Winter was coming to Alaska, again.
And so after high school, Jack had left home for Los Angeles—the city of angels: hard sunlight, lazy palms, bikini bodies, the home of the Playboy Mansion and the promise that if you were hungry enough and loud enough you could claw your way into something epic, or just end up on the streets.
And as for him, well he made it exactly as far as a one-room studio that smelled like powdered protein, sour apple juice, and dreams that had been microwaved too many times.
And now he was dead in it.
Face-down on bargain-bin laminate, cheek welded to the floor by blood that had already started to cool. His arms were yanked behind his back in cuffs—police procedure performed on a corpse, like the universe couldn't even be bothered to stop for irony. His mouth hung open against the wood as if he'd tried to swallow the world and choked.
Under his desk, LED strips bathed everything in gamer-neon—purple, blue, smug as sin. His PC tower sat a few feet away, fans humming like a contented animal, RGB cycling behind tempered glass like a very expensive aquarium for absolutely nothing living. A Counter-Strike match was still running. His teammates were still barking at him through his headset.
Jack's last contribution to the team was being dead.
A minute ago, he'd felt immortal.
He'd been live—shirtless except for a bikini top he'd stolen from some forgotten hookup and thrown on as a "bit," soaking wet because he'd taken a shower on stream like he was auditioning for dignity's funeral. He was a little hinged open on something he shouldn't have been on: adrenaline dressed up as courage, alcohol pretending to be confidence, and the same ugly hunger that makes men do stupid things just to feel real.
His chat—nearly a thousand people—loved him loud.
They loved him when he turned every match into theatre. Every insult into a punchline. Every second of his life into content. They loved his stupid Terminator one-liners—give me cookies—as if quoting an old movie could keep consequences from touching him.
He waved an "AR-15" around for the camera—plastic body, cheap internals, a toy dressed like a threat. Some airsoft trash he'd found in a dumpster while hunting for anything useful, anything sellable, anything that could pretend to be a future. He screamed at strangers through a headset because rage sold. Rage clipped. Rage paid his internet bill.
They always ate it up.
Emojis poured down the screen like puke from a slot machine. Donations chimed like tiny fireworks celebrating his decline.
LOL KING DO IT AGAIN HES ACTUALLY INSANE W STREAM
He flexed at the camera. The lighting caught the sharp cuts of his abs and turned him into a superhero drawn by a horny teenager. He hammered the punching dummy off to the side hard enough to rattle the drywall, hard enough for the neighbor—some twitchy addict with a cough like a dying engine—to pound the wall in protest.
Jack laughed like the world had no teeth.
He shouted like consequences were for people with boring faces.
Then the knock came.
Not a knock. Not even close.
The door stopped being a door.
It blew inward like it had been waiting its whole life to fail, splinters and cheap wood flying, hinges surrendering like they'd been paid off. The sound wasn't "someone at the door." It was thunder hitting his apartment and deciding to come inside.
A small dark shape cartwheeled into the room and kissed the air—
BANG.
The flash turned reality into a blank white joke. Sound became a knife jammed into both ears at once. Jack's eyes seared. His skull rang. Smoke and metal flooded his mouth like he'd bitten down on a battery and decided to chew.
Instinct yanked his arms up. Panic—blind, chemical, stupid—told him the same thing his online persona always told him:
Don't back down. Don't look weak. Make it a show.
So he swung the toy rifle toward the shapes drowning into view, pure rage driving him—rage at being interrupted, rage at the door exploding, rage because there was no way in hell he could afford to fix that.
From the smoke of the doorway, dark figures poured in: black helmets, bulletproof vests, shields, the whole nightmare kit. Red dots jittered everywhere—walls, furniture, his chest—like laser pointers aimed at a cat that didn't know it was about to be put down.
His ears were ringing. He couldn't hear the first wave of yelling.
Then the words punched through anyway—stacked, distorted, hard:
"POLICE! GET DOWN!"
"DROP THE GUN!"
"DO IT, NOW!"
Jack tried to talk. The alcohol in his bloodstream had turned his tongue into wet carpet. His lungs were full of lightning. His brain, trained by a thousand clips and a million comments, chose defiance because defiance got engagement.
