There was no hallway. No second floor. No fluorescent lights humming in the ceiling. No stained off-blue carpeting. No vending machines waiting at the bottom of a dim stairwell on the first floor of the Training Building. The moment his foot crossed the threshold, the space beyond the doorway became something else entirely. Stone beneath his shoes. A breath of dry, scorched air. The scent of ash and blood.
Ethan staggered forward, catching himself against a nearby wall. It was composed of jagged marble, cracked and blackened. Nothing like the flat beige drywall that had lined the corridor seconds ago. He spun around instinctively. The door was gone. The hallway behind him, the second floor of the First City Transit Training Building, was...gone. In its place: ruin. Twisted stone. Shattered beams. Stillness.
What just happened?
The transition had come without fanfare, without warning. No tug. No dizziness. No flicker of light. He had simply opened the door and stepped into something impossible.
He looked down. The floor beneath him was stone and it was ancient and worn, veined with black scorch marks. Something crumbled under his heel when he shifted. Bone, maybe. Or splintered wood. He was not sure he wanted to know.
His right hand throbbed beneath the bandage. The pain had changed again, twisting, as if his skin had suddenly began bending like clay. He ripped the bandage free with shaking fingers. The burn was no longer a wound.
Whatever had just happened beneath the bandages was done. The wound had healed. The skin was whole, but it bore a mark now; raised and ridged, and shaped like a stylized circular key. Deliberate. Not random. His thumb traced the outline. And somehow, it had opened a door. He wrapped his hand again hastily, hiding the mark from sight.
He leaned back against the wall that had no right to exist. Its solidity jolted him, knocked the panic back from the edge. That was enough. He slumped there, half-stunned, heart hammering in his chest.
The world around him began to take shape again. Ethan blinked. His vision was blurry, but it sharpened with each breath. The cold surface behind him grounded him. The shallow rise and fall of his chest kept time with the rush of blood in his ears.
He did not move. The hallway ahead stretched longer than it should have. The walls were stone, not drywall, and the air held a dry, coppery scent that turned his stomach. It was quiet, but not the quiet of vacancy. This was the silence of aftermath. Of finality.
Bodies lay in the corridor. Dozens. They were fresh. Some grotesquely twisted, bent into angles no human body should take. Skin ruptured open. Bones shattered. Others were blackened, as if burned from within. Still more looked shredded, ripped apart by forces he could not name. The floor bore scorch marks, bloodstains, and fragments of something worse. Splintered stone. Burned furniture. Ruined tools or weapons. He could not be sure. Ethan still did not move. He only breathed. He stared down that corridor while his mind scrabbled for meaning.
This isn't real!
He told himself that again and again. A hallucination, maybe. A fall down the stairs. Maybe he lay crumpled somewhere in the Training Center stairwell. Maybe his brain was feeding him visions in its final, chaotic seconds. That would explain the strangeness. The silence. The sense that nothing made sense.
But he could smell the air. He could feel the wall. He could hear something. A faint ticking. Far away. Irregular. Sometimes steady. Like footsteps. And above all, he could feel the strangeness of this place. A pressure. A presence. Not fear exactly, but a dizzying sense of unreality that clawed at his reason. This place is dead. Like a murder victim.
The thought circled his mind as a hawk might above a corpse. The air was thick with it. Insanity. Madness. And something older, lurking unseen in the air. He was not supposed to be here. No one was. This was a playground of death.
And yet, there were no voices. No signs of life. No movement. Only those faint, distant footsteps. And a subtle tremble beneath his feet, like the world itself was uneasy. He had not seen anyone. Not yet.
He pushed off from the wall. His legs were unsteady. Standing on his own took effort. His balance wavered. Dizziness crashed through him in waves. Panic surged in his chest. His breathing sounded too loud.
This isn't happening! His thoughts spiraled. The shift had come without cause. No transition. One moment he had opened a door at work, the next he had stepped into what...a dream? He fought to suppress the terror rising in his throat.
Get it together. Think. He looked again at the bodies. There were children among them, not many, but enough. That struck harder than the gore. He had trained himself not to react to scenes of violence. Ten years in the military. First four years as an infantry man and then the next six serving with the Army Rangers. Three deployments to Afghanistan. His mind had built layers of armor against the damage human beings could inflict on one another.
But this...this tore through it. Ethan fought the urge to empty out the contents of his stomach onto the floor. Some of the dead had been running. Others looked like they had never even known what hit them. Their clothes were strange. Not modern. Handmade, maybe. Ornate. Some bore metal fastenings or strange symbols. A few wore armor. It was light, filigreed, and almost decorative.
