"Oh, gods… did I drink too much?"
Lei staggered back, but the ground didn't catch him.
Reality—the dependable, ordinary kind—began to fracture. Not explode, not vanish, just… unravel. Like a lie finally giving up the act. The world around him twisted, not violently, but with surgical precision—as if something ancient had decided it was time.
Colors bled. Shadows danced in reverse. His breath fogged into symbols.
And then he saw it.
Not with his eyes—but his mind, or whatever was now pretending to be one.
The world was becoming a catalyst.
A trigger for something he'd only theorized in late-night madness: Narthal Entanglement—the mythic state where every possibility overlaps, waiting for an observer to make it real.
"This… this is a theory," he whispered, as his voice cracked like glass.
Dreams overlapped reality. Memory—someone else's memory—spooled through his thoughts in rapid flashes. None of them were his. None of them were fake.
Time folded. Imaginary time, the kind philosophers joked about, wrapped around him like an equation that had finally solved itself with him as the answer.
He felt it all. Every death. Every kiss. Every tear of every person he had never been.
And then—silence.
The hum returned.
He opened his eyes.
And the world was… calm.
A table beneath his hands. A pen between his fingers.
The air smelled of old ink and newer gods.
He looked down.
One word written in perfect, trembling script: Narthal.
A language he had never learned—yet somehow, had always known.