"Fuck you, you mother—"
That was as far as he got.
The rifles answered.
Not one shot. Not a warning. A unanimous decision made in a blink—fingers tightening, triggers breaking, consequence arriving at full speed.
BRRRRT—BRRRRT—BRRRRT.
Automatic fire ripped the room apart. Muzzle flash strobed against the walls like lightning in a closet. The air filled with hot metal and shredded drywall. Jack's body jerked in ugly spasms—hard impacts hammering him backward, cutting the breath out of him in wet chunks.
He didn't even have time to understand pain.
Pain was a luxury for people who lasted longer.
His arms went slack first. Then his legs. Then the rest of him followed, collapsing like a marionette whose strings had been burned clean through. Feeling drained out of his body like someone pulled a plug and watched him go dim.
He hit the floor face-first.
Cold laminate.
Blood spreading fast.
And the absurd part—his mind clung to it like a drowning man clings to driftwood—was that they hadn't hit his PC.
The monitors were still on.
RGB still pulsed.
Fans still whined like nothing important had happened.
His stream kept going.
His face-cam still showed him—half off-frame now, jaw hanging open, eyes huge and stupid with disbelief—like a reaction clip that would get reposted with some caption that made strangers laugh.
Chat didn't stop.
Of course it didn't.
YO??
IS THIS REAL
BROOOOO
WTF
CLIP IT
CLIP IT NOW
Jack tried to think through it in the thin, awful space where the brain still worked but the body didn't cooperate.
This is so unfair.
He hadn't gotten rich. He hadn't gotten famous. He hadn't even gotten the "look at me, I made it" girlfriend—just the revolving door of cheap attention that felt good for ten minutes and left him hollow all night.
And the sickest joke?
There wasn't even a real gun in his hands.
Just airsoft plastic.
A prop.
A bit.
But the world didn't care about intent.
The world cared about shape.
About timing.
About a twitch in the wrong second, in the wrong room, in front of the wrong men with the wrong training.
He lay there cooling, blood pooling under his ribs, fingers twitching once—one useless little punctuation mark at the end of his life.
Voices blurred. Boots thudded. Someone shouted something he couldn't make out anymore. The LED lights smeared into soft stars.
Then even the room started to fade.
Or maybe it was just him.
His body went colder—colder than cold, like temperature had been stripped down to a sterile punishment. Darkness didn't creep in.
It poured.
Wet cement over his senses. Sealing him in.
Light.
Real light.
Not LED glare. Not muzzle flash. Not the epileptic strobe of gunfire and death.
Sunlight.
Warm. Honest. Heavy on his face like a hand that didn't hate him.
Jack's eyes snapped open—and he instantly hissed and squeezed them shut.
"Fuck—!"
Too bright.
He blinked again, slower this time, squinting past the pain.
Blue sky. Clean blue. The kind of blue you never see in cities. Puffy white clouds drifting lazily like they had nowhere important to be. The sun hung overhead, warm and smug, soaking into his skin.
Grass beneath him. Wheat, actually—tall, golden, brushing his arms. The air smelled like summer and dirt and something faintly sweet.
He froze.
No sirens.
No shouting.
No blood.
Jack sucked in a breath.
Then another.
He felt… fine.
He looked down at himself, hands moving fast, frantic—patting his chest, his stomach, his sides. No holes. No heat. No blood. Just skin. Warm skin. A heartbeat.
"…What the fuck?"
He pushed himself up onto his elbows, then into a shaky sit, wheat parting around him.
And that's when it hit him.
Trees in the distance. Dark green. Dense. Untouched. Beyond them, mountains—broad shoulders of stone rising against the sky, snow clinging to the peaks even in summer.
Wide. Quiet.
Familiar.
"Oh no," Jack muttered. "No, no, no—"
Alaska.
It looked like Alaska.
Not the frozen hellscape people imagined—but summer Alaska. Endless daylight. Rolling fields. Mountains that didn't care about you. Nature so calm it felt judgmental.
Home.
The kind of place people called peaceful.
Jack stared, jaw tight.
"This is bullshit," he said aloud. "This is not the deal."
He didn't hate Alaska.
