Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a lightning strike of pure, animal agony.
The first sensation was a fire, a brutal, constricting burn around his throat, crushing his windpipe. The second was the desperate, involuntary convulsion of his body, muscles screaming for an oxygen that would not come. His legs kicked at empty air. A strangled, wet gagging sound tore from a throat that was not his own, a sound of pure, primal panic.
What's happening? An accident? Am I being strangled?
Andrei Hayes's thoughts were a frantic, disjointed scramble. The last thing he remembered was the spiral—the malevolent, glowing spiral from the coin, expanding to consume his vision as he ran through the Bucharest night. The cold metal had been clutched in his hand. Now, his hands were clawing at a coarse, fibrous rope digging into his neck.
Instinct, a deeper and more ancient knowledge than his own, took over. His hands, stronger and more calloused than they should be, scrabbled upwards, finding the rough knot. His fingers, slick with sweat, slipped, but a surge of adrenaline gave him a desperate strength. He hauled himself upwards, a grotesque pull-up, muscles in his arms and back shrieking in protest. The pressure on his throat lessened for a single, precious second, just enough for him to gasp a shred of air that burned like acid.
The strain was unbearable. With a final, tearing effort, he managed to hook a foot onto the overturned chair beneath him, finding precarious purchase. He pushed up, slackening the noose enough to wrench it over his head.
He collapsed to the floorboards in a heap, the world spinning. The impact jarred every bone. He lay there, choking, coughing, dragging ragged, sobbing breaths into lungs that felt bruised. Each gasp was a victory and a reminder of the pain. The rough wood grain pressed against his cheek, solid and real.
This was not his apartment. The air didn't smell of dust and cheap coffee. It smelled of damp rot, salt, and old fish. The light was wrong—a gray, sickly twilight filtering through a single, grimy window.
He tried to speak, to say "Where am I?" but all that emerged was a pained croak. The voice was wrong. It was higher, rougher, laced with an accent he couldn't place.
He looked at his hands, splayed on the floorboards. They were not his hands. They were leaner, the knuckles prominent, the skin marked with small, white scars and fresh rope burns. Dirt was ingrained under the nails.
A cold dread, far deeper than the physical pain, began to seep into him. This was no dream. The hanging was no illusion. The memories of two lives—one ending in a stolen coin and shattered glass, the other ending with a kicked chair—slammed into each other inside his skull.
He was in a room that was a stranger's. He was wearing a body that was a stranger's.
And the rope still hung from the ceiling, swaying gently, a silent testament to why.
The pain in his throat was a constant, throbbing anchor to a horrifying reality. Andrei—because he was still Andrei, that was the only name he had—pushed himself up onto his elbows, his body trembling with weakness and shock. His gaze was fixed on the swaying rope, a grim pendulum counting down the seconds of a life that had already ended.
Then the floodgates broke.
It wasn't like remembering. It was an invasion. A violent torrent of sensation and emotion that wasn't his own, crashing into his mind.
The smell of the sea, thick with brine and tar. A sense of sharp pride, the weight of a heavy coin purse hidden inside his vest. The taste of cheap, warm ale washing down the triumph of a successful scam.
Then, a darker current. The cold, gut-wrenching fear that smelled like cheap tobacco and sweat. The image of a man with a face like weathered stone—Baron Vogler. The memory wasn't a picture; it was a feeling of sheer, helpless dread. The Baron's voice, smooth as oil yet hard as iron: "A smart boy like you, Lutz. You'll pay it back. One way or another."
Lutz. The name echoed in the hollows of his mind, followed by a cascade of associations. The Harbor Vipers. A black tattoo of a coiled serpent. The crushing weight of a number, an impossible debt. The final, chilling certainty: They're coming tonight.
Andrei groaned, clutching his head. These weren't his memories, but they were etched into the very pathways of this brain, screaming with the freshness of a wound. He saw a narrow, filthy alley—his alley. He knew the exact loose floorboard near the bed where a few pathetic coins were hidden. He felt the ingrained knowledge of every market stall in Indaw Harbor that was an easy mark, every guard whose patrol could be predicted.
He saw a woman's face, blurred and kind, selling fish—a fleeting moment of childhood warmth, long gone. He felt the sting of a slap from a man he knew was his father, a drunkard who'd vanished years ago.
It was all there. The entire, short, desperate life of Lutz Fischer. The cunning, the pride, the loneliness, and the final, overwhelming despair that had led to the rope.
