A story, to be told true, begins with three introductions: a place, a time, and a plot.
Place: the thin seam between worlds—where sleep becomes a door and the mind becomes an instrument, tuned to frequencies most people live their whole lives without hearing.
Time: the summer I was fourteen, when boredom felt like a cage and the heat made the air shimmer like a lie.
Plot: an empire was rising in a world I'd never been taught to name—an empire that didn't just conquer land, but possibility itself.
I didn't know that last part yet. I only knew the feeling I carried everywhere: that I was both too visible and never truly seen.
In my home world, I was reminded of my difference in small ways that cut like paper. A pause too long before a smile. A question asked twice as if my first answer didn't count. A casual assumption that my worth was something to be proven—again and again—while others were allowed to simply be. I learned early how to live behind misdirection, how to offer the right opinion at the right time, how to stay passive in a world that pretended it was always moving forward while quietly dragging chains behind it.
And underneath all that, deeper than any daily cruelty, there was another truth I rarely spoke aloud:
I have been old for a long time.
Not old like wrinkled hands and stiff knees. Old like the taste of civilizations rising and falling. Old like the smell of ash after the first city burned and the silence after the last prayer in a language no one remembers. Old like the ache of knowing the world can become barren, then beautiful, then chaotic—and still call it "progress."
I never said it out loud because words do not hold it. Words are a net made for small fish. What I carry is an ocean.
I lived most of my life pretending I was only what people could see: a quiet kid, a distracted kid, a kid with too many thoughts and not enough friends, a kid who watched too much TV because it was easier to explain than the truth—that sometimes I was studying the hidden architecture of reality the way others study sports scores or gossip.
I didn't plan to become anything.
I didn't plan to be a guardian.
I didn't plan to step back into the machinery of fate.
But fate has a way of tightening the thread around your throat until you either pull it off or hang.
That summer, I went to bed like I always did: not expecting anything but darkness.
And then something came.
It stood at the edge of my dream like a wrong note in a familiar song.
It was tall—too tall for the space it occupied—and its legs bent in a way my mind rejected at first, as if the rules of bone were optional where it came from. Its head wasn't a goat's head, not really. It had the shape of one, but the details were blasphemy: a wolf's hunger in the jawline, a scale-sheen across the brow as if its skin remembered being armor. And its horns—those were the worst part.
Six on either side, branching like a deer's antlers, but thicker, heavier, with a metallic glare that didn't reflect my room's darkness so much as it defied it. Those horns looked engineered, as if nature had been redesigned by a hand that preferred efficiency over beauty.
It opened its mouth.
No sound came out the way sound should. It wasn't silence—it was something beneath hearing, something that crawled under thought. The moment it "spoke," fear sprinted through my mind and slammed a door I didn't even know was open.
A window closed.
And even as I woke, sweating and shaking, I understood without understanding: something had found me, measured me, and decided I was dangerous enough to be limited.
For three years after that, I tried to be normal.
I tried to fit into the world's shallow conversations, the kind where people trade facts like coins and call it connection. But there was an energy inside me—an ember that never went out—that made ordinary interests feel like paper compared to fire. It made me restless. It made me lonely. It made me look lazy, because the things that mattered to me weren't visible in my hands, only in my head.
My father noticed the distance in my eyes and called it weakness.
When I was younger and I saw the passed ones—faces in the corners, shadows with names—he told me those things were for fragile minds, for people who wanted to escape reality. So I stopped telling him. I learned secrecy the way other kids learned algebra.
But secrecy doesn't erase truth. It only buries it deeper.
At seventeen, I started meditating—not the kind people do for a trend or an aesthetic, but the kind that feels like cracking your own skull open and climbing inside to rewrite the wiring. I worked at it for months until the world's edges began to soften.
Then, one night, I felt the window open again.
Not gently.
Violently.