It was simply just too quiet. Too slow. Too honest. A place where nothing happened unless you made it happen, and making it happen usually meant hard work, cold mornings, and shutting the fuck up.
"I went south," he snapped. "I went to LA. Beaches. Money. Cars. Women. Noise."
He gestured uselessly at the sky.
"I didn't die to come back to this."
His heart started to beat faster, panic creeping in sideways.
"Am I dead?" he muttered. "Is this heaven? Is this hell? Is this some kind of fucked-up waiting room?"
He looked down.
Boxers.
The damn headset still on his head.
And—because the universe had a sense of humor—the bikini top still strapped across his chest.
Jack closed his eyes.
"…I'm gonna lose my mind."
Then a voice spoke beside him.
Soft. Halting. Like it had to push each word through something narrow.
"D-do you ever w-wonder what's u-up there… in the s-stars?"
Jack's head snapped around.
Beside him, lying in the wheat—
was a baby.
A diaper. Chubby limbs. A thumb in its mouth. The whole stupid, harmless picture—except for the part where from its back, utterly disrespectful to physics and common sense, white wings folded neatly like a bird at rest. It was laying on its back like it had just been placed there by a bored god.
Curly silver hair framed its head like a halo someone had overdesigned. Violet eyes stared at the sky—wrong eyes. Old eyes. Eyes that made a small part of Jack's brain recoil, like it was recognizing something predatory wearing a plush costume.
The baby sucked its thumb like this was a normal afternoon activity. Like this was Tuesday.
"L-like," it continued thoughtfully, "if s-someone up there is w-wondering what's d-down here."
Jack pushed himself upright so fast his vision pinched black at the edges. His heart kicked in his chest—furious and alive. It wasn't a ghost heart. It wasn't a memory. It was his. It hammered like it was trying to fight its way out.
"Nope," he rasped. His throat felt scraped raw, like he'd been screaming for hours. "No. I'm dead. This is my brain doing the last fireworks before it shuts off."
The baby turned its head and smiled, bright and pleased, like Jack had answered a quiz correctly.
"O-oh! You are d-dead. Very d-dead."
Jack closed his eyes and pressed the heels of his palms into them, as if pressure could crush the insanity back into a manageable shape.
"Oh, come on," he groaned. "How? Why? Did one of my viewers call the cops? Did I get swatted and die for content? That's—that's not fair. That's not—"
The baby sat up with careful seriousness, wings rustling as if adjusting expensive luggage. Its thumb popped free with a wet little sound that made Jack's skin crawl.
"No," it said, calmly, like it was correcting a child who'd misnamed a color. "The cops were supposed to do a drug bust into your n-neighbor's home… but they a-accidentally chose the wrong d-door."
It paused—just long enough for that to land like a brick through Jack's chest.
Then, with the cheerful tone of a toddler sharing a fun fact about dinosaurs, it added:
"But d-don't worry. N-nothing was truly l-lost. In f-fact, thanks to you b-being live… it did a b-big thing."
Jack froze.
The baby kept going, as if it was reciting the forecast. As if this was weather. As if this wasn't the total annihilation of Jack's life reduced to clerical error.
"M-millions. C-clips spread. T-thousands s-saw it live. Some l-laughed. Some g-gasped. Many c-closed their b-browsers. Some even w-went outside for the f-first time in a long time."
It beamed like it had personally cured cancer.
"They t-touched grass," it said reverently. "I-it was very moving. For a while."
Jack's mouth went dry. His eyes flicked up to the indifferent sky, searching for a camera, for a boom mic, for the punchline he'd missed.
"My death made people log off?" he asked. His voice came out thin, stretched tight over disbelief.
"F-for days," the baby said proudly. "S-screen time dropped. G-gyms filled up. T-three divorces were avoided. A man in Ohio s-stopped doom-scrolling and f-finally got a job… and later a wife… and made a family."
Jack stared at the sun like it owed him an explanation.
He could feel the anger rising—slow, volcanic, sickly—not just anger at the cops, not just anger at fate, but anger at the shape of the joke. That his ending had been repurposed into a wellness anecdote. That his corpse had become a cautionary tale people used to justify a jog.
His lips moved like he was chewing something bitter.
