The fluorescent lights of the subway station buzzed with that particular frequency that always made Dave's left eye twitch. He'd been awake for thirty-seven hours straight, not that anyone at Morrison & Fletcher LLC gave a damn about his sleep schedule. The quarterly reports were due tomorrow, and somehow, 'somehow', it had become his responsibility to fix Jensen's catastrophic Excel formulas at eleven PM on a Tuesday.
Again.
Dave's reflection stared back at him from the grimy subway window across the platform, a hollow-eyed twenty-eight-year-old who looked forty, with the kind of gray pallor that came from surviving on coffee, spite, and the occasional vending machine sandwich. His tie hung loose around his neck like a noose he'd forgotten to tighten, and his shirt had a coffee stain shaped vaguely like South America near the third button.
'When did I become this?'
The thought drifted through his exhausted mind like smoke, there and gone before he could properly examine it. His phone buzzed, another Slack message. He ignored it. For once in his miserable, corporate existence, he was going to do something for 'himself'.
His finger swiped across the cracked screen of his phone, and the familiar interface of WebNovel Nexus loaded. Chapter 1,847 of 'Epic of The Dreadlands' waited for him like an old friend.
Dave's lips curved into the first genuine smile he'd managed all week.
'Epic of The Dreadlands' wasn't just a web novel to him, it was a lifeline. A world he'd discovered two years ago during a particularly soul-crushing period at work, and had devoured every single chapter since. He'd read through sick days, lunch breaks, bathroom stalls, the dead hours between 2 and 4 AM when even his anxiety couldn't keep him wired.
The story had consumed him, possessed him, become more real than the gray cubicle walls of his actual life.
The Great Catastrophe. The Evolution Fruits. The Seven Kings who carved the dying world into their personal kingdoms. And at the center of it all, Damon Alastair, the common man who'd stumbled into godhood and was slowly, brilliantly, uniting a broken world.
His escape. His sanctuary. The one thing that made the endless corporate grind bearable.
Dave's thumb scrolled through the chapter he'd read last night at 3 AM, checking the comments section that had exploded throughout his soul-crushing workday:
'@KingSlayer_99: BRO DAMON IS INSANE! The fight with King Malachar's Hounds was PEAK FICTION!'
'@SwordSaintSimp: I'm calling it now, Damon's going to claim the Northern Wastes by chapter 1,900. This buildup is INSANE.'
'@NoSleepSquad: It's 4 AM and I just binged 200 chapters. What have you done to my life. I have work in 3 hours. Worth it.'
'@DaveMorrison_82: Same here lol. Reading this at work rn. If my boss catches me I'm dead but Damon >>> my job security'
A genuine laugh bubbled up from Dave's chest, cracked and hoarse from disuse. God, when was the last time he'd laughed? Really laughed? He'd even joined the comment section himself a few months back, something he never did. But the community around 'Dreadlands' was different. They 'got it'. They understood.
'These people get it. In the Dreadlands, effort matters. Struggle has meaning.'
Damon had started with 'nothing', an unevolved human in a world where even rats could tear a man apart. But through sheer determination, clever thinking, and luck, he was building something. Becoming something.
Dave envied that. The idea that you could be nobody and still claw your way to mattering.
"'Scuse me, buddy. You got the time?"
Dave glanced up. A middle-aged man in a stained jacket stood too close, his breath reeking of cheap alcohol and cheaper decisions. His eyes had that glassy, unfocused quality that set off every city-dweller alarm in Dave's head.
"Uh, yeah. It's 11:47," Dave mumbled, stepping back slightly.
"11:47," the man repeated slowly, like he was tasting the words. "Time's funny, isn't it? We think we have so much of it. Then, " He snapped his fingers, the sound sharp in the empty station. "Gone."
"Right. Yeah. Very philosophical." Dave took another step back, angling himself toward the far end of the platform. The train couldn't arrive fast enough.
But the man didn't follow. He just stood there, swaying slightly, a strange smile pulling at his lips. "You ever think about second chances, buddy? Like, what if you could do it all again? Be someone else? Somewhere else?"