Andrei Hayes, the scholar, the language teacher, was drowning in this ghost's past. He felt a profound, aching pity for the boy whose body he now wore. This wasn't a possession; it was a inheritance of tragedy. He hadn't just stolen a life; he had been bequeathed a death sentence.
The two consciousnesses didn't merge seamlessly. They clashed. Andrei's modern sensibilities recoiled at the visceral street-smarts, the amorality of survival. Lutz's instincts screamed at Andrei's paralysis, his intellectualizing in the face of immediate, mortal danger.
He was a composite creature, a patchwork soul stitched together with agony and memory, lying on the floor of a dead man's room.
The need to see became an undeniable urge. He had to put a face to the ghost whose memories now haunted him.
Pushing himself up from the floor, his legs unsteady, Andrei stumbled towards a small, cracked washbasin in the corner. Above it hung a small, tarnished mirror, its silvering flaked away at the edges like a decaying photograph.
He hesitated for a moment, his heart thudding, afraid of the finality of the image. Then, he forced himself to look.
A stranger stared back.
The face was young, probably no older than his own nineteen years, but it was aged by a hardness Andrei had never known. The features were sharp and angular, with a pointed chin and high cheekbones that spoke of lean times. The skin was pale, but not sickly—it had the resilient quality of someone who spent their life in the changeable weather of a port city.
But it was the eyes that arrested him. They were a pale, calculating gray-blue, like the harbor fog outside. They were wide now, dilated with a shock that mirrored his own, but he could see an innate sharpness in them, a latent cunning that was entirely foreign. A faint, white scar bisected the left eyebrow, a small testament to a life of close calls. His hair was ash-blonde, medium-short length, unruly and unkept but not unclean.
This is Lutz Fischer.
The thought was no longer an abstract concept. It was this face, these eyes, this scar. He tentatively raised a hand—his hand, with its calloused palms and clever fingers—and touched the reflection. The cool glass met his touch. He watched the stranger in the mirror mimic the gesture perfectly.
A wave of dizzying dissociation washed over him. He was both the observer and the reflection. Andrei Hayes was a ghost looking out from behind the eyes of Lutz Fischer.
His scholar's mind, ever analytical even in the midst of crisis, began to dissect the image. This wasn't just a body; it was a tool. The sharp features could be arranged into expressions of earnest charm or naive fear—essential for a swindler. The lean build suggested speed and agility, not brute strength. The eyes, once the panic subsided, looked like they could be disarmingly direct or shifty with equal ease.
He tried to smile. The reflection turned into a strange, grimacing thing that was neither a smile nor a frown. It was the expression of a puppet whose strings were being pulled by a novice.
He let the expression drop. This was his face now. This was the instrument of his survival. The face of a dead man, animated by a desperate soul. There was a tragedy in it that made his chest ache, but also a terrifying potential.
He was no longer Andrei Hayes, the struggling student. He was a secret wrapped in a mystery, housed in the skin of a Feysac street urchin.
The thought was still hanging in the air, vast and unsettling, when the first heavy knock landed on the door.
THUMP.
The face in the mirror flinched, the gray-blue eyes widening in a very specific, ingrained terror that had nothing to do with Andrei and everything to do with Lutz.
The moment of introspection was over. The assessment was complete. He was Lutz Fischer.
And the most terrifying thought of all began to crystallize: The debt Lutz owed? The Vipers coming tonight? That was his problem now.
The initial tsunami of Lutz's memories receded, leaving behind a bog of dread and disorientation. Lutz slowly, painfully, dragged himself to a sitting position against the wall.
The rough plaster scraped his back through the thin shirt. He focused on the sensation, a point of raw reality to tether his spinning mind. He was here. In a body named Lutz Fischer, in a city called Indaw Harbor, in a country named Feysac.
The words surfaced from Lutz's knowledge, but it was Andrei's mind that began to analyze them. Feysac. The name had a guttural, harsh sound. It fit the glimpses from Lutz's memories: a nation of industry, cold weather, and a warlike culture. He saw flashes of flags bearing a stylized weapon, heard echoes of tavern songs praising the God of Combat.
The God of Combat. The thought should have been absurd. But after the coin, the spiral, and the hanging, it landed with the weight of terrifying fact. This wasn't just another country; this was another world. A world with its own rules, its own history, its own… gods.