"So I got executed by SWAT," he muttered, "and the universe handed me a… a 'thanks for your service.'"
The baby's smile flattened into offense, like Jack had insulted its favorite cartoon.
"N-no. Not 'thanks.'" It huffed, cheeks puffing. "I-impact. You were an i-impact event."
It straightened—really straightened. The field seemed to take note. Grass stilled. Wind reconsidered. Even the sky looked like it had leaned closer.
Then the baby extended a tiny hand.
Light bloomed in its palm.
Not a flash. Not a flare. A presence.
A soft white sphere formed there—warm, steady, alive. It hummed faintly, like a held breath, like a heartbeat without a body. The wheat around them leaned away from it as if it understood etiquette on a molecular level.
"My chosen one," the baby said.
Something in its tone shifted.
Still childish. Still carrying the stutter. But heavier now—denser. The halting speech smoothed just enough to feel intentional, like a mask slipping sideways instead of off.
"Y-your time is n-not over," it continued. "Because your s-soul value is extremely low… I have chosen you."
Jack's stomach turned cold, like an elevator cable snapping somewhere deep inside him.
"Wait—no." The words came out ugly and fast, tripping over each other. "No, no, no, stop right there. I know what this is and I say, no. You can't do this to me, baby angel thing, or whatever you are, man. Do you have any idea how much I had to work to finally get my channel monetized? You can't do this. Just—just give me a second chance. As myself. As a nobody. I'm not—I'm not a hero."
His voice cracked, desperation pouring through the seams.
"You have the wrong guy. Pick a firefighter. Pick a doctor. Pick—pick literally anyone with a degree. Besides, I don't even have a driver's license—"
"S-sorry," the baby said brightly, like explaining bedtime rules to a slow child. "This is not a democracy."
It tilted its head.
"You don't get to choose."
A pause. Just long enough to sting.
"But you will get to come back and become a millionaire if you succeed."
The words landed softly. Casually. As if they weren't a loaded gun pressed against a desperate man's skull.
Then it smiled again, and the crushing weight vanished like it had never existed at all.
"Now stop whining."
The white light drifted forward—slow, certain, inevitable.
Jack scrambled back on his elbows, panic detonating through his limbs. "No—no, fuck this—" He swatted at it, wild and useless, hands slicing through air like that could change anything.
Too late.
The sphere touched his chest.
It didn't bounce.
Didn't burn.
It entered him.
Like a cannonball through water.
Pain detonated behind his ribs.
Jack screamed.
Not the sharp pain of a wound—this was deeper. Invasive. Absolute. Like something ancient and heavy settling into the space where his heart lived. Like a brand pressed from the inside out. Like someone had shoved a dense, screaming coin beneath his soul and hammered it into place with infinite patience.
He collapsed into the wheat, clawing at his chest, rolling, choking, trying to dig it out with his fingers like an animal caught in a trap. His nails tore at skin. His lungs refused to cooperate. Every breath felt wrong—misaligned, owned.
The baby leaned close.
Its shadow stretched too far, thin and crooked, like it belonged to something standing just behind it.
Its voice softened—almost fond.
"H-happy hunting, my c-champion," it whispered.
"M-make big dreams come true."
Jack tried to answer—tried to curse, tried to shout wait, tried to ask if the millionaire thing was real—
But something hooked him.
Hard.
Like a rope cinched tight around his spine.
The world ripped away beneath him.
"Oh shiiiit!" he screamed as he was yanked skyward.
The wheat shrank into nothing. Clouds slammed into him, wet and cold. Wind tore the breath from his lungs. The sun burned, cruel and distant. His ears popped. Pressure vanished. Air thinned.
For a brief, stupid, painfully human moment, his mind fixated on everything he hadn't done.
I never even sat in a real sports car.
I never went sailing.
I didn't see shit.
Alaska. One plane ride. California. Los Angeles. A studio apartment and a webcam.
That was it.
That was his whole fucking life.
The cold hit like a divine slap. His chest seized. His lungs clawed for air and found none. He was suffocating—dying again, this time in open sky, his body flailing uselessly through altitude and emptiness.
And in the darkness closing in around his vision, one desperate thought floated up like a drowning man's last bubble of hope:
Please let that be real.
