Chapter 1: The Wages of Waking
The cough tore through his chest like broken glass dragged through wet cloth.
Sterling Voss opened eyes that did not belong to him and tasted coal dust, blood, and something metallic that belonged to neither.
"Wrong body. Wrong lungs. Wrong everything."
The ceiling above was water-stained plaster, cracked in patterns that resembled river deltas. A single window let in grey light thick with Backlund's industrial smog. The cot beneath him was narrow, the mattress stuffed with something that crunched when he shifted.
He knew this ceiling. Not from memory—from pages.
Sterling forced himself upright, and the movement sent fire through ribs that had been bruised before he arrived in them. His hands—not his hands, too thin, too calloused in unfamiliar patterns—gripped the rough wool blanket. The knuckles were scraped raw. The fingernails were black with factory grime.
"Lord of the Mysteries. I'm inside the novel."
The realization should have been impossible. It was, instead, simply true.
Twenty minutes ago—or perhaps a lifetime, depending on how one measured such things—Sterling had been a warehouse logistics worker in a distribution center outside Cleveland. Night shift. Inventory reconciliation. He'd been reading on his phone during break, the web novel he'd been following for three months. Klein was in Backlund, building his network, playing the long game.
Then pain. Sudden, massive, radiating from his chest outward. The phone had slipped from his fingers. The concrete floor had rushed up to meet him.
Heart attack, probably. He'd been meaning to see a doctor about the palpitations. Kept putting it off.
And now he was here.
Sterling swung his legs over the side of the cot. The room was a tenement cell, perhaps eight feet by ten. A washstand with a chipped basin. A wardrobe that leaned drunkenly against one wall. A coal stove, cold. A small table with a candle stub and a folded coat.
East District. The poorest quarter of Backlund, capital of the Loen Kingdom. If the novel's geography held true, he was perhaps two miles from where Klein Moretti was currently operating as a Nighthawks squad member—or had been, before everything went wrong in Tingen. Sterling's timeline knowledge was imprecise. He couldn't remember exactly when Klein had arrived in Backlund.
He stood. His legs held, barely.
The body he now inhabited had been dying. Sterling knew this with certainty, though he couldn't say how. The lungs rattled. The ribs ached. The muscles had the tremoring weakness of prolonged malnutrition.
And there was something else.
Something cold. Heavy. Lodged behind his sternum like a second heart made of iron.
Sterling pressed his palm flat against his chest. The coldness pulsed.
"What did you do?"
No answer. He hadn't expected one.
The previous occupant of this body had done something in his final hours. Something desperate enough to kill him. Sterling searched the room methodically—the coat first, then the wardrobe, then beneath the cot, then the loose floorboard he found by accident when it creaked wrong under his weight.
The coat yielded three soli—small copper-silver coins, each worth perhaps a day's factory wages—and a shift card for the Coim Company textile mill. The wardrobe held two changes of clothes, both worn thin. The floorboard hid an empty glass vial, still faintly luminescent with residual energy that made Sterling's eyes itch when he looked at it directly.
He knew what that glow meant. The novel had described it often enough.
Beyonder characteristic residue. The mark left behind after consuming a supernatural potion.
"You drank something. And then you died. And then I arrived."
The cold weight behind his sternum shifted.
Sterling sat back on his heels, the empty vial cradled in his palm. In Lord of the Mysteries, Beyonder potions granted supernatural abilities drawn from twenty-two distinct pathways, each associated with ancient gods or cosmic forces. The potions were numbered in reverse—Sequence 9 was the weakest, Sequence 0 was a True God. The danger was not the power itself but the method: each potion had to be "digested" through the acting method, living out the role described by the potion's name. Failure meant losing control. Losing control meant becoming a monster.
The previous occupant had consumed a Sequence 9 potion. Sterling was certain of this. He was also certain the potion had been contaminated, because he could feel something inside him that was not supposed to be there.
Not the Beyonder characteristic. Something riding alongside it.
Something that had been waiting.
Sterling closed his eyes and turned his perception inward, the way Klein did in the novel when examining his own spirituality. He expected darkness. He expected nothing.
He saw chains.
A single loop of black iron wrapped around something luminous in his chest—his soul, perhaps, or whatever passed for one in a transmigrator. The chain pulsed with a faint bioluminescent glow, like deep-sea creatures that hunted by light. Behind it, in the space where his consciousness ended and something else began, there was a presence.
Not a voice. Not a thought. A weight. An attention.
Like standing at the edge of a pit that breathed.
[BEYONDER CHARACTERISTIC: BONDING COMPLETE]
[SEQUENCE 9: PRISONER — PATHWAY CONFIRMED]
[PARASITIC BOND: ESTABLISHED]
[HUMANITY BASELINE: 95%]
Sterling's eyes snapped open.
The system messages had appeared not as text but as knowledge—information surfacing in his mind with the cold precision of a warehouse manifest. He hadn't imagined them. He hadn't wanted them.
The Prisoner pathway. He knew it from the novel. It was part of the Arbiter pathway group, associated with the God of Knowledge and Wisdom. Sequence 9 Prisoners gained enhanced observation, social perception, and the ability to sense lies and hidden truths. The acting method required enduring confinement and restriction—physical, social, emotional.
