The phone's glow illuminates Jax's face as the messages continue to pile up, each one another stone on the cairn of obligations threatening to bury him. Something inside him cracks not loudly, but with the quiet finality of ice giving way beneath too much weight. He sits up, pockets the phone without responding, and moves to the window. Outside, Oakhaven sleeps beneath streetlights that cast more shadows than illumination. There's only one place in town where no one will look for him, where no one will ask anything of him. The thought of the abandoned mill pulls at him like gravity.
He slides the window open. The night air hits his face, cool and indifferent to his exhaustion. His movements are automatic as he swings his legs over the sill and drops to the soft earth beneath. His knees buckle slightly on impact, a small betrayal from a body pushed beyond its limits. Steadying himself against the house's peeling siding, he waits for the momentary dizziness to pass.
The walk through town feels longer than usual. Jax's steps lack their customary precision; occasionally, his foot catches on uneven pavement, forcing him to stumble forward to maintain balance. The silence presses against his ears, a welcome absence after a day filled with demands. His phone vibrates again in his pocket. He doesn't check it.
Rivers Edge Processing Mill rises from the darkness at the edge of town, a hulking shadow against the night sky. Chain-link fence surrounds the property, topped with barbed wire that gleams dully in the moonlight. NO TRESPASSING signs hang at regular intervals, their red lettering faded to the color of dried blood. Jax knows the weak spot—a section where the fence has been pried up from the ground, creating a gap just wide enough for a person to slide under.
He drops to his hands and knees, wincing as gravel bites into his palms. The space beneath the fence seems narrower tonight, or perhaps his perception is altered by exhaustion. Either way, he forces himself through, his shirt catching and tearing slightly on a jagged edge. The sound of fabric ripping is loud in the stillness.
The side entrance is hidden behind overgrown bushes that scratch at his arms as he pushes through. The metal door stands rust-welded to its frame, sealed by years of neglect and Oakhaven's temperamental weather. Jax braces his shoulder against it, feeling the protest of overworked muscles. He pushes, metal groaning against metal. The door gives way suddenly, sending him stumbling into darkness that smells of dust and forgotten industry.
Inside, the mill breathes around him. Dust motes dance through narrow beams of moonlight that penetrate gaps in the boarded windows, creating silver pathways through the cavernous space. Massive conveyor belts stretch like sleeping serpents across the concrete floor, their metal scales dulled by years of disuse. Machinery looms in the shadows, shapes made strange and almost organic by darkness and neglect.
Jax's footsteps echo as he moves deeper into the building, each sound throwing back distorted versions of itself from hidden corners. He knows the main floor well enough has visited often enough to have landmarks memorized, but tonight he finds himself drawn toward a corridor he hasn't previously explored.
His hand trails along the wall for balance, fingers collecting dust and sending small flakes of peeling paint drifting to the floor. The wall feels solid beneath his touch, a reassuring constancy that requires nothing from him in return. His breathing slows, shoulders dropping from their perpetual position near his ears. Here, there are no expectant faces, no outstretched hands, no problems to solve except his own movement through space.
A sign appears on his left, partially illuminated by a shaft of moonlight: "SECTION D-7: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY." Beneath it, in smaller letters: "SEALED BY ORDER OF OAKHAVEN EMERGENCY RESPONSE - 20 YEAR INCIDENT CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL." The date beneath indicates the sealing occurred seventeen years ago, when Jax was just a baby. The familiar terminology washes over him; everyone in Oakhaven knows about the meteor that struck the mill property, forcing its closure and contributing to the town's economic decline.
Jax moves past the sign, breaking an invisible boundary. His steps leave clear prints in the dust undisturbed for nearly two decades. The sensation of trespassing beyond mere property lines and into contained history sends a small thrill through his exhausted body, the first genuine feeling he's had all day.
The corridor widens into another large room, this one filled with what appears to be wood-cutting equipment. Massive saw blades, now frozen in time, hang above partially processed lumber that never completed its journey to becoming something useful. The irony doesn't escape Jax's unfinished work, suspended forever, neither advancing nor retreating.