Because if it was real—if this was some twisted, cosmic game-show with a prize at the end—then maybe, just maybe, he could crawl back into the modern world with money in his hands. Pay off his debts. Buy the car. Buy the boat. Smile that ugly, arrogant smile of someone who made it.
School was supposed to start in a week.
He needed this to be quick.
He needed to win.
Then the world rejected him.
His body convulsed.
Bones twisted. Pulled inward. Drawn smaller, narrower—re-forged into something else. Copper flooded his mouth—blood, hot and metallic. His skull throbbed like it had been struck by a hammer hard enough to knock the soul loose.
He felt himself slam through something—like breaking the surface of a river—
And then—
Stone.
Hard.
Final.
He dragged in a breath.
Blood filled his mouth instantly—hot copper, thick and obscene. His skull screamed. Hands shook him. Voices crashed over one another in a language he didn't recognize—
And yet understood.
Like his brain had been forced to install a new operating system mid-death.
His eyes snapped open.
Sky—bright, brutally blue—puffy clouds drifting like this wasn't a slaughterhouse happening under them. The sun sat up there like an annoying god, smug and blinding. Jack threw a hand up to shield his face—
—and froze.
That hand wasn't his.
Small. Pale. Slender. Fingers too narrow, nails too neat—soft little princess fingers wearing segmented bracers like jewelry pretending to be protection.
He pushed himself up, shaky, half-dazed, and saw a man looming over him.
Messy blond hair. Crooked teeth. Gray-blue eyes wide with panic. He looked like he hadn't bathed in a week or met a dentist in his entire miserable life. Dirt was ground into his skin like war had branded him personally.
His mouth moved.
And Jack heard old English—raw with panic, scraping out of a man's throat like prayer forced through broken teeth:
"Princess! Princess Aleria!" the blond soldier shouted, half-choking. "God's mercy—say you're breathing! Are you alive?"
Jack blinked, brain lagging, mouth answering on instinct. "The fuck did you say?"
The man's face lit up with relief—
—and Jack's blood turned to ice, because the voice that came out of his own throat wasn't Jack's.
It was high.
Soft.
A sweet little woman's voice.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Jack's mind tried to reject reality.
Reality didn't even pause to laugh. It just kept killing people.
He finally looked around.
He was on a stone wall so huge it felt unreal—a sixty-meter drop off the edge, the kind of height your stomach understands before your brain does. The battlement was wide enough to march a formation across. Towers rose at intervals like teeth. Blue banners snapped in the wind—royal blue, white dragon sigils glaring against smoke.
And the defenders—
Blond. Blue-eyed. Almost all of them. Some in leather and wool like hunters dragged into war, others in chainmail with blue tabards, dragon stamped on the chest. A few heavy infantry in plate moved like walking doors. Archers lined the crenellations with longbows—hands raw, faces gray with exhaustion—pulling and loosing in a desperate rhythm.
Then an arrow—a crossbow bolt—punched into one of the archers beside a tower.
It hit with a sick, flat thunk.
The man jerked, eyes wide, bow slipping from his fingers. He didn't even scream at first—just made a wet sound and folded over the stone, blood spilling down his blue tabard like someone had poured paint on the dragon.
Jack's mouth went dry.
Oh. They're really shooting people.
Below the wall, the open fields were black with bodies and movement.
The attackers came in layers.
First the mob—hooded peasants in black cloth, faces half-hidden, dark skin streaked with grime, teeth crooked, eyes bright with something that wasn't courage. They climbed ladders like insects, dying in stacks, scrambling over the dead like the dead were just rungs.
Behind them—the real weapons.
Men-at-arms in blackened mail and plate. Shields. Spears. Swords that didn't look ceremonial—just hungry. They climbed more slowly, more deliberately, using the peasants as moving cover. Every time a peasant took an arrow in the throat, a heavier soldier used the body as a shield without hesitation.
And when they reached the top—
the wall turned into a butcher's table.
Men screamed.
Steel rang.
Blood turned the stone slick.
A black-hooded attacker vaulted over the crenellation and hacked at a defender like he was chopping wood, laughing through his teeth as he swung. A defending soldier shoved him back with a shield, shouting something sharp and refined—civil words dragged out into a world that didn't deserve them.
