"So, you were here... Lucien."
I found myself in a rather peculiar situation.
I knew this — not because I had taken stock of my surroundings with any calm or clarity, but because I was standing before an elf lady who seemed to recognise me. That fact alone told me something had gone terribly, quietly wrong with the ordinary progress of my evening.
She had green eyes — the kind that carried depth the way certain forests do, layers of colour that suggested something of pure nature. Her hair was golden, caught up in a ponytail with the no-nonsense efficiency of someone accustomed to moving fast when the situation demanded it. She wore silver plate armour bearing a golden sun symbol at its centre, surrounded by runic engravings I couldn't read but felt I should — gold lettering pressed into the metal in patterns that seemed to carry weight beyond decoration. Beneath the plates, a white skirt. Her legs were covered in metal boots and pads that spoke, quietly and without boasting, of experience.
She had an easy smile. The kind of smile that meant she was comfortable here, with me, in a way that required no explanation on her end.
She approached me with the ease of someone who had done it a thousand times before.
"War Council is gathered in the main hall. Let's go — everyone is waiting for you."
The way she said it was casual. Effortless. Like a sentence that had been spoken between us often enough to lose its weight. And that was what unsettled me most — not the words, but the ease behind them. She knew me. I could feel it in the way she moved toward me without checking my expression first, without reading me for cues. She simply walked up to me the way a person walks up to someone they have already figured out.
I did not know her at all.
But I felt something. Some quiet current underneath my confusion — not recognition exactly, but the faint shape of recognition, the way you can sense the outline of a word before it arrives on your tongue. She felt like someone I was supposed to know. The feeling was sourceless and certain, and it made the gap between what I felt and what I remembered feel like standing at the edge of something very deep.
"Sorry... but who are you? And where am I?"
It was the only question in my mind. I interrupted her with it before I had decided to speak.
She went still. Not the stillness of offence, but of someone recalibrating — a brief silence where she appeared to be deciding whether my words were a joke she hadn't caught yet. Then she chuckled, short and uncertain, and crossed her arms.
"Now is not the time for this. You know how important this meeting is. So—"
"Sorry, lady, but I really don't know you. Nor about this meeting. I just went to bed last night, and now I am seemingly here."
Something in what I said reached her differently than the rest. Her brows arched — not quite hurt, not quite alarmed, but somewhere between the two that landed closer to irritation. Her mouth opened slightly.
"Did you just call me 'lady'...? What happened to you, Lucien — did you really hit your head or something?"
Lucien. My name, spoken by a stranger who treated it like something familiar. It felt true. I had no reason to doubt it and no memory to support it, and the combination of those two things was beginning to make the ground feel less reliable than it had a moment ago.
Before either of us could continue, a voice cut across the space between us.
"Your Highness—"
I never learned what came after that.
· · · ✦ · · ·
One moment I was standing in front of her.
The next I was somewhere else entirely, and the world had decided that subtlety was no longer worth the effort.
Roars. Screams — some short, some not. The thick, copper-heavy smell of blood mixing with the acrid edge of fear-sweat. Beneath my feet the ground was uneven, wet in ways I did not want to investigate. Around me, bodies moved with the desperate, economical violence of people who had long since stopped thinking about what they were doing and were simply trying to remain alive.
I had a shortsword in my left hand and a dagger in my right.
My shortsword was in someone's neck.
I became aware of this in stages — first the weight of the blade, then the resistance at its tip, then the full understanding of what that resistance meant. By the time I grasped it completely, the person had already fallen. My hands had done this. These hands, shaking now with a violence I could not control, had moved with a precision I had never trained for and arrived at a result I had never imagined for myself.
I had just killed someone.
The thought did not diminish with repetition. It sat in me, solid and irremovable, while the rest of the battlefield continued without waiting for my horror to resolve. I was not fully in control — not the way I had been standing in that corridor, confused but present. Here something else was operating alongside me, something that knew the geometry of this, that read the angles of incoming attacks and responded before I could think to respond. My body moved itself. I could only witness it.