Dave's phone buzzed again. Another message. Another demand. Another piece of his soul traded for a paycheck that barely covered rent in his shoebox apartment.
"Every single day," Dave muttered, more to himself than the drunk.
He turned back to his phone, dismissing the Slack notification without reading it. Chapter 1,848 was already posted. He refreshed the page eagerly, watching the comment count tick up. Three new comments already. The author had been on fire lately, daily updates, each one better than the last.
'God, what I wouldn't give to live in a world like that. Where effort actually means something. Where you can become more than... this.'
The rumble of an approaching train vibrated through the platform. Dave looked up, saw the lights emerging from the tunnel like the eyes of some great beast. Right on time. Finally. He could get home, read the new chapter properly, maybe leave a comment, and then, if he was lucky, get four hours of sleep before the cycle started again.
He took a step toward the platform edge, phone still in hand, already scanning the first paragraph:
'The throne room shook with the force of Damon's arrival. King Arcturus rose from his seat, and for the first time in three hundred years, something resembling fear flickered in his ancient eyes...'
The push came from nowhere.
No warning. No sound. Just a sudden, forceful pressure against his back that sent him lurching forward. His phone flew from his hand, clattering across the concrete. Time fractured into crystalline shards of hyper-awareness:
'The yellow safety line passing beneath his feet.'
'The homeless man, standing exactly where he'd been, hands in his pockets, that strange smile still on his face.'
'The scream of train brakes, metal shrieking against metal.'
'The conductor's face, pale and horrified through the windshield.'
'The thought, clear and absurd: I never got to finish the chapter.'
Dave's body hit the tracks.
The impact drove the air from his lungs. His head cracked against the rail, a bright, terrible sound that rang through his skull like a bell. He tried to move, tried to scramble back, but his legs wouldn't respond. Warmth spread beneath him, sticky and wrong.
The train lights filled his entire vision, blinding and inevitable.
In those final microseconds, as his brain flooded with chemicals trying desperately to shield him from the horror of his own death, Dave's last coherent thought was almost funny:
'Damon would've found a way out of this.'
Then the world ended in a symphony of metal and flesh, and Dave Morrison ceased to exist.
---
Darkness.
Not the darkness of sleep or unconsciousness. Something deeper. Absolute. A void so complete that Dave couldn't tell if he still had eyes to see with, or if the concept of sight had simply ceased to exist.
'Am I dead?'
The question formed without sound, without voice, just pure thought echoing in an infinite nothing.
'This is it? This is death? Just... nothing?'
Time meant nothing here. He could have been drifting for seconds or centuries. There was no way to tell. No reference point. No sensation. Just the fading echo of who he'd been.
Dave Morrison. Twenty-eight. Corporate slave. Reader of web novels. Dead on subway tracks because he'd been too absorbed in a fantasy world to pay attention to reality.
'What a pathetic ending.'
But then, something changed.
A pull. Faint at first, like the gentlest tug on a fishing line. Then stronger. Insistent. A current in the void, dragging him toward... what? Where was there to go in nothingness?
The pull became a yank became a 'rip', and suddenly Dave was falling, tumbling through a space that shouldn't exist, toward a light that burned like molten gold,
---
''THUD.''
Air rushed into lungs that hadn't breathed in, how long? Pain exploded across his chest, sharp and agonizing, like someone had driven a railroad spike through his sternum. His back arched involuntarily, and a strangled gasp tore from his throat.
'I'm alive?'
No. That wasn't right. He'd died. He'd felt it. The train, the impact, the,
"Young Master!"
The voice was high-pitched, feminine, and absolutely terrified.
Dave's eyes snapped open.
The first thing he registered was that he wasn't looking at the grimy ceiling of a subway tunnel or the fluorescent lights of a hospital. He was staring at an ornate canopy, deep crimson fabric embroidered with gold thread in patterns that seemed to shift and writhe in the flickering light.
'Flickering light?'
He turned his head, even that small movement sent fresh lances of pain through his body, and saw candles. Dozens of them. Real wax candles in elaborate silver holders, their flames dancing in a draft he couldn't feel.
"Young Master, please, don't move! You'll reopen the wound!"
