Grayson laid on the cold studio floor, face twisted in what he believed was a convincing look of agony.
His arms flopped limply to his sides, a plastic sword protruding from his chest at an impossible angle. He squeezed his eyes shut, took one last dry breath and whispered, "Tell my wife…cough cough.... the kingdom WILL remember me."
Silence followed. Then an angry voice rang out across the stage.
"CUT! CUT! CUT!!!!!!"
"For crying out loud, Stratham!, what the hell was that supposed to be?"
Grayson cracked one eye open. The director, a skinny man with a scarf wrapped twice around his neck despite the suffocating heat of the lights, was storming towards him.
"You're supposed to be a dying soldier, not...."
Huff Huff
the director waved his arms in exasperation, "...whatever soap opera monologue that was! This is a Background death scene, Stratham, not A damned Hamlet play!."
A chorus of snickers rose from the other extras sprawled across the fake battlefield. Plastic armours squeaked as a few of them sat up to watch the spectacle unfold.
Grayson forced a chuckle, trying to salvage some dignity.
"I was just giving it a bit of...gravitas, you know? Depth. The Audience would feel it, I swear."
"Feel it? FEEL IT!?" The director threw his clipboard down with a clatter. "The audience won't even see you! You're five rows back, under a pile of corpses, for less than three seconds of screen time. Your job is to die and stay still, Stratham. CAN'T you manage that, or is that asking too much from the great GRAYSON STRATHAM!?"
More laughter. Someone muttered, "Guess even playing dead is too high-level for him."
Grayson swallowed his retort and sat up, brushing fake dirt from his fake chainmail. His knees popped like firecrackers. Fifty-three years old, performing as a nameless soldier in a direct-to-streaming fantasy movie whose budget couldn't afford decent props, let alone extras with aspirations.
This wasn't what he'd dreamed of when he'd taken the stage name GRAYSON STRATHAM.
Back in his twenties, he had been certain it would look good on posters, on billboards, on the lips of screaming fans. "Grayson Stratham in Blood Horizon." "Grayson Stratham in The Last Crusader." "Grayson Stratham in Mission possible ".
He was going to be the next Tom Cruise, the Action star who'd put Dwayne Johnson to shame. He had the looks once, the jawline sharp enough to cut glass, the hair slicked back with that natural movie-star aura.
But somewhere along the way, the phone calls stopped ringing. The auditions got smaller. And the roles… well, the roles got sadder.
Now he was here, fifty-three, hiding his bald spot with Dye spray, gut straining against armour made of painted cardboard, still clinging to a name that sounded like it belonged in blockbuster headlines instead of the credits under of an unidentified soldier that died in the background of a war.
The younger extras didn't make it easier. A tall kid with perfect skin leaned over and whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear, "Careful, guys. Don't let Grandpa overact near you, or you'll catch it."
"Yeah," another added, "didn't he once play a corpse in that crime show? And even then, they cut his scene? Talk About dead career, he can't even play dead lol"
Grayson forced a smile, though his cheeks burned. "Hey, say what you want, but corpses are harder to play than they look. You try holding your breath for more than three minutes Then, I'm not an Olympic swimming for God's sake!"
The group erupted in laughter. Someone coughed, "you might as well give up acting and try your luck as swimming"
Grayson rubbed the back of his neck, muttering under his breath. "It's not like I wanted to be in this dumpster fire of a movie anyway."
But he had. He took every gig, no matter how pathetic, because some desperate, stubborn part of him still believed it might lead to something. Anything. A director noticing him. A casting agent remembering his name. A miracle.
"Alright, back to positions!" the director barked. "Reset the battlefield! And STRATHAM, this time, just die. No Shakespeare, no speeches. no damn gravitas. just Collapse like a sack of potatoes and stay there."
Grayson dragged himself back into place among the sea of would-be corpses. Around him, the younger extras joked, laughed, posted selfies to Instagram in full costume. They had their whole futures ahead of them, bright and burning. Grayson had… what? Half a pay cheque and the privilege of getting yelled at by a man wearing a scarf indoors like some pompous French romantic.
The assistant director clapped the slate. "Scene seventy-three of The battle of the Teleportation Gate, take four. CAMERAS, LIGHTS, ACTION!"
The "battle" began. Cardboard swords clashed, extras fell melodramatically, fake blood sprayed from hidden tubes. Grayson staggered forward on cue, clutching his chest. This time he didn't try to add a monologue. He just dropped to the ground, limbs splayed, eyes half-closed.
He lay there, breathing shallow, waiting for the director to shout "Cut!"
Instead, he heard a muffled pop. Then another. The air buzzed with static. A humming sound and vibration spread across the set.
Grayson shivered. That wasn't in the script. This felt ominously wrong.
The glowing prop portal at the centre of the battlefield that was meant to act as the Teleportation Gate in the movie, a cheap ring of LED lights glued to a wooden frame, began to spark. Blue light shimmered outward, brighter and brighter until the extras nearby stumbled back, Running away from the stage.
"What the hell!?" the director shouted. "Kill the effect! Who's running the switchboard!?"
No one was touching it. The light pulsed faster, heat radiating in waves. A few extras screamed. The wooden frame cracked with a sound like thunder.
Grayson , lying closest to the portal, squinted against the glow. His heart hammered. For a second, he thought it was just another badly planned stunt, or just a slight malfunction in the prop's lights wiring. Then the air itself seemed to tear open, revealing a swirling blue vortex within the fake prop.
The pull hit him before he could Thinking of running.
Wind roared, sucking at his clothes, dragging his body across the fake battlefield. He clawed at the floor, nails scraping plywood, but the force only grew stronger. Extras shrieked as papers, props, even cameras were yanked toward the portal.
Grayson 's last thought, as his fingers slipped and the light swallowed him whole, wasn't fear.
It was a bitter, pathetic resignation.
"ah damnit. couldn't land a leading role in my life, played so many dead person roles and now I'm literally dying on stage ."
Then the stage, the lights, the shrieking of the other extras and the director's Annoying screaming, all of it vanished.