The rain was fake, but the cold was real.
It seeped through the cheap polyester of Leo's guard uniform, a cold that started at his lower back and was working its way up to his brain. He'd been standing in it for eight hours. His only job was to look stoic, then die.
"Guard Three! You're dead! Fall down! More conviction, you're not napping!"
The Assistant Director's voice crackled through the rain. Leo was Guard Three. A number. A placeholder in a shot meant to show the heroic lead cutting through faceless enemies.
This is it, Leo thought, the water tracing a path down his temple that felt suspiciously like a tear. My legacy. A wet corpse in a direct-to-streaming fantasy show that'll get canceled in two weeks. They won't even use my take.
He took a deep breath of damp, Vancouver-night air. He'd played a dead body seven times this year. He was good at it. He knew how to fall without blinking, to go limp in a way that looked final. It was the only role he ever got called back for.
"Action!"
Leo widened his eyes, brought his plastic sword up in a pathetic block, and took a imaginary blow to the chest. He let his knees buckle, his body tilting back. He hit the wet concrete with a practiced thump, his head lolling to the side, eyes staring into the middle distance. He held perfectly still.
"Cut! Good. Reset for take twelve."
Take twelve. Leo didn't move. Let them reset around him. A background prop. A piece of set dressing that breathed. He stared at a puddle reflecting the harsh studio lights. Thirty years old. A failed background actor. My greatest performance is convincing everyone I'm not drowning.
There was a sharp crack above the din of rain machines and grumbling crew.
Leo's eyes, still in their dead stare, saw it first. A large studio light, its housing frayed and rusted, had broken free of its mooring. It swung on its cable like a grim pendulum, directly above the lead actor, a handsome man in pristine armor who was checking his phone.
Time didn't slow down. It sped up.
The AD opened his mouth to shout. The lead actor looked up, confusion on his face. The light fell, a silent, heavy mass of metal and glass.
Leo didn't think.
His body moved before his mind could process it. He was on his feet, a dead man springing back to life. He took two long strides through the puddles and shoved the lead actor in the shoulder, hard. The man yelped, tumbling out of the way.
Leo looked up.
The world went white. Then black.
His last thought was not of fear, or his life flashing before his eyes. It was a petty, professional, utterly Leo thought: Finally. A decent reaction shot.
There was no light. No sound. No body.
There was only a terrible, twisting pull.
It wasn't through space. It was through… layers. Through whispers and screams and half-remembered dreams. Leo was consciousness without form, hurtling down a rushing, invisible current.
Sensations battered him:
The primal, village-clearing fear of scales shadowing the sun.
The sweet, tragic ache of immortality, of love lost across centuries.
The dry, dust-bone logic of a spell that calculated the entropy of a soul.
The deep, crushing pressure of the ocean's grudge.
He was tumbling through a kaleidoscope of stories. Not just any stories. His stories. The myths he'd read as a child, the monster movies he'd loved, the fairy tales he'd been told. They were all here, raw and powerful and real.
Distant voices echoed, not in his ears, but in the fabric of the current itself. They were cold, analytical, and vast.
"The Anchor is vacant… the narrative tension is unsustainable."
"The Current seeks stabilization. Scanning the Wellspring for a compatible resonance…"
"A frequency match. Minor. Frail. But its source-material is pure. It understands the archetypes."
"Initiate retrieval. Bind it to the Anchor."
The pull became a yank. The yank became a撕裂 sensation, as if he were a page being ripped from one book and slammed into another.
No—!
Silence.
It was the first thing he was aware of. A silence so complete it had weight. It pressed in from all sides, a thick, velvety nothing.
Then, sensation returned. But it was wrong.
He was seated. His back was against a surface that was neither warm nor cold, just perfectly smooth and unyielding. Stone, maybe. But on a scale that felt continental. He tried to take a breath.
The breath he drew in was silent, but the exhalation… it echoed. A deep, low sound that rolled out into the darkness and took seconds to fade, like a sigh in a cathedral the size of a world.
He tried to open his eyes.
He saw darkness. But not the darkness of closed eyelids. This was a vast, open darkness. High above, impossibly high, faint, sourceless light hinted at a ceiling. It was carved. The shadows on it moved. He saw the silhouette of a great winged beast, the curl of a serpentine tail, the suggestion of a many-legged thing skittering across the stone. A gallery of nightmares in relief.
Panic, slow and cold, began to seep into him.
Move. Move a finger.
The thought was his. The action that followed was… not.
His finger lifted. The movement was fluid, effortless. There was no strain, no pull of muscle. It was like commanding a machine of unimaginable precision and power. It terrified him.
He was in a body that was not his.
The realization hit him like a physical blow. The fake rain, the falling light, the void of stories… he had died. And then he had been… placed here.
He willed his head to turn. The motion was smooth, silent. His new vision took in the room.
He sat on a dais. The throne beneath him was carved from a single piece of something blacker than the darkness. It was not ornate. It was severe. It was less a seat and more a declaration: from here, the world is seen, and judged.
The floor before him was polished to a mirror sheen. It reflected the towering, distant ceiling. And it reflected the throne.
And the figure sitting upon it.
Leo's mind recoiled.
The reflection showed a shape of condensed shadow and sharp, graceful angles. It was draped in robes that seemed to drink the faint light. Where a head should be, there was a suggestion of a helm, or perhaps a crown, formed from the same substance as the throne—a dark, non-reflective material that ended in subtle, horn-like curves. Within the shadow of where a face would be, two points of faint, ruddy light glowed, like distant coals in a dead furnace.
No mouth. No nose. Just those two ember-eyes in a sculpture of silent, sovereign power.
That's not me. That can't be me.
He tried to lift a hand to his face. In the reflection, the sleek, gauntlet-clad hand of the shadow figure rose correspondingly.
The cold panic turned to icy, trapped terror. It filled his chest, a scream with no voice. He was locked in a monument. A statue of fear.
What am I? Where is this?
He felt no heartbeat. No pulse. Just a profound, humming stillness, as if the very air was holding its breath.
From the absolute shadows at the base of the dais, a voice cut the silence. It was calm. Dry. Devoid of any emotion whatsoever.
"Your Majesty."
The voice did not echo. It was absorbed by the room, delivered directly to him.
"The Stillness has passed."
Leo froze. The figure in the reflection froze. The two coal-glow eyes stared ahead, unblinking.
"The Seven Pillars have gathered. The Veridian incursion at the Western Veil requires your judgment."
The words meant nothing. Majesty. Stillness. Pillars. Veil. Incursion. They were lines from a script he'd never read. A script where he was the lead role.
His actor's instinct, honed from years of anxiety and observation, kicked in. It overrode the screaming in his mind. When you don't know your line, don't speak. When you don't know your motivation, be still. Silence can be power. Let them project onto you.
He remained motionless. The reflected Emperor was a statue of ominous calm.
A long moment stretched. Ten seconds. Twenty.
The voice spoke again. "They await in the Grand Antechamber."
Another pause. This one felt different. Searching.
Then, the voice asked a question. A simple, terrible question that hung in the silent air like a blade.
"Shall I admit them?"