The first time Arjun slipped out of his own body, he thought it was just a dream.
The fluorescent buzz of the university library was still ringing in his ears, the last paragraph of his half-hearted thesis outline still glowing on the laptop screen, when the edges of the room folded in on themselves like paper soaked in ink. He remembered blinking, rubbing his eyes, then clutching the desk as the weight of himself lifted — no, was pulled — from bone and breath.
When his vision cleared, the air smelled of ash and iron.
He was standing on a jagged wall overlooking a battlefield. The sky burned purple with lightning, and below, ranks of armored figures clashed like waves colliding, shields splintering, banners snapping in the storm-wind. In his hands was a staff crowned with a shard of crystal, and when the lightning arced, it bent toward him, not away.
A voice shouted, not in English but in words that still made sense in his head:"Archmage! Hold the line!"
Arjun froze. His mouth moved — and the words that came were not his own, but deeper, commanding, ancient:"Stand firm. The wards will hold."
And the wards did hold. Light poured from the staff, a shimmering dome rising to shield the soldiers clustered behind him. Arrows hissed against it, bursting into harmless sparks. The soldiers roared, surging forward under his protection.
Arjun staggered back, heart hammering. This isn't real. This can't be real. Yet the heat of the magic tingled in his fingertips, and the ground shook with the charge of mounted cavalry, and the man beside him — scarred, bleeding, grinning — clapped him on the back with such force he nearly toppled from the wall.
"For the realm!" the man bellowed.
The realm. The battle. The staff. The archmage.
Arjun shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he was back in the library, his laptop chiming with a low-battery warning.
The taste of ash was still in his mouth.
For three days, he told no one. He told himself it was just exhaustion, just the by-product of too much caffeine and too little sleep, just the imagination of a young man who had never really wanted to write a thesis in the first place.
But then it happened again.
Not to him. To Maya.
Maya was late again. Not for work — she was always on time for work, whether it was her morning shift at the diner or her evening shift at the grocery store — but for her son.
Nine-year-old Aarav was waiting outside the school gates, clutching his backpack straps, his hair curling damp from drizzle. She ran, breathless, waving, her shoes slapping puddles. "I'm here, I'm here," she called, though the guilt in her chest made the words hollow.
He didn't scold her. He just smiled tiredly and slipped his hand into hers. That was worse.
She bought him fried dumplings from the stall near the bus stop to make up for it. He ate quietly. She told herself she would take an extra shift tomorrow, save for his birthday gift, maybe even manage a small cake.
She blinked. The bus was gone. The dumplings were gone.
And she was sitting on a throne.
The hall stretched like the belly of a cathedral, marble pillars veined with gold, tapestries embroidered with stars. Courtiers lined the aisles, bowing as trumpets blared. On her lap lay a crown, heavy with emeralds. A child — not Aarav, but so like him it made her heart twist — knelt at her feet.
"Mother," the boy said softly. "The council awaits your decree."
Maya's lips trembled. She wanted to scream. She wanted to clutch the boy and demand to know what this was, where her son was, what cruel joke had stolen her from the drizzle and the bus stop.
Instead, she heard her own voice speak, regal and unyielding:"The decree stands. Let it be known that the crown will not bow to traitors."
The courtiers cheered.
Maya wept.
When her vision snapped back, she was on the bus, Aarav asleep against her shoulder, the dumpling bag empty in his lap.
But the echo of the crown's weight pressed against her skull.
Arjun didn't know Maya yet. Not for another two weeks. But when he sat across from her at a community hall meeting — a support group he had been dragged into by a persistent friend — he saw the same look in her eyes that haunted him in the mirror.
The look of someone who had been somewhere else.
The third Borrower was Kenji.
Kenji didn't even fight the dream. He welcomed it.
In his world — the small, cramped apartment littered with empty instant noodle bowls and game controllers — he was nothing. A dropout. A disappointment. A ghost in his own family.
But in the borrowed world, he was a knight.
He woke in armor that gleamed beneath a tournament sun, with a sword that fit his hand as if forged for him alone. The crowd roared his name, though it wasn't Kenji they cheered. It was Sir Alaric of the Silver Guard.
And Alaric fought like a storm given flesh.
Kenji laughed as the lance shattered in his grasp, as the rival knight crashed to the sand, as the herald raised his gauntleted hand to the sky. It was everything he had never been allowed to be: strong, admired, seen.
So when he woke back in his dingy apartment, the silence was unbearable.
He longed for the next slip. He prayed for it.
And when it came, he embraced it like a lover.
The Borrowers did not yet have a name for what was happening to them. They did not yet know there were others.
But the cracks between worlds were widening.
Selene's slip came during a meeting.
She was mid-sentence, explaining quarterly revenue projections to a room of bored executives, when the fluorescent lights stuttered.
She blinked.
And she was running. Barefoot across wet cobblestones, lungs burning, sirens blaring overhead. Drones swept the alleys with beams of red light, searching, hunting. In her hand was a scrap of paper with a sigil drawn in hurried ink.
"Go!" someone shouted behind her. "The safehouse is ahead!"
Selene ran harder, her sharp heels gone, her tailored suit replaced with rags. She skidded into a cellar where rebels crouched around a lantern, their eyes filled with desperate hope.
"You made it," one whispered. "The plan can still work."
Selene wanted to deny it, to insist this wasn't her, but the words that slipped from her lips were cold, precise:"Then let's make sure it does."
When she jolted back to her boardroom, her assistant was staring at her."Ms. Rao? Are you… all right?"
Selene smoothed her blazer with trembling hands."Yes," she lied. "Let's continue."
Dante's slip came last.
For him, it was not a battlefield or a throne or a tournament or a rebellion. It was peace.
He woke in a sunlit courtyard, the fragrance of jasmine on the air, a book in his hands. His fingers, scarred and calloused from soldier's work, traced delicate lines of ink across parchment. Students sat before him, listening to his words as though they mattered.
The scholar's voice — his voice — spoke of histories and philosophies Dante had never learned, but which poured from his tongue with the ease of memory.
No gunfire. No screaming. No blood. Just quiet.
When he returned to his cramped apartment, medals tucked in drawers he never opened, Dante found himself weeping.
Not from pain. From longing.
Five Borrowers. Five cracks.
Each thought they were alone.
But the worlds were already whispering to each other.
And the choices, once offered, would demand answers.