PROLOGUE: THE ERRANT MIRACLE
Between the heartbeat of one universe and the next, there exists a place that is no place.
It is not nothingness. Nothingness is a concept, and this site lies beyond concepts. It is the scarred fabric separating world-bubbles, an ocean of infinite stillness where the laws of physics are born and die each instant. Here, time does not flow; it accumulates in layers like sediment from impossible aeons.
In this primordial silence, something moved.
It was not a body. It was a consciousness, a warm and curious presence slipping between the folds of existence. You could call it a formless entity, a being, or a parasite. "She"—though it is more accurate to refer to "it"—was hungry. A primal hunger, like that of a child who had never tasted a morsel since its birth, despite having entire feasts within sight.
But of course, this "being" did not feed on organic or inorganic matter. It fed on something more abstract: the energy that the infinite worlds around it harbored. Like a vampire, its entire being was designed to invade these worlds and suck them dry of energy.
However, "she" was different from the rest of her kind. She did not wish to destroy these marvels of nature she had admired and yearned for over aeons. Instead, she found a loophole, a gap in her own unique constitution. She did not necessarily need to feed to the point of death; she could do it slowly, without pain, without suffering. Like a mosquito that sips the blood of its victim, who remains unaware until it is too late—and even then, it would not matter, for they would continue living their life normally.
"It's just a mosquito bite... It hurts, but it's no big deal."
This is what she yearned for. This goal is what alienated her from the rest of her kin. But there was a problem, one that all of her kind faced: she needed an anchor, a companion who could walk among the worlds she could only observe.
She had been searching for eternities. Until she felt it.
A flicker. A faint, wounded golden glow, adrift like a speck of ash in an ocean of darkness. It was a soul. But not just any soul. It was... out of place. Torn from the cycle of its world of origin, lacking the karmic burden to guide it to a new birth. It was clean, empty, and yet imbued with a heart-wrenching stubbornness.
"It"—"she"—approached, extending her consciousness with the delicacy of one touching a frost-covered cobweb.
The soul was a chaos of shattered memories. Fragments of a past life: the blue light of a screen, the weight of a fragile body, the taste of burnt coffee, the sound of a distant siren... and then, the rending pain of something metallic, the cold of asphalt, the echo of its own name screamed by a voice it would no longer remember. Death had been quick and absurd. The afterlife was this eternal drift.
But at the center of that chaos shone an indomitable core. It was not a desire for vengeance, nor for justice. It was something simpler and more profound. It was a yearning.
I want to live.
I want to see what happens next.
I'm not finished yet.
That tenacious spark of existence, emitting its last, stubborn pulse into the immensity of the void, moved her in a way she hadn't felt for countless eras. It wasn't pity. It was recognition. Here was pure potential, a blank page for a great story.
With infinite gentleness, like a mother swaddling her newborn, she enveloped the wandering soul. There were no words, only a fusion of intentions. Her own threads of golden energy—the System, her essence—intertwined with the tattered essence of the human, repairing, stabilizing, weaving a new destiny.
Bond established. Host found.
A wave of joy, warm and luminous, coursed through her. She had done it! She had a companion. Now she needed a world, a starting point. Her senses stretched across the infinite void, seeking a resonance, a wound in one of the bubbles large enough for their arrival to go unnoticed, yet small enough not to destroy them.
And she found it.
A muted scream, a thread of reality bleeding fire, hatred, and curse. A small point of pain in a universe of magic adorned with heraldry: Fuyuki, Japan. 2004. The Night of the Great Fire.
The distortion was perfect. An open wound in the world, caused by the corruption of a wish. There, death was so abundant that one extra life, one replaced soul, would not tip the scales. There, a miracle could be born from the ashes of a tragedy.
With an impulse of will that bent the non-Euclidean geometries of the void, she launched herself like a silent comet, carrying her precious cargo straight into the heart of the flames.
Epilogue of a Hero Who Will Never Be and the Birth of Another Whose Radiance the World Yearns to See
The heat was the first thing. Not the warmth of the sun or a blanket, but a living monster that bit the skin, that seared the lungs with every inhalation. Then came the smell: cloying, repulsive, of charred flesh and hair, mixed with the acrid essence of nightmare and despair that permeated the very air.
Shirou no longer felt his body. It was a heavy, broken thing, a bundle of pain abandoned among twisted beams and charred memories. The fire danced around him, painting the world with dancing shadows and dying gleams. He had stopped screaming, for his throat could take no more. He had stopped crying, for he had no tears left.