His legs tremble suddenly, a delayed response to the day's accumulated strain. He sinks against a wall, knees finally giving up their fight against gravity. The concrete floor is cold beneath him, the wall solid against his back. His breathing sounds unnaturally loud in the space.
Another sign catches his attention across the room: "QUARANTINE BOUNDARY - DO NOT CROSS." Below it, someone has spray-painted: "NOTHING HAPPENS HERE ANYMORE." The contradiction makes Jax almost smile—danger warnings juxtaposed with bored dismissal, both faded with time.
For the first time in months, no one knows where he is. No one is waiting for him to solve a problem. No message needs immediate response. The realization floods his system like a drug, muscles relaxing so suddenly it's almost painful. He tilts his head back against the wall and closes his eyes.
The mill settles around him, metal contracting in the night air with occasional pings and groans. These sounds ask nothing of him. They exist, as he simply exists, without purpose or utility. His hand trembles when he raises it to brush dust from his face—a fine tremor born of overexertion and too many skipped meals.
He opens his eyes to examine his surroundings more carefully. Emergency flood lights, long dead, hang from the ceiling. Faded safety posters peel from walls. A clipboard still hangs by the door, its papers yellow with age. And deeper into the shadows, another corridor leads further than he's ever ventured before.
Jax pushes himself up, legs steadier after even this brief rest. He braces himself against the wall, leaving a handprint in the dust as he moves toward the unexplored passage. The floor slopes slightly downward, taking him beneath the main processing area.
The weight on his shoulders, that constant, invisible pressure of being needed, seems to lighten with each step away from the world outside. Here, in this forgotten place, there is no one to disappoint, no expectations to meet. The relief is so profound it manifests physically: his breathing deepens, his steps grow more certain despite the uneven flooring, his jaw unclenches.
In this moment, surrounded by abandonment and decay, Jax Rivers feels something dangerously close to peace.
The corridor narrows as Jax advances deeper into the mill's forgotten sections. His hand traces the wall, encountering patches of dampness where water has seeped through aging concrete. The air grows cooler, carries a metallic tang that wasn't present in the upper levels. His phone's flashlight cuts a weak path through darkness that feels progressively more absolute, revealing doors set at irregular intervals along the passage. Most hang open, their contents long since cleared or rotted away. But at the corridor's end, a solid metal door stands firmly shut, its surface less corroded than its surroundings. A small plaque, clouded with dust, remains bolted to its center.
Jax wipes the plaque with his sleeve. "Site Manager" appears in faded lettering. He tries the handle locked, as expected. Unlike the other doors, this one seems deliberately sealed rather than simply abandoned. The contradiction intrigues him; why secure an empty office in a building no one is supposed to enter?
He tests the door with his shoulder. It doesn't budge. The frame shows no signs of weakening, unlike the side entrance he forced open earlier. Jax sweeps his light across the floor, searching for something to use as a lever. Amid the debris, a length of metal catches his eye—part of a support strut, one end flattened and slightly curved. He picks it up, testing its weight and rigidity.
The makeshift pry bar fits awkwardly between the door and frame. Jax braces his foot against the wall and pulls, muscles straining against the resistance. For several seconds, nothing happens. Then, with a sound like a distant gunshot, the lock mechanism fractures. The door swings inward, releasing a cloud of disturbed dust that briefly turns his flashlight beam solid.
Jax coughs, waving away particles that tickle his throat and nose. As the dust settles, he steps cautiously into what was once the site manager's office. Unlike the processing areas outside, this room contains remnants of its former purpose: a metal desk overturned against one wall, filing cabinets with drawers hanging open like broken jaws, a chair missing its seat cushion. The beam of his flashlight reveals a large tear in the linoleum floor where it has separated from the concrete beneath.
He steps carefully around the tear, aware of the unfamiliar territory. The floor feels solid enough despite its damaged appearance. Water stains map continents across the ceiling, evidence of a long-ignored leak. Papers lie scattered and yellowed, their text faded beyond legibility.
