The last thing I heard was the sound of my own impact.
It hit like an overripe tomato striking concrete, amplified a thousandfold.
Then…nothingness should have followed. But I was still here. Still thinking.
Why am I still conscious?
I kept my eyes squeezed shut. I braced for NC-17 extreme gore: exposed bone, arterial spray, the kind of ruin that ends lives. My fingers searched frantically — skin, bone, ribs. There was no wet heat of blood. No wrongly angled bone. No pain.
Weird. Did something stop my fall?
I cracked one eye open.
Huh!?
The other snapped open.
I wasn't on the pavement. There was no school. No sky. No ground.
The world was gone.
Only darkness. The type of darkness that predated electricity, predated fire.
Am I blind? Brain damage from the fall?
The question lasted less than a second before color answered it.
It bled in — slow, deliberate, like ink dropped into still water. Ultramarine seeped into rose madder; violet filaments wove through electric cyan; threads of molten gold pulsed across impossible gulfs, each throb like a distant heartbeat of something vast and unseen.
Nebulae curled like living smoke. At their fraying edges, infant stars winked awake.
These weren't the stars you saw in the night sky.
They were everywhere.
An endless ocean of stars, countless as grains of sand on the shore.
Some were close enough to touch, had I been willing.
Silence pressed against my eardrums.
Then — motion, the way a sleeping thing moves before it wakes.
One star brightened until it hurt to look at. It swelled — radiant, furious — consuming the darkness around it. For a moment I thought it would swallow everything.
It became a gigantic, blazing sphere.
The sun.
Then two wandering stars with furnace hearts drew closer, accreting into a planetary mass — spinning so violently they ignited into searing twin half-spheres, like a smaller sun. They then drew inward, crashed together, cooled and became something whole.
Something familiar.
A moon was born.
Again, silence.
From nothing, a sphere of light took shape — small, fierce, incandescent. Before it could settle into itself, another came, greater, fiercer — a devourer. It engulfed the first in a single molten embrace, their fires merging until the sphere burned lava-bright, a heart of plasma beating with stolen fury. Then the mantle came — darker, more patient, wrapping the plasma in its thick geological arms. And last, a cooling skin closed over the inferno: fractured, cooling. Blue oceans boiled then cooled, sliding under continental edges that buckled and split.
The sphere that had been built from the inside out turned slowly.
A halo of billions of particles approached it and whirled into orbit around it.
A world, newly made.
Singular — no neighbors. Earthlike. Encircled by rings like Saturn's.
Time seemed to stall.
Then twelve stars ignited brighter than the rest.
One after another, they began to fall.
Not drifting — descending.
Twelve luminous bodies streaked toward the newborn planet like divine meteors, their radiance carrying an unmistakable presence. Not objects. Not phenomena.
Witnesses. Agents. Something alive.
I could not blink. Could not move.
The first struck the world like a hammer meeting the anvil of creation.
I waited for the aftershock.
Nothing.
Silence reclaimed everything.
Is this the end?
Eventually I looked down at myself — or what passed for down, in a place without directions — and found my body still attached and accounted for, floating with the mild indignity of someone suspended in water.
The weightlessness and the absence of breath — not breathlessness, not suffocation, just the gentle revelation that my lungs had negotiated a temporary leave of absence.
"What is this?" I said.
My voice returned shattered — layered, distorted — a thousand throats screaming in perfect unison.
I clamped my hands to my ears. Too late. The sound was already inside my skull.
Panic threatened to bloom, but reason intruded instead.
The sheer impossibility of everything led me to a single conclusion — it had to be a coma.
I remembered a documentary once — accounts from patients suspended between life and death. Entire alternate realities. Impossible landscapes. Awareness without a body. The sensation of floating in nothingness.
I think they called them hypnagogic — or hypnopompic — hallucinations.
That explanation should have comforted me.
The longer I drifted in that perfect emptiness, the more I understood loneliness — not the petty kind of unanswered messages, or being alone in your room, or thinking that friends and relatives don't care.
This was loneliness: being the only witness to something immense. Having no one to turn to and say — are you seeing this?
Then my body moved forward. Without consent. Something had pulled me.
I startled backward — or tried to. The motion repeated, insistent, and then I wasn't drifting anymore. I was going, accelerating toward the planet with the sudden conviction of a falling object, which is to say with no conviction at all, only physics.
The planet rushed up to meet me.
Wind roared. Atmosphere ignited. It was like skydiving without a parachute.
I shut my eyes and braced for annihilation.
Nothing.
I opened them.
Light flooded in — the blinding, almost personal brightness of someone who's been in the dark too long.
My vision swam. I squinted hard and let the world assemble itself in pieces.
Sound arrived before sight: screams, raw and primal, threaded with something inhuman. Metal shrieked on metal.
Then smell — iron and sulfur and rotting meat.
When my vision steadied, I had to take a moment to simply refuse what I was seeing.
I stood upon a battlefield.
The moon above wore rings.
The sky wept crimson fever.
