My name is Lain Evermore.
A normal, broke college student at Harveil University. A computer science major. A loser at heart.
And above all else—I hate stories.
Not all of them. Just the endings.
Ever since I was a child, I despised the way stories concluded. I remember tugging at my mother's sleeve after she finished reading me a bedtime tale."Mommy, does the story continue after that?" I would ask.She would smile gently and pat my head. "No, that's the end, bud."
But I never accepted that.
The book might close, the final words might fall into silence, but what about the world beyond those pages? What about the characters who kept breathing, living, struggling in unseen corners of their existence?
Endings felt like a lie. An ugly cage forced over something infinite.
And maybe that's why I grew to hate this world too. Because in the end, life itself ends. The story always ends.
I buried those thoughts under coursework, late-night coding sessions, and the dull haze of routine. I was just another shut-in student chasing grades, sleep-deprived and fueled by vending machine coffee. Searching—desperately—for a perfect story that could satisfy the gnawing emptiness in me.
That was the day it found me.
I had been walking to the library, my bag slung lazily over one shoulder, when I noticed a book lying half-hidden beneath a bench. The leather cover looked weathered, as though centuries had pressed against it.
Curious, I picked it up.
The title shifted before my eyes, letters reshaping themselves like living ink until they formed words I could understand:
"The Story of Lucian Smith."
I blinked. Lucian Smith? The name meant nothing to me. A trick of fatigue, I thought. Maybe I was hallucinating from lack of sleep. Shrugging it off, I slid the book into my bag and carried on with my day.
But that night, everything changed.
I was heading home from the library when I noticed him. A man standing alone beneath a broken streetlight, its bulb flickering in irregular pulses like a dying heartbeat. His figure was draped in tattered robes that whispered against the still night air.
His eyes glowed faintly, reflecting something not of this world.
I slowed, unease coiling in my gut.
And then he spoke.
"The Seer who Wonders Time looks upon this world…"
The words rolled from his tongue in a cadence both melodic and terrible. They weren't shouted, yet they reverberated through my bones, echoing in places no sound should reach.
I wanted to keep walking. My instincts screamed to turn away. But my body betrayed me—my legs stiffened, rooted to the pavement as if invisible strings had claimed me.
The man's lips curved into a half-smile. His voice dropped into a whisper that still rang with cosmic weight.
"Let the end begin."
The moment the words left his mouth, the world shattered.
The street dissolved into fragments of glass and shadow. Light bled into darkness, and sound into silence. The ground beneath me folded in on itself like pages of a burning book.
Agony ripped through my body. My vision warped, my senses twisted until they no longer belonged to me.
And when I opened my eyes again—
I was no longer myself.
I woke up in a body that was broken, disfigured, its limbs twisted in grotesque shapes. Pain surged with every breath, but worse than the pain was the flood of visions that stormed into my mind.
Visions of futures. Of deaths. Of myself and countless others, falling into ruin. A burning clock hovered before my eyes, its hands ticking down toward a single date, a single moment—a month from now.
The end.
And I understood, with a terror I could not escape:
My story had just begun.