Then a heavier black-armored brute crested the ladder—massive, disciplined—moved like he'd done this a hundred times. He buried a blade into a defender's gut, lifted him like a fish on a hook, and tossed him off the wall like trash.
The man fell screaming until the scream ended.
Jack's brain short-circuited.
This is real. This is real. This is real.
Another knot of defenders rushed the brute—brave or desperate—and he cut through them with one ugly arc. Two bodies came apart. Intestines spilled onto the battlements in steaming ropes.
Jack gagged.
Then—like a fever dream refusing to end—a tall silver-haired monster of a man charged into view with two hammers and kicked the black brute so hard it looked like a joke.
The invader flew backward.
Over the edge.
His scream faded into distance and impact.
Jack stared, mouth open, brain refusing to cooperate.
This wasn't Counter-Strike.
This wasn't a stream.
This wasn't a bit.
This was a real medieval siege—
and Jack was on the wall, apparently in a princess's body, surrounded by blonde men and black nightmares, while men died close enough for their blood to hit his face.
He had only ever fought off homeless guys trying to rob him and done a little schoolyard bullshit. He was not ready for this.
Not even close.
Hands grabbed him again—shaking, frantic.
The dirty blond man leaned closer, eyes wide with terror, still shouting over the noise, still treating Jack like something precious and breakable.
Jack turned toward him, still trying to understand the ancient language pouring into his ears, because it was old as shit and yet somehow—
A shadow fell behind the man.
Jack saw it a half-second too late.
A black-armored soldier stepped in like a nightmare in plate.
And the greatsword came down.
Clean.
Horrifyingly easy.
The blade passed through the blond man's head like it was slicing warm bread.
The top half slid away like a lid lifted from a pot.
Blood erupted—hot and sudden—spraying Jack's face and armor in a wet red burst. The man's eyes went empty before the scream could even finish becoming a sound.
His severed head dropped onto Jack's lap.
Heavy.
Real.
The body crumpled beside him, still twitching, spilling life onto stone like a knocked-over bucket.
Jack made a sound.
A small, sharp squeak—pure panic, pure humiliation—
—and his stomach twisted as he realized that noise had come from him.
From her.
From a princess's throat.
The black-armored giant stepped forward.
Plated. Brutal. Moving with the slow certainty of something that didn't fear dying. Dark skin showed only in narrow gaps of the helm. A T-shaped visor hid most of his face, but his grin still found a way through.
It wasn't a smile.
It was hunger.
Jack's breath caught.
Her mind screamed NO, but her body didn't know what to do with it. No weapon. No shield. No memories. No training. No idea how a princess was supposed to stand, command, survive.
She backed away on her palms.
"Don't—" she tried, the word thin and useless in the roar of battle.
The giant chuckled and lowered himself like he was about to pick up a toy.
"Don't worry, little white rabbit," he murmured, voice thick with want. "I'll be gentle. I swear it—"
Jack shoved backward harder, kicking at the stone to make space—
and for half a heartbeat, the world paused as the edge of the wall kissed the back of her foot.
Her stomach dropped into her throat.
"Oh—"
The word tore out of her as the ground vanished.
She fell off the fucking wall.
It was so high it made his brain reach for the dumbest landmark it could remember—Statue of Liberty?—even though he'd never seen it in real life, only in movies. That's how far down it felt. That's how wrong it was.
Not gracefully. Not nobly.
She windmilled once, arms clawing at empty air, the stone rushing past as the sky spun and the world flipped upside down.
She screamed.
A sharp, high sound—pure terror—ripped from her throat as the battlements vanished above and the city yawned open below.
"THE PRINCESS—!" someone shouted.
Someone else screamed.
Then gravity finished its sentence.
She hit the cart like a thrown body.
Wood splintered.
Flour burst.
The impact punched the air out of her lungs in a white, choking explosion. The cart collapsed under her weight, boards cracking as sacks tore open and sent clouds of powder billowing into the air like a ghost blooming out of a grave.
Her head struck wood.
Hard.
Pain flared—bright, total—
and the world folded in on itself.
The last thing Jack felt was weightlessness again.
Then nothing.