He was already falling when the joke arrived. Not a good one.
Not even a full one. Just the reflex of a man trying to bolt a handrail into his own skull.
Well, Aydin, he thought, in the tone of someone narrating a mistake to keep from screaming, you finally found a way to travel without having to pack.
Wet-dark air tore at him. It did not behave like air.
It had weight. It pressed against his ears until they clamped, then it let go for a heartbeat, then it clamped again, like something was editing the world one brutal cut at a time.
His ribs took a hit mid-fall, something unseen and heavy, like the ruin itself had swung an elbow. His lungs forgot the order of operations.
If he hit wrong, he died.
The creature was already on him, claws raking for purchase, mouth snapping where his face had been. He caught a flash of teeth, too many, wrong angles, like somebody had built a predator out of leftover knives.
It clicked those teeth in a three-beat pattern as it lunged, like it was counting him. "Seriously, universe, this is your onboarding?" Aydin croaked, swallowing grit.
Sand answered his reach, grit and powdered mortar dragged up by thought alone, then fought to escape because it was falling too. "Of course," he panted.
He pulled it into a thin curtain anyway. Gravity tore it sideways, but it bought him a blink, and he used that blink to twist his body away.
They punched through wood. Ancient boards snapped, resin and salt hit, and dust packed his mouth to paste.
The creature snapped again, three clicks, patient. Aydin shoved his forearm into its mouth because at least it was not his throat.
Teeth scraped bone. It thrashed, and his shoulder should have lit up with pain.
Instead he got pressure and impact and a clean, awful fact: his body was reporting data, not hurt.
Am I really going to die again? The thought arrived like someone checking a schedule.
"If there's a desk that handles reincarnation, I want a manager," he gasped into the dark. This life lasted two days, he thought, furious and breathless, and swallowed dust instead.
He hit. Ribs met something hard.
Breath left him in one violent shove. His head bounced off stone and stars bloomed behind his eyes.
He rolled because the slope demanded it, and the demon hit beside him like a dropped statue.
For a heartbeat, everything held still. The creature moved.
It dragged itself up and lunged again like the fall had been an inconvenience. Three clicks.
Aydin pushed to his hands. His hands moved, and did not report back.
Not the blood, not the scraped knuckles, the absence. He didn't have time to test it.
He just knew it, the way you knew you were bleeding because the world looked wrong around the edges.
The creature closed. Three clicks, patient.
No time to spiral. Aydin reached for sand, and this time he felt it.
Not like grabbing dirt. Like catching a current.
It ran through him in a hard, straight line, jaw to teeth to throat, and into the grit at his knees like the two of them shared the same spine.
The demon lunged. Aydin snapped his wrist up, by sight, by will.
The sand rose. Not drifting, not spilling, not a wave.
A spear. It formed in one clean, violent motion, grit compressing into a hard line, the tip sharpening as it climbed, the shaft tightening until it hummed with the same wrong vibration behind his teeth.
The creature opened its mouth to take him. Aydin drove the spear up from below.
It punched through soft underjaw, through tongue and palate, and out through the roof of its mouth. The demon's momentum carried it a half step.
It stopped. Standing.
Mouth pinned open around the sand spear, held upright like a grotesque signpost. Its claws twitched once.
Three clicks tried to happen. Only air came out.
The body went heavy. Aydin held the spear in place a beat longer than he needed to, because his hands were numb and this was the only thing in the world that still listened.
He let go. The spear slumped into a cascading fall of grit as the creature collapsed around it.
Aydin sat back on the slope, chest heaving. His hands rested in his lap like strangers.
"No."
The silence after was wrong. Not safe.
Just empty. The ruin breathed around him anyway, old wood settling, stone ticking as it cooled.
A pulse ran through the dark. A signal.
A violet thread of light, thin as a hairline fracture, leaked from a crack in stone to his right. It pulsed again, in time with a deeper thump he felt in his sternum more than his ears.
A heartbeat under sand. Aydin swallowed, throat full of grit.
"No. That's not normal."
The glow should not exist. So of course he went toward it.
The crack was not a line. It was a seam.
Cut on purpose. The seam opened with a soft click.
A mechanism. Inside, the air changed.
Cleaner. Drier.
Like the chamber had been sealed against time and won out of spite. Ward lines covered the floor, precise circles and angles that made his eyes want to follow them.
The geometry pulsed faintly, steady as breath. A cradle mount sat in the wall.
And in it, intact and waiting, was a bracelet. A ward-bracelet with a sealed amethyst face, a polished oval disk holding deep violet dark.
A faint internal fracture curved through the crystal like a crescent, like a smile that never finished.