A man grabbed my shoulder. He was shouting something directly at me — mouth moving fast, urgency in every line of his face — but the sound wouldn't assemble itself into meaning. The roar of everything around us, the blood hammering through my ears, the sheer incomprehensibility of where I was — all of it conspired against comprehension.
Then another blink.
He was gone. The battlefield was gone. All of it gone, replaced at once by somewhere that had no right to exist.
· · · ✦ · · ·
The place was unnatural. And — despite everything — it felt beautiful in itself.
Reality here had been broken, the way a mirror breaks differently when it shatters from a fall versus when it is struck deliberately. The fractures had geometry. It was night, or something that remembered night — a sky overhead that held no stars but bore a shattered moon, its pieces suspended at angles that defied gravity, casting a grey light that fell like the memory of light rather than the thing itself.
The ground was grey. Across it lay the debris of time — or time itself, broken into physical form: enormous mechanical clocks shattered open, their inner workings spilled across the land like the organs of something vast that had died mid-motion. Smaller clock-fragments scattered between them. Blocks of stone and crystalline material carved with runic symbols in a language that predated every language I had ever encountered, yet carried a weight of meaning I could feel in my sternum without understanding a single character.
And at the centre of all of it: a clock tower.
It reached heights that mortal engineering could not accommodate. My mind kept trying to assign it a number and failing — not because the number was too large, but because height itself seemed to stop applying at a certain point of the structure's ascent. Its face bore the phases of the moon encircling it in an unending progression, and around those phases, more runes — the same unknown language, carved with the desperation of someone recording something they feared would be forgotten. Or perhaps something meant to cage the dreadful figure within.
At intervals around the tower, nailed to crosses at the clock's cardinal positions: a figure.
The moment my sight reached toward it, every fibre of my body rejected the act of looking.
It was not a conscious refusal. It was deeper than that — cellular, instinctive, the way a living thing recoils from extreme heat before the mind has registered the danger. I managed to hold my gaze for only a blink before something in me physically forced my eyes away, and even that single blink was enough to fill me with a dread so complete it displaced everything else. Suffocation without air leaving my lungs. Pressure from a direction that did not exist.
Then I heard the voice.
Distorted. Soul-wrenching. Not coming from any single point in space but from the space itself — from the broken clocks, the fractured sky, the impossible tower, the grey ground. Multiple frequencies layered over each other, creating harmonics that human perception was never built to receive. It was the sound of something ancient speaking through a medium that had been damaged past the point of clean transmission.
My body became rigid. Not stiff — rigid, as though my nervous system had simply ceased accepting instructions. My ears began to bleed. My eyes. My nose. The blood was warm and quiet, and I felt it distantly, the way you feel something happening to a body you are watching from a slight remove.
The Hanged Man uttered.
"SO IT HAS BEGUN...
A?a##$?..."
That was the last thing I heard.
· · · ✦ · · ·
I woke up panting, both hands clenched around my own skull as if I could press the dream back inside it or keep my head from splitting open around it.
My bedroom. My ceiling. The particular quality of darkness that belonged to my room at this hour, the familiar shapes of furniture at the edges of my vision, the sounds of the street outside operating exactly as they always did.
I was on Earth. I was in my bed. I had not moved.
None of that made what I had just experienced feel less real.
I sat there for a long time, not calming down so much as running out of the energy that panic requires. The images refused to soften the way dreams usually soften on waking — the elf lady's green eyes, the weight of the blade, the grey land and the shattered moon and the figure on the cross at the hands of the clock tower, and that voice: that broken, distance-ravaged voice saying a name I did not recognise, as though it were the last word its speaker intended — so that I could hear it, and memorise it.
I didn't know what any of it meant.
I didn't know yet that it meant everything.
I pressed my palms against my eyes, breathed, and told myself it had been a dream.
I almost believed it.
· · · ✦ · · ·