As Jax moves deeper into the office, his light catches something that doesn't belong—a brief, metallic glint from the center of the room where the floor has completely collapsed. He approaches cautiously, testing each step before committing his weight. The linoleum has peeled back entirely here, revealing rough concrete beneath. At the center of this exposed patch, something shines with an unusual luster that seems to both absorb and reflect his light.
Jax kneels for a closer look. A ring, partly embedded in the concrete as if it had fallen into wet cement and been left there. Its surface carries no dust, despite its surroundings. The metal, if it is metal, gleams with a polish that seems impossible after years of abandonment. More strange is how it appears fused with the concrete, its circumference partially submerged in the gray material.
"What the hell?" he whispers, his voice sounding foreign in the silent room.
Curiosity overrides caution. Jax reaches toward the ring, expecting it to remain fixed in place. His fingertips brush its surface, and an immediate difference in temperature registers colder than the surrounding concrete, cold enough that the brief contact sends a shiver up his arm. Yet despite this, he doesn't pull away.
When he touches it again, more deliberately this time, the ring moves. What appeared fused now loosens, turning slightly beneath his touch as if awakening from dormancy. Jax works it gently back and forth, surprised at how easily it now separates from its concrete bed.
The ring comes free suddenly, nearly slipping from his fingers. It sits in his palm, unexpectedly heavy for its size. As he holds it, the metal warms rapidly, transitioning from ice-cold to body temperature and beyond, though never to the point of discomfort. More startling is its color or colors. The surface shifts beneath his gaze, displaying hues he struggles to name. Not iridescent, not quite reflective, but something else entirely, as if the ring contains colors not typically visible to human eyes.
A sensation of weightlessness washes over Jax, his stomach dropping as though he's cresting the peak of a roller coaster. The room seems to recede slightly, objects gaining a strange clarity while simultaneously feeling more distant. His heart pounds against his ribs, a drum signaling something momentous. The ring pulses in his palm, its warmth syncing with his heartbeat.
Time stretches. Jax stares at the object in his hand, transfixed by its impossibility. The ring appears plain from a distance—a simple band that might be silver or platinum—but up close reveals complexities that seem to shift when not directly observed. It holds his attention in a way nothing has for years, awakening curiosity that had been buried beneath layers of obligation and exhaustion.
The spell breaks when his phone vibrates in his pocket. Reality crashes back, the room's dimensions normalizing around him. Jax blinks, momentarily disoriented. With his free hand, he retrieves the phone, its screen painfully bright in the darkness.
A text from Nina Brooks glows accusingly: *Need help asap with math homework. You promised!*
The familiar weight of expectation settles back onto his shoulders. Jax looks from the phone to the ring and back again, caught between discovery and duty. His fingers close around the ring, feeling its persistent warmth against his skin. The idea of leaving it behind, of returning it to its concrete prison, creates an unexpected hollowness in his chest.
Another text appears: *Jax? Are you there? Test tomorrow!!*
His thumb hovers over the screen. The automatic response forms in his mind *On my way* simple words that would maintain the pattern of his life, the endless cycle of being needed and responding. But the ring pulses once more in his hand, a counterpoint to the phone's demanding presence.
Jax slips the ring into his pocket. Its weight settles against his thigh, a secret gravity. He feels its warmth even through the fabric of his jeans.
*Sorry, got caught up with something. I can help for an hour,* he types, a compromise between refusal and total acquiescence that feels foreign to his fingers.
With one last look at the strange depression in the concrete where the ring had waited, Jax turns toward the door. His footsteps sound different on the way out, more deliberate, less automatic. The ring in his pocket seems to grow warmer with each step, as if responding to his decision to keep it.
As he navigates back through the mill's abandoned corridors, Jax finds himself touching his pocket repeatedly, confirming the ring's presence. Something about it feels significant in ways he can't articulate, as if he's crossed a threshold without recognizing it. For the first time in recent memory, his path back to responsibility carries something meant solely for himself.