Dave's gaze tracked down and to the side. A young woman knelt beside what he now realized was an enormous four-poster bed. She wore a black and white uniform that his brain sluggishly identified as a maid's outfit, but not the cheap costume kind. This was real, practical, with a long skirt and a white apron that was currently wrinkled from her hands clutching it.
Her face was pale, streaked with tears, and her eyes, deep brown and wide with shock, were fixed on him like he was a ghost.
Which, he supposed, he might be.
"Where..." Dave croaked, then stopped. That wasn't his voice. It was too deep, too rough, like someone had taken his vocal cords and aged them ten years. "Where am I?"
The maid's face crumpled with relief. "Oh thank the Seven, you can speak! I thought, when you wouldn't wake, the physicians said, " She was babbling now, words tumbling over each other. "Six months, Young Master. You've been unconscious for six months. We feared you'd never, "
"Six 'months'?"
Dave tried to sit up. Mistake. Massive mistake. The pain in his chest went from agonizing to apocalyptic, and his vision whited out for a second. He collapsed back against pillows that were far too soft, far too luxurious, gasping like a fish on dry land.
"Please, Young Master, you mustn't strain yourself!" The maid was on her feet now, hands hovering over him like she wanted to help but didn't know how. "The wound, it nearly killed you. The Hound's blade pierced straight through your heart. By all rights, you should be dead."
The words filtered through Dave's pain-fogged brain slowly, like honey through a sieve.
'Hound. Blade. Heart.'
'Six months.'
'Young Master.'
Something cold settled in his stomach, pushing past the pain and confusion.
"What..." He swallowed, his throat dry as sandpaper. "What did you call me?"
The maid blinked, confusion replacing her relief. "Young Master? I, I called you 'Young Master.' As is proper. Are you... are you well? Should I fetch the physician?"
"No. I mean, " Dave's hand moved to his chest, feeling the thick bandages wrapped around his torso under the silk nightshirt he was apparently wearing. Silk. He'd never worn silk in his life. "What's my name?"
Now the maid looked genuinely frightened. "Young Master, you're scaring me. Should I call for, "
"Just answer the question!" The snap in his voice surprised him. The maid flinched.
"You're... you're Lord Alear," she whispered. "Alear Von Weisz. Son of King Avalon Von Weisz, ruler of the Western Continent and one of the Seven Kings of the Dreadlands."
The world tilted.
'Alear Von Weisz.'
'The Dreadlands.'
'Seven Kings.'
No. No, that was impossible. Those were words from a story. From 'Epic of The Dreadlands'. From the web novel he'd been reading when he,
When he 'died'.
Dave's mind raced, puzzle pieces slamming together with horrifying clarity. The Great Catastrophe. The Evolution Fruits. The Seven Kings. Damon Alastair and his impossible rise from nobody to hero.
And somewhere in that story, mentioned in passing, barely a footnote,
'A bastard son who couldn't evolve. A failure. A disgrace who died to a rival King's Hound.'
"Oh god," Dave breathed. "Oh god, no."
"Young Master?" The maid's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Young Master, what's wrong?"
Dave, no, 'Alear', stared at the canopy above, at the embroidered patterns that now seemed less like decoration and more like a prison.
He'd died and been reborn in his favorite web novel.
As a character so worthless, so utterly insignificant, that the author had killed him off in a single sentence.
And according to the timeline he remembered, he had less than a month before Damon Alastair found the 1,000-year Evolution Fruit and began his unstoppable rise to heroism.
'One month.'
Dave started laughing. It hurt his chest, sent fresh waves of agony through the wound that should have killed him, but he couldn't stop.
The maid backed away, looking ready to bolt for help.
"Young Master, please, "
"I'm fine," Dave, Alear, whoever he was now, managed to gasp out between painful chuckles. "I'm fine. I'm just... I'm alive. Against all odds, I'm alive."
'And I'm going to stay that way.'
'No matter what it takes.'
‐‐‐
''Author's Note:'' 'Welcome to the Dreadlands. Updates every week. Don't forget to leave a comment, Dave would've wanted that. RIP to the most overworked corporate slave in existence. His suffering is over. Alear's is just beginning.'