Arjun stopped trusting sleep.
But worse, he stopped trusting waking.
It began in small flashes.
A flicker of recognition when he passed the campus fountain, as if he remembered it not in daylight but moonlit, guarded by sentries.The smell of incense from the temple near the station — suddenly layered with the tang of battlefire from the warded camps.A girl's laugh drifting through the quad — overlapped with a memory of a soldier's laugh, one he knew belonged to Captain Deyra, though he had never met her outside the other world.
The cracks weren't waiting for night anymore. They were bleeding through.
By the third week, he woke in his dorm muttering spells under his breath. The syllables tasted right and wrong all at once.
Once, in the library, he stretched his fingers absently — and the lights above flickered. Every fluorescent bulb in the row blinked in unison. Students cursed, laptops dinged. Arjun yanked his hands back, shaking, swearing under his breath.
No one else noticed him. But he noticed.
The magic was following him.
The next slip was worse.
He was Arathen again, walking the battlements. The soldiers saluted as he passed. He should have felt pride. Instead, guilt burned him raw.
The prisoners — the ones he had spared — had escaped.
The general's jaw was tight, her voice clipped. "Mercy has its cost. Three men dead because of your restraint. They slit throats in the night, Archmage. You gave them that chance."
Her words pierced like arrows. They weren't just accusation — they were memory. He saw the blood-slick stone floor, the contorted faces of the murdered guards. The memory burned in him like it had been his watch, his loss.
But it hadn't. That wasn't his life.
And yet he felt the grief anyway.
When he woke, he was crying. Not Arjun's quiet tears, but Arathen's deep, guttural grief. His chest shook. His body ached like he had carried corpses through the mud himself.
He stared at his laptop screen, blank again. The cursor blinked like mockery.
What was an essay about comparative politics compared to the weight of lives, of decisions that carved fates?
His hands clenched. His reflection in the screen didn't even look like him anymore. The cheekbones sharper. The eyes colder. For a heartbeat, his hair gleamed silver.
He slammed the lid shut.
That night, he dreamed he was looking into a mirror.
But the reflection moved before he did.
Arathen stared back at him.
"You don't belong here," Arjun whispered.
"You don't either," the archmage answered. His voice was steady, calm, terrifying in its certainty. "One of us is real. One is a shadow."
Arjun's stomach knotted. "I'm real. I have a family, friends, a life—"
Arathen tilted his head. "Do you? Your friends do not notice your absence. Your work lies unfinished. You drift like smoke in your world. Here, you are necessary. Here, you are known. Tell me — which of us is dreaming the other?"
The mirror cracked.
Arjun jolted awake, his sheets drenched in sweat.
But the voice lingered, curling through his mind.Which of us is dreaming the other?
By dawn, Arjun no longer knew the answer.