My eyes abruptly shot open as I screamed my lungs out.
"RRRRRAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!"
Every veins in my body stretched taut as I frantically scanned my surroundings. Instead of the mocking, hyena-like face of Exheltor I was expecting, I found nothing but an unfamiliar, dim environment. My heart hammered a wild, frantic rhythm against my ribs. Left, right, up, down—no sign of my nemesis, nor of Kaelen or Lyra. They were just… gone.
Where the hell was I? This wasn't the twisted realm of shadows and screaming winds where Exheltor had dragged me. This was... quiet. Still.
"SHOW YOURSELF, EXHELTOR! YOU FUCKING COWARD! I WILL FUCKING FEED YOU YOUR OWN ENTRAILS!" I roared, the threat echoing in the small, quiet space.
I waited. My breathing came in sharp bursts as I listened for his response—that grating laugh that sounded like metal scraping against bone, or perhaps the whisper of his voice sliding through dimensions like a knife through silk.
...
.....
.....
No mocking chuckle. No taunting reply. Only a deep, unsettling silence that pressed in on my ears like cotton.
"IS THIS ANOTHER OF YOUR FUCKING TRICKS? YOU DESPICABLE BEING!" My voice cracked slightly on the last word. I hated that crack. It sounded almost... human.
....
...
...
Nothing. My mind raced. An illusion? A particularly intricate one, perhaps. But Exheltor, for all his trickery, was not powerful enough to craft a prison this… solid. This real. I am Nylka'htar of the Twelfth Seat. My will is not so easily subverted. I've broken through dimensional barriers that would drive lesser minds to madness. I've walked through the dreams of gods and emerged unscathed.
But this... this felt different.
There was only one way to be sure. I approached the nearest pale, off-white wall. The surface looked mundane—painted drywall, maybe plaster underneath. Nothing like the obsidian fortresses of the Void Lords or the crystalline barriers of the Celestial Courts. Just a wall.
I gathered the might that had shattered the fortresses of gods into my fist. Power that had once reduced mountain peaks to dust, that had carved my name into the very fabric of reality. I drew it all into my right arm and threw a punch meant to obliterate whatever pathetic barrier stood before me.
BAAM!!
A dull, pathetic thud echoed back at me.
The first thing I noticed: the wall did not shatter. It didn't even crack. Hell, I don't think I even left a mark. It was just a wall, stubbornly and mundanely real, probably wondering why some idiot had just punched it.
The second thing I noticed: The pain.
!!!!!!!!!!!
A single, traitorous tear rolled down my cheek and fell to the scuffed wooden floor with an audible PLOP!
Both my eyes twitched violently. I couldn't help it. This was... this was impossible. I hadn't felt pain like this since—since before I became what I am. Since I was weak.
"AAAAHHHHH!!!!!" I crashed to my knees, clutching my right arm as it throbbed with a white-hot, relentless agony I hadn't felt in centuries. I rolled on the floor, thrashing, a pathetic symphony of sniffles and choked cries escaping my lips.
It was a trivial, mortal pain. The kind that comes from flesh meeting something harder than flesh and losing. Yet it was all-consuming, overwhelming every other sensation until the universe narrowed to just this: hurt, hurt, hurt.
What is this? Why am I so weak? This was no illusion. Illusions don't break your bones with such brutally honest physics. I sobbed, the sound ugly and foreign to my own ears. When was the last time I had cried? When was the last time I had needed to?
DAMN IT. I AM NYLKA'HTAR OF THE TWELFTH SEAT! SLAYER OF TANNORI, THE DRAGON OF ENDS, DESTROYER OF EXHELTOR THE WEAVER OF DESTINY! AND ETERNAL GUARDIAN OF THE MAIDEN OF THE PEARL!!!!
The titles felt hollow in this place. Empty words spoken to an empty room. Where was my power? Where were my companions who had followed me through hell itself?
How was I brought so low? EXHELTOR, I SWEAR IF THIS IS YOUR DOING I WILL CHASE YOU TO THE END OF SHAMANKA!
But even as I screamed the threat, doubt crept in. This didn't feel like his work. Exheltor was dramatic, theatrical. He loved to gloat, to explain his victories in excruciating detail. This silence, this abandonment... it wasn't his style.