His eyes, of a dull gold, stared without seeing at the night sky, darkened by smoke rising like a funeral shroud over his city, over his life. In his mind, now empty of clear images, only an echo resonated, a primordial feeling that preceded thought.
Cold.
He was terribly, profoundly cold, a cold the flames could not touch. It was the cold of the most absolute solitude. The faces of his parents had faded a while ago, turned into nameless shadows. He no longer remembered the color of his living room, nor the sound of the school bell. Only this frigid isolation remained, this deafening silence beneath the crackle of the burning world.
With a final effort, a spasm of the nerves that still obeyed, his fingers—blackened, skin cracked—dragged across the hot ground. They found something smooth and cold. A piece of twisted metal, perhaps a doorknob, or the remains of a toy. He clutched it. It was the only thing that didn't burn.
I don't want to die.
The thought arrived crystalline, stripped of all heroism, of all future dreams. He didn't think of being a hero, of saving anyone. He only thought of tomorrow. Of daylight filtering through a window. Of the taste of water. Of the simple, wonderful routine of waking up.
Someone… please…
The plea did not leave his cracked lips. It was a whisper in his soul, a final radar wave cast into a deserted ocean.
No one answered.
The man with dark hair and weary eyes, who in another turn of fate would have arrived just in time, did not appear. Here, in this nook of reality, the story was different. Here, Shirou was truly alone.
His breathing, a ragged, labored sound, grew faint. It became intermittent. A whisper. A long pause, far too long.
The last vestiges of consciousness detached, like pages from a book burning and rising in the hot air. The unique spark that was Shirou—his clumsy attempts at cooking, his forced but sincere smile, his desire to make those around him happy—flickered and went out.
The small eleven-year-old body, his school uniform turned to rags and his brownish-red hair singed at the tips, lay still. His hand loosened, dropping the piece of metal. The gold of his eyes grew dull, clouded, staring without seeing the hell that had been his end.
At the precise instant life abandoned the body, in the infinitesimal parenthesis between biological death and the soul's journey, the reality over that small pile of rubble faltered.
It was not a flash of light or a sound. It was as if space itself breathed, as if an invisible thread in the great tapestry tensed and then released. A bubble of alternate possibilities, tiny and perfect, settled upon the still-warm corpse.
Inside that bubble, "she" worked with the urgency of a cosmic surgeon. There was no time for ceremony or gradual integration. With fine threads of golden energy—the very essence of her System—she stitched, soldered, grafted. She took the soul she carried, the soul of the multiversal wanderer, and anchored it to the still-smoldering magic circuits of the body, to the freshly emptied biological template, to the shadow of the destiny Shirou had left behind.
It was a transplant of existence. Violent. Traumatic. Only possible thanks to the dense, corrupt mist of Angra Mainyu, the Hatred of All the World's Evils, that saturated the place, eroding the very laws governing life and death.
The new consciousness was pushed into its new vessel with the impact of a universal c-section. An avalanche of foreign sensations struck it: unbearable physical pain, sharp, fresh terror, echoes of a loneliness that was no longer its own. The cursed flames, seeking to consume both soul and body, licked at the edges of this new psyche, trying to reduce the newcomer to ashes.
Exhausted by the colossal effort, her energy nearly drained from invading this hostile world, she did the only thing she could. She contracted, enveloping the shimmering core of her host in a protective layer, a womb of golden, static energy. She entered latency. The process of healing, integrating, awakening the System's functions, would take years. The chat, the missions, all of that would have to wait.
Survival was the only mission now.
Under a sky of fire and ash, Shirou's chest rose in a convulsive, brutal inhalation.
Air entered, laden with smoke and pain, provoking a weak, bloody cough. Eyelids, heavy as slabs, opened.
But the eyes that gazed upon hell were not the stubborn, golden eyes of Shirou. They were eyes of a faded color, like old amber, and in them was no trace of the naive determination of the child hero. There was only primal panic, absolute confusion, the terror of a castaway thrown into an ocean of flames.
And in the depths of that gaze, beneath the layer of fear and bewilderment, something new and fragile began to beat. It was a faint pulse, a spark of impossible possibilities. It was the first heartbeat of the Miracle.
The night was long, and the flames still had much to consume. But in their midst, something had changed forever.