Jax sits cross-legged on his bed, the ring placed carefully at the center of his palm. His bedroom is exactly as he left it, textbooks stacked by subject on his desk, tomorrow's clothes laid out on his chair, the cracked ceiling above tracing its familiar pattern. Yet everything feels subtly altered in the presence of the ring. The object shouldn't be here. It belongs to the abandoned mill, to the concrete that held it, to a world separate from schedules and obligations. He can't explain why he took it, only that leaving it behind felt impossible.
The overhead light casts clinical brightness over the small space. Jax reaches for the lamp switch, plunging the room into darkness, broken only by the faint glow of his alarm clock and streetlight filtering through the blinds. And now, unexpectedly, by the ring itself.
It emits light, subtle but undeniable. A soft luminescence pulses from the metal, casting wavering shadows across his palm. The glow isn't bright enough to read by, but it's persistent, like a heartbeat translated into light. Jax turns the ring, examining how the illumination shifts with movement, strengthening when he holds it at certain angles.
The sensations from the mill return as he studies it—that strange weightlessness, the warmth that exceeds normal body temperature without burning. When he runs his finger along the ring's inner surface, his skin tingles as though touching something electrically charged, yet there's no pain. Just awareness, heightened and immediate.
"What are you?" he whispers to the object.
Exhaustion presses against him, the day's accumulated strain finding him now that he's alone. His eyelids grow heavy, but curiosity keeps him awake. After helping Nina with her homework, he'd returned home to find his parents already asleep, passing ships in the night. The house's silence wraps around him like a familiar blanket, broken only by the occasional creak of settling foundations.
Jax places the ring on his nightstand, expecting the glow to diminish once separated from contact with his skin. Instead, it pulses more insistently, casting a dome of soft light that extends just far enough to illuminate his pillow. He lies down, watching the rhythmic ebb and flow of brightness. The day's events replay behind his eyes: the community drill, the students needing help, Mrs. Whitaker's yard, the abandoned mill. Only the ring seems disconnected from that familiar pattern of need and response.
His eyes close despite his intention to keep watching the ring. The mattress beneath him seems to soften, his body sinking into it as tension releases muscle by muscle. The ring's pulsing light continues behind his eyelids, visible even in darkness, guiding him toward sleep.
The transition happens without warning. One moment, Jax lies in his bed, consciousness fraying at the edges; the next, he stands barefoot on soil the color of arterial blood. The ground beneath his feet isn't earth as he understands it, finer than sand but more substantial than dust, its crimson hue so saturated it seems to vibrate with internal energy. Each step leaves footprints that glow briefly before fading.
Above him stretches a sky unlike any he's seen before. Instead of horizontal clouds, vertical ribbons of light extend from horizon to zenith, rippling in patterns that suggest language rather than weather. The colors shift constantly, electric blues bleeding into violent purples, edges limned with greens that have no earthly equivalent. These aurora-like formations cast enough light to see by, despite the absence of any visible sun or moon.
Jax turns slowly, taking in a landscape both impossible and intimately detailed. The air feels thicker than Earth's, carrying scents he has no reference for—something metallic yet organic, bitter yet enticing. Each breath delivers information his brain struggles to categorize, sensations that exist beyond his experiential vocabulary.
In the middle distance, massive trees rise from the crimson soil. Their trunks twist in helical patterns, bark glowing with phosphorescent patterns that pulse in sequence, creating waves of light that travel from roots to crown. The trees stand impossibly tall, their upper branches disappearing into low-hanging mists that reflect the colors of the aurora above.
Jax walks toward the nearest tree, compelled by its pulsing glow. His body feels simultaneously heavier and lighter than normal—as if gravity pulls more insistently on certain parts of him while releasing others. The sensation should be disorienting, even nauseating, but instead feels strangely appropriate, as if his body recognizes this altered physics even if his mind doesn't.
The terrain changes as he approaches the trees. What appeared flat from a distance reveals itself as subtly warped, with areas where the ground curves upward at impossible angles. In some places, small objects—stones or seed pods, he can't tell which—hang suspended a few inches above the soil, rotating slowly like miniature planets.