The ground was charred. Corpses lay in arrangements that suggested neither battle formation nor collapse but something in between, something choreographed by violence. Some were recognizably human. Others had angles where angles shouldn't be, joints that articulated in wrong directions, mouths full of too many teeth.
In the distance, chaos unfolded:
An enormous, majestic bird circled above the battlefield, whipping a tornado of flame down on the creatures below and incinerating them in swaths. Still, the inferno faded as quickly as it flared. Then it folded itself downward, descending toward three wounded fighters who fought against dozens of those terrifying creatures. A woman in battered armor who had clearly been having a bad day. With each wingbeat the bird shrank until it landed on her shoulder the size of a hunting eagle and immediately, with a kind of deliberate finality, burned itself out. Ash scattered from her shoulder plate. A single feather remained, burning steadily, and she caught it in her gauntleted fist, crushing it, before dropping to one knee. Her spear was the only thing keeping her from the ground. With the particular fury of someone who knows they're out of options, she cursed at her legs — which had apparently made their own decision about continuing — and struck the earth.
Beside her, an elderly man who looked like every wizard in every story you've ever been told about wizards: the robes, the beard, the staff raised heavenward in the posture of someone demanding attention from the sky. A book floated open at chest height, its pages turning on their own as he read from it, and the light forming around his staff bloomed upward. Dozens of patterned circles erupted in the sky, spinning with a hypnotic, unnatural rhythm. Dark storm clouds roiled above the creatures, thunder crashing, lightning flashing.
And then — nothing.
The circles shattered in an instant, fragments raining like glass. The storm clouds ripped apart, and the crimson sky bled back into view, vast and empty. The book fell. The light around the staff turned gray as ash.
The old man gasped, a breath wheezing from tired lungs. "Damn it… I'm out of mana."
The third was a woman whose beauty was the kind that makes a person quietly recalibrate what they thought they knew about the word. She stood still in the chaos with her eyes closed, ignoring the commotion around her — calm as someone in a garden — and when she whispered, her crosier began to drink the darkness. Purifying it, restructuring it, releasing it upward as light so clean it felt like something that had never touched suffering.
Light surged from the heavens and swept across the battlefield, purging the monstrous creatures. Wounds on the wizard, the armored woman, and on the woman herself sealed as if untouched by battle. I don't have a thing for ears, but hers were impossible to ignore — sharp, pointed.
But neither her beauty nor her ears held my attention for long, because thirty feet away from her, two men were rewriting the language of violence.
The first moved with the sun. That isn't metaphor — the sun trailed his every motion like a loyal hound across the battlefield. His blade blazed with light and radiant heat; each arc caused the air around him to shimmer with heat distortion. A nearby river that had turned bloody from the carnage boiled in his wake to nothing but steam.
Beside him fought a figure with snow-white hair and crimson eyes that glowed like smoldering embers, his movements a lethal symphony, a dance of death. Each swing of his sword arrived silently. The aftermath didn't. Seconds later, you'd hear it: a crack like the world splitting at a seam. Mountains in the background separating. Trees detonating from the concussive displacement. The sky — the actual sky — coming apart in long, clean lines.
They were not fighting each other; they moved with a synchronicity that was almost beautiful — a deadly ballet — and together they faced a man at least seven feet tall, obsidian horns spiraling from his forehead. His power was untamed pandemonium, yet it matched theirs blow for blow. He defended against every strike; his sword screamed for blood with each swing. Something stirred in my chest, a thread of empathy tugging at me. I should have been terrified. Instead… I felt connected to him, as if his rage was my own.
The battle turned in a single exchange.
The dead had not stayed fallen. Their lingering energy — the residue of what they had been — spiraled toward the horned man, twisting into shadows. It opened a portal, not a door for him to escape, but a wound in the fabric of reality itself. From it, arms emerged. Hundreds of them, clawing at nothing, reaching for the sun-man and the white-haired swordsman with the desperate hunger of the dead, as if trying to possess the living or drag them back to where they belonged — or somewhere far worse.
But the duo pressed on; the white-haired warrior was caught in the burning grip of shadowed hands that dragged him toward the portal's mouth. At the threshold, he chose defiance, knowing that even if he escaped, his burning arm would be useless. Steel flashed—his own arm fell, and their hold broke. With the other, he carved through every shadow clinging to him, then—without missing a beat—turned the blade on the last tendrils that barred his path. Blood streaked the ground in crimson arcs that traced the precision of his movement.
Angered, he then joined the sun bound warrior and struck the horned man's sword arm. Clean, exact — the cut a master craftsman would call finished work. His own blade caught a single drop of the horned man's blood as it fell — black blood, which proved itself immediately by dissolving the sword from the point of contact back, eating through metal the way ice melts.
"An arm for an arm," he said as the horned man's arm and sword fell simultaneously. Neither could be used anymore.
The sun-bound warrior stepped in; his sword of light took the other arm before the horned man had fully registered losing the first.
The horned man collapsed to his knees, black blood fountaining beneath him. The sun-bound warrior stepped forward, sword raised for the coup de grâce. But the horned man did not look at those who had defeated him, nor at the one poised to finish him. His eyes found mine across the battlefield, as if I were the only one he could see, the only one who mattered. His lips moved soundlessly, yet I understood:
"Now it's your turn."