He stepped forward, careful not to touch the bodies. The world held steady beneath his feet. Whatever this was, it could not be a dream. The colors did not shift. The floor did not ripple. The weight of his body, the sound of his breath, the pulse behind his eyes; everything felt too real.
He moved deeper into the corridor. The footsteps ahead kept time. His mind spun in circles. No clear answers. No transition. There had been a sensation of tripping for a moment that had been so brief it might have been imagined. One moment he had been at work and in the next he was here, wherever here was.
His thoughts fought the truth of what he was seeing. His brain wanted to reject it outright. But the death was real. It was not a smell one easily forgot.
He passed a large wooden table, remarkably untouched. Its surface gleamed, unstained. Alone on it sat a single object: a silver bracelet. It was small but clearly sized to fit either a man or a woman. The metal was fine, etched with symbols, sharply angled, looping, like letters from a language invented by an alien mathematician. It was beautiful. Out of place. Or perhaps the most important thing in the room.
He picked it up. Turned it in his fingers. Slipped it into his pocket. Why? He did not know. The footsteps had faded. In their place came laughter.
It started soft. Almost musical. Then it rose. Wild. Sharp. Manic. There was no humor in it. No joy. Only madness. It echoed along the stone like the edge of a serrated blade. It rose, fell, cracked; more cry than laugh. Somewhere between a cartoon villain and something far older, more broken. Something that had been too strong for too long.
Ethan froze. Then, slowly, he approached the turn in the hallway. The sound echoed just beyond. He did not speak. He did not call out. He leaned carefully, just enough to see. The laughter had ebbed. It was breathless now. Whispered. A sound too thin to be human, or maybe too human to endure.
A ruined chamber stretched beyond the bend. It had once been beautiful; ornate and vaulted, now collapsed in great chunks. Stone broken. Pillars splintered. Sunlight cut down in crooked shafts from a shattered ceiling. One wall still bore a mirror. Its glass rippled, hanging crooked, the marble frame melted as if fire had run through it like liquid.
He saw the man. He stood before the mirror critically examining his reflection. Tall and broad-shouldered but slumped; his body weighted by exhaustion or grief. The coat he wore, red and gold, once regal, was now tattered and streaked with ash. One sleeve had been burned away. The other clung to a wrist that trembled. His hair was dark, streaked with gray, resting damp on his forehead. Blood ringed his collar. Dried, but recent. And his voice, murmuring to the mirror, carried no hope. The clasp on his shoulder caught the light. Half black. Half white. Split by a curved line.
Ethan's heart skipped a beat. He knew that symbol on the coat. Black and white, divided by a curved line; like yin and yang, but not. Not exactly. It was older somehow. More absolute. And yet more... fictional?
The man's hands moved constantly. They gripped the frame of the mirror. They rose to claw at his temples. They spread wide, as if pleading with the man inside the glass. Ethan could not hear every word, but he caught fragments; phrases about betrayal, fire, light, and a name he could not quite make out. The voice rose and fell, skipping between deranged laughter and hoarse whispering. His face twisted as he stared into the mirror, seeing something or someone that Ethan could not.
The red coat caught the light, gleaming faintly despite the grime. It stirred something deeper. A memory. A name. The weight of déjà vu pressed down on him, thick and relentless. He had seen this man before. Not in person. Not in life. But in pages? In dreams? Maybe lines of text too familiar to be remarkable.
This man, himself, was familiar. Not like a face from childhood or a long-lost friend. Like a legend worn thin from too much retelling. Like a prophecy glimpsed just before waking. He did not recognize the features. But the impression...yes. The tilt of his voice. The color of the coat. The yin and Yang-like symbol on his coat, half sun, half-moon.
It gnawed at Ethan's thoughts, begging to be named. But he shied away from it. Too much had happened too soon for his mind to accept what he was seeing. The gravity of the man. The shape of the world around him. Ethan knew this from a bystander's viewpoint but kept telling himself he did not. Knowing what was impossible did not change what was happening.
He did not move. He did not speak. He barely even breathed. The figure in the red coat was unraveling before his eyes, one thread at a time. Yet there was something terrifyingly intact about him. Something held back beneath the madness, like a blade sheathed in silk.
The laughter softened into something worse; low, breathless muttering. It was without pattern. Words spilled like marbles from a torn bag. Sometimes they dipped into whispers. Other times they spiked into jagged phrases, names and fragments that carried no meaning alone but hinted at something enormous just beyond reach.
Ethan continued to hold himself still. Not trying to breath or even too blink. He feared to disturb this moment in the same way he had feared a stepped-on landmine back in the day.
Then the man looked up. Back into the mirror. He smiled. It was a bright, shattered thing. And then laughed again.
"Ilyena, my love! Come to me, my wife. You must see this."