Jax extends his hand toward one of these floating objects. Before his fingers make contact, his skin begins to tingle, energy dancing across his palm in patterns that mirror the phosphorescent bark of the nearby trees. The sensation isn't painful, but intense enough to make him gasp. His entire arm now pulses with light that matches his heartbeat, veins and arteries briefly visible beneath his skin.
He reaches the base of the nearest tree, its trunk wider than his arms could encircle. Up close, the bark's patterns resolve into intricate symbols that continuously rearrange themselves, flowing like liquid yet remaining part of the solid surface. Jax raises his hand, hesitates, then places his palm against the trunk.
Connection floods through him—not thought or language but pure sensation. His consciousness expands outward, becoming briefly aware of root systems extending for miles beneath the crimson soil, of moisture being drawn upward against gravity, of energy exchanged between tree and sky through pathways he couldn't have imagined. For a moment, Jax isn't entirely himself but something more diffuse, spread across systems too vast to comprehend.
In his bedroom, his body shifts restlessly. One arm extends outward, fingers splayed as if reaching for something beyond the confines of his small room. The ring on his nightstand pulses in perfect synchronization with his accelerated heartbeat, casting elongated shadows that dance across the walls. His eyelids flutter rapidly, eyes moving beneath them in patterns too complex for normal dreaming.
Back in the dream landscape, Jax pulls away from the tree, his sense of self reasserting its boundaries. He feels changed by the contact, carrying some residual awareness that wasn't his before. The landscape has shifted while his attention was elsewhere. The vertical auroras have intensified, their colors deeper and movements more purposeful. The air vibrates with something like anticipation.
A path has appeared before him, cutting through the crimson soil in a perfect straight line. Unlike the organic shapes of everything else in this place, the path's precision suggests conscious design. It leads toward a horizon where the terrain appears to fold upward, defying perspective in ways that should be impossible yet make visual sense in this environment.
Jax steps onto the path. Each footfall releases small bursts of light that travel outward in concentric circles. The sensation of altered gravity intensifies—his body feeling anchored at his core while his limbs experience decreasing resistance. Walking becomes an exercise in controlled falling, momentum carrying him forward with minimal effort.
The landscape blurs at the periphery of his vision, details smearing into streaks of color and light. Only the path remains distinct, pulling him forward with increasing urgency. Something waits at its end—a presence he can feel but not yet see, calling to him through means other than sound.
His skin tingles with accumulating energy, as if he's absorbing some essential quality from the air itself. Each breath delivers more than oxygen—it carries information, potential, connection. His heartbeat syncs with the pulsing lights of the trees, the shifting auroras, the floating objects that now orbit his path like curious satellites.
In his bedroom, the ring's glow intensifies, bright enough now to illuminate the entire room. Its light catches on the water stain above his bed, the stack of textbooks on his desk, the carefully arranged schedule pinned to his wall—ordinary objects transformed by its otherworldly radiance. Jax's breathing grows deeper, his body fully surrendered to whatever journey his mind has undertaken.
The dream pulls him forward, toward something that feels like revelation. The path beneath his feet begins to incline, leading upward at an angle that should be impossible to climb, yet his steps remain sure. Gravity continues to shift around him, rules rewriting themselves with each advance.
The horizon folds one final time, reality bending back on itself to reveal a structure that seems to exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously. Jax moves toward it, drawn by recognition of something he's never seen before but somehow knows. The ring's energy pulses through his dream body, connecting him to this place in ways he doesn't yet understand but feels in every cell.
As he reaches the threshold of understanding, perched on the edge of discovery, dawn's first light slips through his bedroom blinds. The ring's glow recedes, overwhelmed by mundane sunlight. Jax's eyes open to his familiar ceiling, the crack still tracing its river-like path above him. But something has changed—the weight of obligation that normally greets him each morning is temporarily displaced by the lingering sensations of another world.
He turns toward his nightstand. The ring sits innocently in the morning light, its extraordinary properties dormant. Only the memory of crimson soil beneath a sky of vertical auroras suggests it might be anything other than an unusual piece of metal. Yet when Jax reaches for it, the warmth against his fingertips confirms what his dreams have already told him—this object doesn't belong to his world, and perhaps, neither does he.