"I hate school..."
Alex muttered under his breath as he sat there at the desk with his laptop screen glowing in the dark dorm room...the cursor on his engineering project file blinking like it was mocking him for the hours he'd wasted staring at it instead of actually working.
The only light in their sorry apartment, came from that screen and the faint blue glow of Elijah's monitors across the room...casting long shadows over the clutter of empty energy drink cans and half-finished snack bags that had built up over the week.
The air in the room stung of a mix of old pizza and the faint metallic tang from the overheating laptop fan.
He leaned back in the chair...his shoulders tight from the way he'd been hunched there for too long...and let the words hang without expecting much.
While Elijah...his roommate, was sprawled on his bed with a controller gripped in both hands...headphones half-on so one ear stayed open even while he barked short commands into the Discord call running in the background.
His side of the room looked like a storm had rolled through it...clothes tossed over the chair...notebooks with scribbled story ideas spilling out...but that was just Elijah...
The silence stretched after Alex spoke...but it wasn't uncomfortable.
Alex watched him for a moment...not pushing...because he knew how this went.
Elijah's thumbs kept flying over the controller...eyes locked on the screen as explosions lit up his face in flashes of color...and for a beat it seemed like the words had drifted right past him.
"Oh yh...that," Elijah finally said...his voice distracted and low while he didn't even glance over...
Alex stared at him...his jaw tightening just a fraction as the exhaustion from the day settled heavier in his chest...but he didn't snap or push.
He never did. Instead he just kept sitting there...the laptop fan whirring louder now...as if trying to fill the space between them, and barely hanging on, from Alex's engineering project.
Elijah must have felt the weight of that stare because he paused the game—which luckily for Alex, it wasn't an online game—with a quick button press...the sudden quiet in the room was almost jarring...so he tugged the headphone off one ear completely.
"My bad...my bad. Run it back. What happened?" He shifted on the bed...turning halfway toward the desk while still holding the controller like it might call him back any second...his expression was now a bit somber than it was few seconds ago.
"Ahh..."
Alex let out a slow breath...his fingers tapping once against the desk edge before he spoke again.
"There are three people in my group...three...and I'm the only one who's touched the file in two weeks...not only that, but Professor Daniels moved the deadline up like we asked for it...and now it's due in four days instead of next week..."
He trailed off...rubbing at the back of his neck where the tension had knotted up...the words not quite capturing the full treadmill of his feelings.
Elijah nodded slowly...setting the controller aside for real this time as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed...his full attention landing on Alex.
"Damn...that's rough bro. They ghosted you again? I thought you said the one dude was supposed to handle the code part."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
Elijah let out a breath. "Feet already hurting just thinking about that CrunchTime shift tomorrow too...ain't it?"
"Yeah...that's something too...I can't tell you how much I hate school bruh..."
"Same here dude, but at least we're in our finals, I can't wait to see the looks on the freshmen, when they start doing their presentations, heh." Elijah chuckled like he could already visualize the thought in his head.
"...poor kids..."
The conversation settled into something real after that...the kind of back and forth that didn't need big declarations or perfect advice...just the two of them existing in the same room with the weight of the day loosening a little.
Alex mentioned the late hours at the fast food counter...the way his manager kept scheduling him for closing even though he had classes stacked in the morning...and Elijah listened...throwing in a dry joke about flipping burgers while dodging group project bullets that actually pulled a faint twitch at the corner of Alex's mouth.
It wasn't much...but it was enough to cut through the heavy air...enough to remind him that he wasn't completely alone in the grind even if neither of them ever said it outright.
At some point Elijah deflected...the way he always did when things got too close to serious...and grabbed his own laptop...pulling up a Google Doc with a few paragraphs of the story he'd been starting and abandoning for the last month.
"I know it's not fire yet...I'm still working on it..." he said...sliding the screen over so Alex could see.
"I got big ideas though bro...just gotta figure out how to get them out right. Like...what if the main character could actually rewrite the rules when shit hit the fan? Not in a lame way. Something that feels real."
Alex read the lines quietly...his eyes scanning the text that was rough around the edges...which was mid at best...but he didn't tear it down or offer empty praise.
He just sat with it for a long moment...Alex believed in the potential even if the execution wasn't there yet...but didn't say a word.
Elijah caught it...grinning a little as he closed the laptop again...and the room felt steadier for it...
Yet something nagged at the edges of Alex's thoughts...a faint pressure building behind his eyes like the start of a headache that wasn't quite a headache...and the laptop screen flickered once...a quick distortion he blamed on the shitty dorm wifi.
The room seemed too quiet too...no distant bass from the floor below...no late-night footsteps in the hall...just the hum of electronics and their breathing.
He dismissed it...already too tired to think of it as superstitious...his body felt heavy in the chair as he stretched his arms overhead.
*BZZTTT*
*BZZZT*
Then both their phones buzzed at the exact same second...vibrating against the desk and the bed, cutting through their calm.
Elijah grabbed his first...frowning at the screen while Alex picked up his own...staring at the black background with plain white text that had no app icon...no sender...there was nothing normal about it.
□■□■
♧The Trial of the Divided Sky begins in 00:04:59.
Sincerely, Destiny.♧
□■□■
A countdown ticked beneath the words...already dropping second by second.
"Hehe...this gotta be a joke."
Elijah let out a short laugh...nervous energy bleeding into it as he held the phone up. "Bro who's hacking our phones? This some ARG shit? Like one of those viral games where they scare the hell out of you for fun?"
"..."
But Alex didn't laugh.
The cold settled deeper in his gut...a feeling he couldn't name but couldn't shake either...and he stood up slowly...crossing to the window with the phone still in his hand.
*SWISH*
He pulled the curtain aside...the fabric whispering against the rod...and looked out at the night sky that was no longer just night.
There was a line down the middle...a sharp unnatural divide that shouldn't exist.
One half stretched into void black...deeper than any darkness he'd seen...like reality had been sliced open and something empty stared back.
The other half burned golden-white...blinding and alive...pushing against the black in a way that made his eyes ache.
While the countdown on the phone kept falling.
□■□■
00:04:32.
□■□■
"Elijah," Alex said...his voice quiet...sounding distant even to his own ears as the pressure behind his eyes worsen.
"What?"
The words stuck for a beat...his shadow on the floor seeming to shift just a fraction under the strange light leaking through the glass.
"Look outside."