, wrong coldness spreading through him.
He tried to draw breath to scream. Nothing came. His last sight was not of the blade, but of the child's terrified eyes. I was only trying to help...
The cold swallowed everything. The world vanished.
WRONG.
That was the first feeling. His body did not feel like his own. A deep, icy wrongness was locked in his chest, as if his heart had been replaced with a stone. He gasped, and the air felt thin and strange in his lungs.
HOME.
The second feeling. The pressure of his mattress. The weight of his comforter. Light through blue curtains.
His hands flew to his chest, patting, searching. Only soft cotton. No hole. No ice. But the memory of the cold was a physical thing, a ghost limb of pain.
The smell of ozone and stone was gone, replaced by the faint dust of his room. But the feeling of that coarse tunic against his skin—that feeling remained. A phantom texture that wouldn't leave.
He remembered. Everything. The storm-wracked sky. The impossible spire. The command. The fearful people. The blade.
He hadn't traveled. He had died.
A great, silent shudder seized his body. He wrapped his arms around himself, pressing down hard, trying to hold himself together. His breath came in short, sharp gasps that didn't seem to bring any air. This wasn't fear. This was his mind cracking under a weight it could not hold.
It was a dream, a desperate, sane part of him whispered. A stress dream. It felt real, but it wasn't. It can't be.
But another part, a colder, quieter part, knew that was a lie. Dreams fade. This did not fade. The ghost of the blade was still in his chest. The feeling of that rough cloth was still on his skin. Dreams don't leave the feel of another world on your body.
The door creaked open. His mother stood there. For a single, heart-stopping moment, he saw not his mother, but a stranger—a woman with eyes tired from a worry he caused, her mouth a thin line of resigned frustration. Then the moment passed, and she was just Mom.
Her eyes took him in: sitting rigidly upright, pale, sweat on his brow, his arms locked around himself. Her first feeling was a mother's sharp fear. Something is wrong. Her second, a weary sadness. Again. It's always something.
"Arjun?" Her voice was careful, holding back a sigh. "What's going on? You look like you've seen a ghost." Inside, she pleaded for a simple answer. A nightmare. The flu. Something she could fix.
He looked at her, and his eyes held a distance that scared her. For a second, he seemed to be looking through her, at something else entirely.
He opened his mouth. She saw a truth hovering there, something dark and huge. Then, it was gone. His shoulders slumped. He looked down at his hands, now clenched in his lap.
"The math test," he said, the words flat. "Today. I just... woke up feeling strange. My chest feels tight. I guess I'm just... nervous."
The excuse was so ordinary, so weak, that her worry curdled into frustration. The strange look in his eyes must have been her imagination. This was his pattern. Avoidance. Drama. Her voice lost its softness. "Nervous," she repeated, the word lifeless. "Arjun, sitting there and shaking won't change your grade. Nervousness is a excuse. The only thing that fixes it is being prepared. You should have spent less time worrying and more time studying."
The words felt hollow even to her, but she was tired. She believed pushing him was love. She believed comfort would make him weak.
He just nodded, not meeting her eyes. "I know."
"Then get up," she said, her tone leaving no room for argument. "I made tea. It's getting cold. Come downstairs. Now."
She didn't wait for a reply. She turned and left, closing the door with a soft but firm click. She leaned against the wall outside, closing her eyes. Why is everything so hard? she thought, the old ache returning to her heart.
In the room, Arjun slowly uncurled his arms. The icy feeling in his chest was now a memory. His mother's words, about tests and studying, felt like they were spoken in a different language. They had no meaning anymore.
He focused on the feeling. The ghost of the rough tunic on his skin. The memory of the blade. It was no dream. The proof was in this feeling, a sensory memory that did not fade.
He had died. And yet, he was back.
Why?
The question hung in the air, vast and terrifying.
From downstairs, her voice cut through his thoughts, sharp and final. "Arjun! Now!"
The sound snapped him back to the present. The boy with the math test was a costume he had to put on.
He took a deep breath, the air still feeling foreign.
"Coming," he called out, his voice surprisingly normal.
He swung his legs out of bed, his feet finding the familiar cool wood of the floor. He had to go down. He had to drink the tea. He had to pretend.