Aydin took a step, then another. His heart knocked hard against ribs.
"Hi," he said softly. "Please be the helpful kind of artifact."
A chime answered, one clear note that made his skin prickle. He reached out, fingers hovering.
His numb hands looked like props from somebody else's life. He touched it.
Heat bloomed under his fingertips. Activation.
Violet light threaded through the etching like veins waking up, and the hum settled into his teeth and sternum. Then a voice pressed into his skull, cold and certain.
CANDIDATE HOST DETECTED
Aydin jerked back. "If you're a trap, do it fast. I'm out of options."
INITIALIZATION REQUIRED
WARNING: MEMORY PARTITIONS CORRUPTED
CREATOR DATA: INSUFFICIENT DATA
Aydin stared at it, breath rough. "Perfect. Tutorial's corrupted."
Aydin looked down at his numb hands. If he left it, he stayed like this.
Half a body. Half a person.
If he took it, it could ruin him. He hated that he understood that sentence and still reached for the next one anyway.
"Do it," he whispered. "I'll regret it later."
A precise click snapped around his wrist. A lock.
Cold flooded up his arm like the bracelet had been waiting for a pulse to drink. For a second, his teeth buzzed hard enough to make his eyes water.
HOST FUNCTIONS: ACTIVE
OBSERVER SCAN: AVAILABLE
VOICEPRINT SYNC: INCOMPLETE
DO NOT DIE WITH ME ON YOUR ARM
Aydin blinked hard. "What does that mean," he rasped.
His vision flickered. A peel.
Reality sliding sideways like a page being turned too fast. And for one impossible second, Aydin saw the world from far above, as if Violet had grabbed his skull with both hands and forced it to look.
Rimsea was not a globe. It was a circular wound cut into the land, continental and deep, as if something had drilled into the world and torn the middle out.
Along the rim, broken terraces held chains of light, stitched to stone like someone had tried to nail civilization in place. Human life stitched around the edge of a grave.
His mind reached for metaphor out of habit. Like a…
The sentence died.
At the center of the ring, where there should have been open depth, there was land. A rough, dark mass, half island, half scar tissue.
And then the sky tore. A single star fell wrong.
It burned pink, then shifted as it dropped, colour rippling through it like something alive. Pink to violet.
Violet to a deep, wet red. Blood-red.
It hit the center. Not with an explosion.
With a decision. The land vanished.
Erased in a blink. Water surged in, furious and immediate.
Storm built itself out of the hole like a thing waking up angry. Waves climbed.
Lightning stitched down, pinning the new sea and failing. Aydin felt the pressure in his teeth again, that wrong vibration, stronger now.
And from the dead center, something pulsed back. A pattern.
A signal answering Violet's hum, faint, old, and hungry.
Then Violet showed him someone else. Not a name.
Not a face you could hold. A memory torn mid-motion.
A figure soaked to the bone and laughing like it hurt, braced at the edge of a deck that looked carved, not built. Ward-lines ran up their forearms like living script.
Their wrist burned with the same amethyst oval. Their laugh broke.
Salt hit their teeth. And for a blink Aydin felt it, the moment the storm took them.
Then the words arrived, too late to help.
DO NOT LET THE STORM HAVE YOU
CENTER: UNRESOLVED
HOST: TERMINATED
Aydin's stomach dropped. The vision snapped back.
Stone returned. Air returned.
The chamber slammed into existence around him like a door kicked shut. He staggered, hand to the wall, breath coming in thin, ugly pulls.
He looked down at the bracelet. The amethyst face sat calm against his skin, as if it had not just shown him the shape of the world and the place where answers went to die.
Aydin swallowed. His voice came out small.
"That was not a tutorial."
The bracelet vibrated once, almost like a dry laugh.
SCAN INCOMPLETE (41% CONFIDENCE)
VEIL JITTER: HIGH
PRESSURE NOISE: HIGH
STR: 2
DEX: 5
INT: 9
Aydin's mouth went dry. "Nine intellect. Two strength. Incredible."
CONFIRMED
His laugh came out once, sharp and disbelieving. "I didn't ask for the stat sheet."
The bracelet chimed, soft, precise, like a bell struck with a measured hand.
DIRECTIONAL PING: CENTERWARD
SEA STATE: STORM
RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT DELAY
Aydin stared at it. Then at the ward-lines on the floor.
Then at the seam he had opened. The ruin did not feel like a dungeon anymore.
It felt like a hinge. Like he had been dropped here not to fight, but to be pointed.
Aydin swallowed again. "Fine," he whispered, to Violet, to the storm he had seen.
"Show me how to not die."