In the silent, non-dimensional expanse between realities, a war was ending.
It was not a war of fire and steel, but of concepts. Aion, the God of Ordered Time, sought to weave the multiverse into a perfect, stable tapestry, each thread of causality laid precisely against the next. His sister, Entropy, Goddess of Chaotic Change, fought to let realities bloom wild and free, to live and die in glorious, spontaneous tumult.
Their conflict was a silent, terrifying pressure against the fabric of all that was. And Aion was losing.
He could feel his essence unraveling, his magnificent tapestries fraying at the edges as Entropy's chaotic power washed over him. He would not be unmade. He could not. In a final, desperate act of defiance, he did not lash out at his sister. Instead, with the last shred of his will, he reached out. His consciousness, fractured and dying, shot like a bolt across the dimensional barriers, searching for a anchor, a lens, a conduit—anything to channel his last, cataclysmic breath away from her, to preserve a single, final echo of his order.
His grasp, weak and frantic, brushed against a reality, then a planet, then a city, then a classroom. It found a soul. Not a mighty warrior, not a brilliant sage. It found a soul at its most placid, its most neutral, its most unguarded.
It found a boy named Haru Rindo, who was, at that exact moment, dozing off in history class.
***
The clock on the classroom wall had, in Haru's professional opinion, given up on life. The second hand didn't so much tick as it shuddered, lurching forward with a faint, pathetic click that was swallowed whole by the droning monotony of Mr. Yakawa's history lecture. Each shudder was an eternity.
A strange, cold shiver ran down Haru's spine, a feeling utterly disconnected from the warm spring afternoon. For a single, disorienting second, he felt a sensation of immense, unbearable pressure, as if the air itself was being squeezed out of the universe. It was gone as quickly as it came, leaving behind only a faint ringing in his ears and a sudden, profound exhaustion.
"…and thus, the political machinations of the late Heian period…"
Yakawa's voice was a dry, dusty thing, a perfect match for the chalk dust motes dancing lazily in the slanted afternoon sunbeam cutting across the room. The strange sensation was already fading, dismissed as a weird dizzy spell.
Haru's chin was propped heavily in his palm, his elbow threatening to slide off the polished surface of his desk with every slow blink. His textbook was open to a page on aristocratic court poetry, but the carefully printed characters had long since blurred into a gray, meaningless smear. His own reflection, pale and bored, was faintly visible in the varnish over a woodblock print of a nobleman on a horse.
"Just five more minutes,"
he bargained with a universe that had, unbeknownst to him, just been forever altered.
"Just five more minutes and the bell will ring. I can make it..."
His eyelids were made of lead. The sunbeam was so warm. The droning was so constant. It was a symphony of boredom, and he was its most willing audience. His head dipped once, twice. The classroom around him—the rustle of notebooks, the whispered conversations two rows over, the scent of floor wax and old paper—began to soften at the edges, melting into a pleasant hum.
He was dozing. Not fully asleep, but adrift. In that hypnagogic state, the real world began to twist into something else. The click-shudder of the clock became the distant, rhythmic clang of a blacksmith's hammer.
Mr. Yakawa's droning voice warped, deepening into the low, guttural cadence of a man shouting orders in a language Haru felt he should understand but didn't. The sunbeam on his face wasn't from a window anymore; it was the glare off a polished shield, hot and blinding.
A sharp, acrid smell cut through the dream—not chalk dust, but smoke. Woodsmoke, and something else… something metallic. Like old coins. Like…
Blood.
The thought was so visceral, so alien, that it jolted him partway awake. His head snapped up, his eyes fluttering open. The classroom was still there. Mr. Yakawa was still droning. A girl in the front row was stifling a yawn.
Weird dream, he thought, shaking his head slightly. His wrist itched. He absently scratched at a small, star-shaped birthmark there—a mark he'd had his whole life but that now felt strangely warm, almost throbbing.
He let out a slow breath, the tension leaving his shoulders. Just a dream. He slumped back into his posture of studied indifference, letting the drone pull him under once more.
This time, the transition was instantaneous and absolute.
There was no slow melting. One moment, he was listening to the rise and fall of a lecture on feudal economies. The next, the world lurched.
It was a nauseating, vertiginous sensation, like missing a step in the dark. The solid desk vanished from under his elbows. The warm sunbeam was replaced by a oppressive, thick heat. The droning voice was drowned out by a cacophony of loud, overlapping voices, raucous laughter, and the clatter of heavy pottery.
Haru's eyes flew open, and for a terrifying second, his brain refused to process what it was seeing.
The clean, well-ordered classroom was gone.
He was slumped over a rough-hewn wooden table, sticky with something that smelled faintly of stale beer and vinegar. The air was hazy with smoke from a hearth large enough to roast a whole pig, and it was thick with the smells of roasting meat, unwashed bodies, and damp wool.
A massive man with a beard that looked like a bird's nest and a scar cutting through one eyebrow slammed a foaming tankard down on the table next to Haru's head, making him jump.
"Quit yer snoozin', lad!
'Tis barely sundown!"
the man bellowed with a gap-toothed grin before lurching away towards the bar.
Haru sat bolt upright, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He was wearing clothes he'd never seen before—a coarse, homespun tunic and trousers, and worn leather boots. His school uniform was nowhere to be seen.
What…? How…?
This wasn't a dream. The sensory overload was too intense, too real. The splinters in the table under his fingers, the acidic taste of the air, the deafening noise—it was all horrifyingly tangible.
He was in a tavern. A real, bustling, medieval-style tavern.
His mind, still fuzzy with the remnants of a history lesson, scrambled for an explanation. A prank? Some kind of hyper-realistic VR? Had he been drugged?
He stared blankly at the tankard in front of him, his reflection distorted in the curve of the pewter. The face was his, but the context was so utterly wrong it felt like looking at a stranger.
The only thing that felt familiar was the faint, warm throb from the star-shaped mark on his wrist. He clutched it, as if it were an anchor in this sudden, insane sea of confusion.
This wasn't dozing off in class. This was something else entirely. And as the initial shock began to recede, a cold, stark terror began to take its place.
Where in the world was he?