I had to master myself. This weeping was unbecoming of who I was—who I am. This was just flesh. Trivial, mortal flesh that had forgotten its place. I could mend it. I had to mend it.
I slowly, painfully, sat up and crossed my legs. The movement sent fresh waves of agony through my arm, but I endured. I cradled the injured limb in my lap. Five fingers, bent at wrong angles. The wrist already swelling like a balloon. A simple fracture. Nothing a low-tier healing cantrip couldn't fix.
I brought my good hand forward, closed my eyes, and concentrated. I reached for the familiar, raging inferno of my mana core, the metaphysical furnace that had allowed me to warp reality to my will for over five hundred years.
Come on. Come on. Where are you?
...
.....
...
I found… a puddle. A shallow, lukewarm puddle of energy, faint and fading fast. My eyes twitched again. This had to be some kind of joke. Some cosmic prank played by forces beyond even my understanding.
Another mystery to solve before I smote Exheltor into a stain on the cosmic canvas. If I ever found him again. If I ever got my power back. If, if, if.
I pushed the frustration down. Focus. I had survived worse. I had clawed my way up from nothing before, though that was so long ago the memory felt like someone else's life. I gathered the last dregs of this pitiful energy, imposing my will upon it.
It responded sluggishly, reluctantly, like trying to squeeze honey from a stone. A faint green glow emanated from my good hand—barely visible, more of a suggestion of light than actual illumination. I guided the trickle of regenerative energy into the broken mess of my right arm.
Soft pops and cracks echoed as bones slid back into place, ligaments knit, and swelling receded. The pain faded to a dull ache, then to nothing. I flexed my hand. The fingers moved properly. The wrist turned without grinding. Good as new, or at least functional.
One problem solved. About a thousand more to go.
Now, the surroundings. I forced myself to actually look at where I was instead of just reacting to it. A small, four-walled room, lit by the blue-gray light of early dawn filtering through a grimy window. The light had that quality that came just before sunrise, thin and uncertain.
A crude bedding on the floor—a "mattress," my mind supplied, the term dusty with disuse. It was lumpy and covered with sheets that had seen better days. A simple wooden chair sat beside a small table. Everything was... normal. Aggressively, determinedly normal.
And on that table sat a...
...
I stared.
....
My breath hitched. A deep, forgotten sense of nostalgia, a longing so sharp it was a physical pain, lanced through me. Memories, buried under centuries of spellcraft and warfare, of different skies and stranger stars, began to stir. But not the skies of Nemucury. Something else. Something older.
I abruptly stood and practically bolted to the table, my earlier majesty forgotten. My legs moved without my conscious command, driven by recognition I couldn't quite place.
My eyes widened in pure, unadulterated disbelief. My heart wasn't hammering from battle-rage now, but from a shock so profound it left me dizzy and struggling to breathe.
Tears, real ones this time, not of pain but of a loss I hadn't allowed myself to feel in five centuries, streamed down my face. Hot and salty and utterly human.
It was a computer.
A clunky, beige, cathode-ray tube monitor sat on a bulky tower case. The kind of machine that belonged in a museum, all sharp angles and thick plastic. A keyboard, yellowed with age, sat before it. I could see dust particles dancing in the pale light above the monitor.
Five hundred and fifty-seven years. It had been five hundred and fifty-seven years since I had last seen one. Since I'd been ripped from my world, from my life, at the age of seventeen. A chubby, anti-social nerd who lived more in digital worlds than his own.
My name… my name wasn't always Nylka'htar.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. I had been someone else. Someone smaller, weaker, more ordinary. Someone who sat in front of machines like this and lost himself in pixels and polygons and stories that weren't his own.
I reached out a trembling hand, my fingers—the same fingers that had once woven spells to bind dragons, that had inscribed runes of power into the very air—brushing against the dusty plastic of the keyboard. It felt… real. Profoundly, mundanely real. The texture was exactly as I remembered: slightly rough, worn smooth in places by countless hours of use.
A desperate, hopeful thought surged through me. A connection. A link. A way to understand what had happened to me, where I was, why I was here. My finger fumbled for the power button on the tower, pressing it with a reverence I usually reserved for holy relics.
