The air outside felt different from inside the room.
More alive, somehow — though I couldn't say why. I stood at the threshold for a moment, drawing a slow breath before stepping down into the street. Birds wheeled overhead, and above them the sky still held the deep, bruised blue of early morning, two crescent moons fading as pale light crept across the horizon.
The town was busy.
And every single person in it was a woman.
I noticed it then, standing at the edge of the road, watching the flow of people. The trader at the roadside stall — a woman. The guard standing rigid at the stone building's entrance — a woman. The children weaving between the legs of the crowd — all girls.
I was beginning to feel like a punctuation mark in the wrong sentence.
"Hey. You there."
I turned.
A woman stood a few paces away, dressed in fabric that spoke of money — fine embroidery at the collar, a high neckline, knee-high boots that had no business looking clean on these muddy roads, yet somehow did. Nobility, probably. Her face was beautiful in the way that edged toward sharp, like someone who knew precisely how striking she was and had made peace with the fact that you knew it too.
She was looking at me with eyes that had narrowed to a careful squint.
"Are you lost?"
"No." I answered. "I just... arrived."
Something shifted in her expression. Not surprise anymore — something closer to disbelief, the look of someone who had just heard something that didn't fit into any known category of sense.
"Just arrived," she repeated slowly.
Then her gaze dropped — head to feet, feet to face — and back up again.
"You're... you're a man?"
Before I could answer —
"A MAN!"
Her voice cracked through the air like a whip. Heads turned. Then more heads. Then all of them.
The bustling market went silent in a way that felt almost physical — like a held breath stretching across every alley and stall and doorway at once.
Dozens of eyes found me at the same moment. The expression on every face was identical: not anger, not fear — just the stunned, wide-open look of someone who had seen a ghost.
Alright. This is a problem.
"I am, in fact, a man," I said, feeling vaguely ridiculous for stating something so obvious. "Is that... an issue?"
The noblewoman took one instinctive step back.
"How are you here?" Her voice dropped to a hush — tight and precise, like a blade being drawn quietly. "Men are gone. There are none left."
I went still.
Gone.
I turned the word over in my mind. Tried to slot it into what I knew. The Loom's synopsis had mentioned a world where women made up the majority of the population — I'd taken it as flavor, some interesting backdrop detail. Not a literal statement of fact. Not extinction.
Which meant in this world, I wasn't just an outsider.
I was an anomaly.
"...Huh," I murmured, mostly to myself.
The noblewoman was still watching me — caught between suspicion and uncertainty, like she hadn't quite decided what I was supposed to be. Around us, no one had moved. The crowd stood frozen, all of them waiting, as if I was the one who needed to make the first move.
I looked from face to face.
This is going to be more complicated than I thought.
The shout had been loud enough. Already, at the far end of the road, two figures in uniform had turned toward me — their hands moving to their hips.
Guards.
I ran through my options fast. Left — narrow lane, packed with people. Right — a dim alley, maybe an exit. My feet were already shifting toward the right —
Blue light erupted from the ground.
I looked down. A circle of radiance had appeared around both my feet, its engravings shifting like something alive, crawling across the stone in slow, deliberate patterns. I tried to lift my foot. I couldn't — not because of weight, but because my entire body had simply refused to move, locked in place by something I couldn't name.
Time felt like it had thickened around me.
Is this the guards' doing? I glanced toward them — they were still too far.
That last thought had barely finished forming —
And then I was gone.