His eyes scanned the room, not with Lutz's familiarity, but with a scholar's desperate search for data. The architecture was a strange, anachronistic blend. The gas lamp on the wall, its glass smudged and sooty, spoke of an industrial age. But the construction of the building itself, the heavy timber beams and crude iron fixtures, felt older, rougher. It was like a distorted echo of Earth's own Victorian era, but twisted down a darker path.
Steampunk, his modern mind supplied, but the term felt frivolous. This wasn't a aesthetic; this was the grimy, lived-in reality. This was a world where people apparently hung themselves over debts to gangs led by men called "Baron."
A fresh wave of panic, cold and sharp, threatened to rise. He was a linguist, a historian of dead languages. What use was that here? How could he possibly navigate a world that operated on such brutal, immediate terms? Lutz's knowledge was a map of the city's underworld, but it was a map written in a language of fear and survival. Andrei could read it, but he didn't know how to walk its paths.
Yet, a stubborn spark of the academic remained. The same curiosity that had drawn him to the cursed coin now fixated on the fragments of this new reality. The different gods. The strange technology. The very fact of his own existence here pointed to laws of reality far different from those he knew.
He was a living anomaly, an impossible data point, an Error, and if he wanted to survive, he couldn't just be Lutz Fischer, the terrified swindler. He had to be Andrei Hayes, the analyst. He had to study this world, learn its rules, and find a loophole.
The thought was a lifeline, fragile but real. He had to get out of this room. He had to see this city with his own eyes. But first, he had to get past the door. And the memory of the Vipers' imminent arrival slammed back into him, extinguishing the spark of curiosity in a flood of pure, animal fear.
The world could wait. Survival was now.
But the resolve to survive was a flimsy shield, and it shattered an instant later.
The sound was not a polite tap. It was a series of three heavy, impatient blows against the door, a brutal percussion that shook the flimsy wood in its frame.
BAM. BAM. BAM.
Andrei's heart, which had begun to slow to a frantic gallop, seized into a frantic, hammering stall. A jolt of pure, undiluted terror—Lutz's terror, a well-honed instinct—electrified his nerves. His breath caught in his damaged throat, sending a fresh spike of pain through him.
A voice, coarse and loud, grated from the other side. "Fischer! Open up! Stop pretending you're not in there!"
He knew that voice. The knowledge came not as a memory, but as a visceral reaction deep in his gut. Rudel. One of the Baron's men. A man with a quick temper and fists like stones. Lutz's memories supplied a flash of Rudel's face, contorted in a cruel laugh as he'd cornered a debtor in an alley.
Time seemed to warp, stretching and snapping taut. Andrei's mind, the part that was still him, scrambled for options. Hide? The room was a barren box. The single window led to a three-story drop onto cobblestones. Fight? He was a language teacher in a swindler's underfed body, with a throat that felt like crushed glass.
The doorknob rattled, a cheap, tinny sound that was more terrifying than the knock. "Last chance, you little weasel! The Baron's tired of waiting. You pay tonight, or you're coming with us."
Pay tonight. The words were a death sentence. He had nothing. The few coins under the floorboard were a pathetic insult. There was no deal to be made, no scam to run. The elegant, long-term strategy he'd just contemplated evaporated, leaving only the raw, immediate need to not be on the other side of that door when it opened.
He looked frantically around the room, his gaze skipping over the rope, the chair, the grimy window. His eyes landed on the only potential weapon: a heavy, cast-iron candleholder on the small table. It was crude, solid.
A thought, cold and clear, cut through the panic. It was a thought born from Lutz's cunning and Andrei's desperation.
They think I'm just Lutz. Scared, cornered Lutz.
He had one advantage: the element of surprise. They expected a frightened debtor. They did not expect a man possessed by a ghost from another world, with nothing left to lose.
Silently, moving with a caution that felt alien to his trembling limbs, he pushed himself up. He ignored the protest in his muscles, the fire in his neck. He crept to the table and wrapped his fingers around the cold iron of the candleholder. It was heavier than he expected.
He raised it, his arms shaking. He positioned himself to the side of the door, out of the immediate line of sight.
Outside, Rudel grunted. "Alright, that's it."
A heavy boot slammed against the wood near the lock. The doorjamb splintered.
Andrei Hayes, heart pounding in a dead man's chest, gripped the cold iron tighter, and waited for the world to break in.