A light flickered. Red, steady, reassuring. A low hum started, a sound from the deepest corridors of my memory. The sound of fans spinning up, of hard drives clicking to life, of electricity flowing through circuits. The monitor glowed to life, casting a pale blue light on my face.
For a glorious second, I felt a surge of triumph. Yes! Connection. Information. Answers.
Then, with a sad, sputtering pop and a faint smell of ozone, the light died. The hum cut off abruptly, like someone had yanked the plug from reality itself. The screen went black, darker than before. Dead.
Silence returned.
I stood there, my hand still hovering over the dead machine. The hope that had flared so brightly extinguished just as fast, leaving me feeling hollow. Empty. Like a vessel someone had poured out and forgotten to refill.
The shock began to recede, replaced by a slow, dawning, terrifying comprehension. This was no spatial displacement. This wasn't some pocket dimension Exheltor had crafted. This was… something else entirely. Something that felt like...
Like home.
The word whispered through my mind, barely audible over the sound of my own heartbeat.
I turned away from the dead computer, my eyes truly seeing the room for the first time. The posters on the wall… faded images of anime characters I hadn't thought of in lifetimes. A spiky-haired boy with orange clothing. A girl with pink hair and a giant key. Characters from stories I had loved once, when love was simpler and the world was smaller.
The pile of manga in the corner, volumes stacked haphazardly like they'd been read and re-read until the spines cracked. A single, rumpled bed that looked like someone had been sleeping in it recently—the pillow still held the impression of a head.
My gaze drifted to the window. I walked over, my steps hesitant, almost afraid. Each step felt like walking toward the edge of a cliff. I looked out.
No floating citadels hanging in the sky like impossible jewels. No twin moons casting silver light on crystal towers. No crystalline spires piercing a magenta sky that bled color into the clouds.
Instead, I saw a quiet, suburban street under a pale, early morning sky. A lamppost stood guard over empty pavement. A car sat parked beside the curb—some kind of sedan, nothing fancy, just transportation. A neatly trimmed lawn stretched toward a house that looked exactly like every other house on the street.
Normal. Completely, utterly, devastatingly normal.
The breath left my lungs in a rush.
Earth.
The word was a ghost in my mind. A half-remembered dream from when I was someone else entirely.
My eyes fell on my reflection in the glass. The face staring back was not that of a battle-hardened demigod, etched with the scars of centuries and eyes that had witnessed the birth and death of stars. It wasn't the face that had stared down cosmic horrors and negotiated with beings of pure thought.
It was the round, soft face of a seventeen-year-old boy. Pale from too much time indoors, like someone who lived on delivery pizza and energy drinks. A few pimples dotted the forehead—the kind of minor imperfections that had once seemed like the end of the world. Eyes wide with a mixture of terror, confusion, and the lingering shadow of social anxiety.
I was back. And nothing had changed.
But everything had.
I was still chubby. Still soft around the edges in all the ways that mattered and some that didn't. I was still, physically, that anti-social nerd who'd rather spend time with fictional characters than real people. But inside… inside was Nylka'htar. A being of immense will and ancient power, now trapped in a vessel of soft flesh and brittle bone, in a world that had no magic, no monsters, and whose greatest intrigues felt like child's play compared to the cosmic games I'd been forced to master.
A slow, grim smile touched my lips. It felt unfamiliar on this face, like wearing clothes that didn't quite fit. This face wasn't made for the kind of expressions that came with five centuries of warfare and command.
Exheltor wasn't here. This was not his doing. This was something else entirely. Something bigger, stranger, more impossible than anything I'd encountered in all my years of battling cosmic forces.
The pain in my hand, the dead computer, the quiet street—it was all real. This was my new battlefield. Infinitely more mundane than fighting dragons and negotiating with gods, and infinitely more complex than any challenge I had ever known. How do you conquer a world that doesn't even believe in magic? How do you command respect when you look like someone's little brother?
First things first. I had to remember my name. My real name. The one my… mother… had given me before the universe decided I was needed elsewhere. It was on the tip of my tongue, hiding just behind a lifetime of being someone else entirely.
What was it? What had she called me when I was small and the biggest monsters in my life were homework assignments and playground bullies?