A factory worker in East District was already a prisoner of circumstance. The potion would digest quickly if he simply lived the life the body had already been living.
But the parasitic bond—
"What are you?"
The cold weight shifted again. This time, Sterling felt something that might have been satisfaction.
A knock on the door shattered his concentration.
"Mr. Voss!" A woman's voice, sharp with impatience. "Your rent was due yesterday. Three soli or you're out by sunset."
Sterling stood, his body moving before his mind caught up. The motion was automatic—muscle memory from a life he hadn't lived. He crossed to the door, unlocked it, and found a woman in her fifties glaring at him from the hallway. Her face was hard, her eyes calculating, her dress patched but clean.
Mrs. Greer. The name surfaced from somewhere—not his own memory, but the body's residual knowledge.
"Mrs. Greer." His voice came out rough, scraped raw by whatever had killed the previous occupant. "I have it."
He held out the three soli.
She snatched them with the speed of long practice. "You look terrible. Worse than usual. If you're coming down with something, don't spread it to my other tenants."
"Just a bad night."
"Aren't they all." She pocketed the coins. "Factory bell's in forty minutes. Don't be late. Harwick's been docking wages for anyone who shows up after the whistle."
Sterling nodded. She left.
He stood in the doorway for a long moment, staring at the narrow hallway with its gas lamps turned low to save fuel. Then he went back inside, dressed in the dead man's clothes, and walked out into Backlund.
The streets of East District smelled of coal smoke, horse dung, and the particular sour-sweet rot of too many people packed into too little space. Sterling walked through the yellow-grey fog with his collar turned up and his eyes cataloguing everything.
He was in the novel. He was carrying a parasitic entity in his chest. He was scheduled for a factory shift in thirty-five minutes.
One problem at a time.
The Coim Company textile mill was a blocky brick structure that exhaled steam from a dozen vents. Sterling joined the stream of workers flowing through the main gate, presented his shift card to the bored clerk, and found himself assigned to Loom Station Seven.
The body knew the work. Sterling let his hands move while his mind processed.
He needed information. Current date, current events, Klein Moretti's precise location. He needed resources. Money, shelter, access to the Beyonder underworld. He needed to understand what the parasitic bond actually did, because the entity behind his sternum had not communicated beyond that initial pulse of satisfaction, and silence from something that powerful was worse than screaming.
The shuttle clacked back and forth. Thread became cloth. Hours passed.
"Sterling."
He turned. A young man with a cheerful face and oil-stained hands stood beside his loom. Thomas Orwell—the name surfaced from the body's memory along with a cascade of associated information. Coworker. Friendly. Engaged to a girl named Clara from the weaving district. Talked too much but meant well.
"You look like death warmed over," Thomas said. "Worse than usual, I mean. Which is saying something."
"Bad night."
"The cough? My aunt had something similar. She swears by—"
"Thomas." Sterling cut him off, not unkindly. "I need to focus."
The younger man's face fell, then recovered. "Right, right. Harwick's watching. I'll save you some of my lunch bread. You need it more than I do."
He moved off before Sterling could refuse.
The cold weight behind Sterling's sternum shifted. This time, he felt something sharper—analysis, assessment, cataloguing. Thomas Orwell's openness, his trust, his stable emotional foundation, his obvious attachment to his fiancée.
Sterling had not initiated the assessment. The information had simply appeared, complete and detailed, like an inventory report generated by someone else.
"Stop that."
The presence did not respond. It didn't need to. The assessment was complete, filed, and stored for future reference.
Sterling's hands kept working. The shuttle kept moving. The thread kept becoming cloth.
The chains inside him glowed a little brighter.
The shift ended at seven. Sterling walked home through fog that had thickened to the consistency of wet wool.
He stopped at a vendor's cart on the corner of Harvest Street. The man sold roasted chestnuts from a charcoal brazier, three for a pence. Sterling bought a paper bag's worth and ate them as he walked, the warmth of the shells burning his fingers.
The first comfortable sensation since waking in this body.
The tenement was quiet when he returned. Sterling locked his door, checked the window, and sat on the cot in the dark.
He pressed his palm against his sternum.
"I know you're there. I know you're listening. What do you want?"
Silence.
The cold weight did not answer. It did not need to.
The chains around his soul pulsed once, twice, and then settled into a rhythm that matched his heartbeat.
Sterling sat in the dark for a long time, feeling the presence that was not him but would, eventually, become indistinguishable from him if he did not find a way to stop it.
Outside, the fog swallowed Backlund.
Inside, the thing behind his sternum shifted—and Sterling realized it had not been resting.
It had been listening.
Reviews and Power Stones keep the heat on!
Want to see what happens before the "heroes" do?
Secure your spot in the inner circle on Patreon. Skip the weekly wait and read ahead:
Hustler [$7]: 15 Chapters ahead.
Enforcer [$11]: 20 Chapters ahead.
Kingpin [$16]: 25 Chapters ahead.
Periodic drops. Check on Patreon for the full release list.
Join the Syndicate: patreon.com/Anti_hero_fanfic