Those were his last words. Before his head rolled.
Darkness again — but warm this time, and seductive, the kind of dark that asks you to stay. I might have. I was considering it. Then something pulled me upward — not physically, not like a hand, but the way waking pulls you from a dream you were almost willing to live in.
Murmurs filtered through, fragmented at first, gibberish coalescing into sense.
"Congra— mada—"
"It— healthy boy—"
"— blessing to the Wolfh— famil—"
I opened my eyes into blur. Wind stung them shut. I opened them again.
"— red eyes an— white hair—"
"He— beautiful, I am your mo—"
When I looked again my vision had cleared. My head rested on what I thought was someone's lap — a woman's face resolved above me, close and warm and impossibly lovely — the kind of face that belongs in stories that promised everyone lived happily ever after. She was dressed like one, too. Her smile was gentle.
This is a hospital, right? I thought. Why is she dressed like that? Is there a costume policy I don't know about?
"He isn't crying." The woman's smile flickered into worry. "Is that an ill omen?"
Another face appeared. "I've never seen anything like it." A hand moved to check my breathing. "His lungs seem stable — just silent. It may be a delayed transition. Think nothing of it."
Why would I cry? What ill omen? I thought, indignant.
Then I looked up.
The ceiling was a sky. Painted angels leaned from clouds of gold and lapis, their gazes patient and mobile, following me with the calm attention of things that have all the time there is. Tall columns — white, slender, set close to the walls — rose to a vaulted ceiling gilded at every edge. Chandeliers hung heavy with gold.
I never cared much for art or museums; I thought it was just the rich wasting money — but I could still recognize a place that wasn't built for people like me.
How much does a room like this cost? I thought. Grandma can't afford this. I need to leave before someone hands her a bill.
I tried to stand.
Nothing happened.
The coma, I thought. Obviously the legs are the last thing to come back. That's fine. That's temporary.
"I'm awake," I announced. "Thank you. I'll just — I need the restroom. I'll find it myself."
I lied, trying to escape.
What came out of my mouth was a sound I can only describe as a declaration of total collapse.
Initial speech ability. Coma, I thought, once again.
"There he is," the second woman said warmly. "Finally crying."
The woman who held me drew down her gown with unhurried grace and guided her breast to my lips.
"Wait, let's talk about this!" I screamed in panic. "Ma'am, I'm still in high school — this is an arrestable situation! I can find other ways to pay—"
What came out of my mouth was a sound of entirely involuntary relief as the milk reached me and my body — this body, this traitorous body — accepted it.
I looked at my hands.
Small. Soft. Rounded at every edge. Innocent in the way that only things that haven't been anywhere yet can be innocent.
Panic gripped me. What is this? What have you done to my body?
The woman murmured, "It's almost as if fate decreed it. His father wished to name him after the founder."
"Father? What are you talking about, mine's dead!" I railed, reduced to wails.
She lifted me up with a tender, proud smile. "My Arthur Romaeus van Wolfhard, the second."
The name hit me like a freight train.
Arthur Romaeus van Wolfhard II.
I knew that name. I had made it — invented it while bored in class, scribbling in the margins of a notebook, assembling it syllable by syllable because it sounded like someone who would burn half the world down. And he did. Someone broken by the world, who decided to erase it — and everything in it — becoming the greatest calamity, even above dragons. Someone designed, with deliberate craft, to be the wound the story couldn't heal until the final act.
The villain.
My villain.
He dies in chapter five hundred and twelve. The heroine drives her sword through him as he laughs — maniacal, unyielding — at death itself. It was a laugh that spoke more than words ever could, his dying declaration, while a tear fell from one of his eyes announcing there was still a piece of humanity left inside him. I wrote that scene three times before it finally landed right.
WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME!
The wail that emerged from me was operatic in its sincerity and entirely without intelligible content.
The woman only smiled and kissed my forehead.
This wasn't real. It couldn't be real.
Except the woman's warmth was real. The milk tasted real. The stained-glass light fracturing across my tiny, pudgy hands was real.
I wasn't in a coma. I wasn't dreaming.
I was here. In the world I'd created.
I had fallen off a roof. I had died — quickly, if wetly — and I had woken up inside the world I built word by word in my notebook and on my phone. Reincarnated. Transmigrated. Isekai'd, without the dignity of encountering a truck.
Into the body of the man I designed to fail.
Into the villain. Into the character the story required to be hated, to be feared, to be defeated — badly, publicly, in front of a world army that had forced the remaining nations of the world to come together — so that the heroine could become what she was meant to become.
What made it hard to believe, no matter how many times I turned it over in my mind, was that this world wasn't created by a god. I had made it with my own hands. It should have been scientifically impossible.
I closed my eyes and tried the only thing left available to me: hoping very hard that none of this was real.
When I opened them, the woman was still there. Still beautiful. Still smiling at me the way people smile at things they love.
My Arthur, she had called me.
STOP CALLING ME THAT, WOMAN!
I screamed.
The sound that came out was a newborn's wail.