The stranger in the puddle kept staring until I realized I was the one who wouldn't look away.
New face. Younger. No scar through the brow. Slimmer jaw. The same gray eyes, but clean of the years that had sanded mine down. When I breathed, the pale surface fogged and broke the picture into ripples. When it stilled, he came back—me, but not.
I sat up fully. Pebbles clicked under my palms. Stone pressed cold through a shirt that wasn't hospital linen.
I touched the ground, the wall, the ceiling. Rough limestone. Damp. The air tasted of rock and old water. A cave, not a ward. No beeps, no plastic, no nurse murmuring half-asleep reassurances.
Hands first. No tape marks. No IV scars. The calluses were wrong—fresh, not the thick badges you get from years of rifles and rope. I flexed. The joints obeyed. Nothing hurt except the shock.
Clothes: a dark coat over a white shirt, collar stiff where my neck met fabric. Brass buttons. A belt with a slim sheath at my hip. My fingers found the hilt: a narrow-bladed sabre, light and balanced. Not ceremonial. Used. On my other hand, a ring. Heavy, old. A crest in the metal—two towers divided by a river and a banner between them. My mouth said the words before I realized I'd found them.
"Valerion."
The sound of my voice bounced off stone and came back thinner, younger. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. The kind of voice that still has room to grow.
The ring fit perfectly, like it had been waiting for me.
Valerion.
Memory slid across the surface of my mind like a stone skipping water. Not mine. Not Earth's. Lines of a page. A black screen with white text. Notifications. A chat thread I left on mute because my little brother spammed the family group with chapters and cover mockups and polls about names. He typed at two in the morning and didn't stop until sunrise and called it hustle.
What had he called the damn thing?
I closed my eyes and saw a banner image: a sword of light over a mountain-ringed city. The title in thick, heroic font.
Dawnbringer.
That was it. He'd been obsessed. Talked about his hero like a roommate. Shoved his phone in my face at holidays and said things like, "Okay so Act One, there's this arrogant noble jerk who gets taught a lesson by the MC and then dies in a dungeon so the stakes feel real—"
My stomach dropped through the floor.
I looked around the cave again. Low ceiling, water dripping steady somewhere out of sight. Uneven ground. A narrow crack overhead letting in a gray smear of day. My clothes were clean, but there were scuffs at the knee and dirt at the hem. The sabre's guard had a fresh nick.
Act One.
Arrogant noble jerk.
Dies in a dungeon.
The puddle didn't answer. Neither did the ring. But my brother's voice from a hundred late-night calls did.
"Trust me, it's important. The hero's gotta beat him and move on or the audience will think the academy is just posturing. The noble's death proves the world bites back."
The "noble jerk" had a name. It slid into place behind the crest like it'd always lived there.
Armand Valerion.
Me.
I laughed once. It sounded wrong in the small space. Not funny. Just the only noise my body knew how to make when the universe folded a joke with your face on it.
Okay. Breathe. Inventory.
I patted down pockets. Inner breast pocket: a folded card, edges softened by use. The ink on the front read Velorum War College in precise letters. Inside: Armand Valerion, First Year. A name I hadn't given the nurse or the priest. I'd given it to a mirror in a puddle without thinking.
There was a small pouch at my belt. Coins clinked when I moved it. I didn't have the vocabulary yet to name them—crowns? marks?—but the weight felt like enough to buy food. If this wasn't a fever.
Knife in a boot sheath. Good steel. A strip of cloth tucked in the coat lining that smelled faintly of ink and wax—polish for the button brass? A handkerchief folded into a square that had never seen a nose. Everything in its place. Armand had been neat, even if the story called him arrogant.
Dawnbringer.
I tried to push farther into memory. The plot didn't come. Only flashes. A shining kid with a bright name and a bright blade and a smile so clean it felt like a challenge. A girl in white whose hands glowed. A princess who didn't have patience for fools. An academy crouched over dungeons like a cat over a mouse hole. First act: the hero exposes the noble punk in front of everyone. There's a duel, or not quite a duel—something that humiliated. Then the noble vanishes into a dungeon to prove himself and a footnote later he's dead. The hero grows. The world claps. My brother's comments filled with fire emojis.
The webnovel's details beyond that were fog. I hadn't been a good reader. I had been working nights and sleeping in cars and telling my wife I'd be home by seven and showing up at nine. I caught my brother's enthusiasm like a cold and then put it down because I had a job that killed people who looked away.
Now I was wearing the ring of the boy my brother had tossed into a pit to show his readers the pit had teeth.
"Great," I said to the cave. "Fantastic narrative. Ten out of ten. Would die again."
My voice didn't echo as much this time. Maybe the cave was tired of me.
Practical. I slid the sabre from its sheath an inch, checked the edge, slid it back. Stood slowly. My head didn't spin. Body moved cleanly, if too lightly. The coat settled around me like it remembered the shape it had been tailored for. My boots were good leather, well-broken, laces tight.
The puddle caught my face again when I bent to check the ground. The stranger looked back. Armand. He had the kind of face that gets away with things until it doesn't. Noble bones. A mouth built for smirks. I hoped he had better uses for it.
I looked up through the ceiling crack. The light was gentle and indifferent. Day outside, overcast. The crack was too narrow to be useful. The cave ran both directions into dark. The steady drip came from the right. The left smelled staler.
A stone the size of my fist lay within reach. I picked it up. Good heft. Not much else in arm's reach except more rock and the puddle that had introduced me to myself. My hand, holding the stone, trembled for exactly one second. Then it stopped. I let my breath out slow. Training picks what it needs from the body and throws away the rest.
"Okay," I told the darkness. "New plan. Don't die in chapter one."
If this was Dawnbringer's world, then there were rules. Whatever my brother had built into it would be the bones under the skin. There was an academy. There were nobles and crests and a capital that cared about the academy because it fed soldiers and saints to the Empire. There were dungeons under everything because readers liked danger on-tap. Saints healed. Mages cast. Tamers had pets. And necromancers—
I stopped that thought before it finished. The word tasted like scandal. In my brother's pitch rants, necromancy had been "bad vibes, man," said with a grin. Maybe illegal, maybe not. Details fuzzy. What I remembered clearly was this: Armand was a cautionary tale, not a villain mastermind. He hurt people because attention, not because plan. He died because he wouldn't listen. Flat as a fly on a windshield. Then he was done. The hero, with a blinding name I couldn't pull into focus, moved on to midterms and dragons.
I rubbed my thumb over the ring until the crest warmed under skin.
"Not this time," I said.
Left or right. Stale or wet. A dying man who opens his eyes in a cave doesn't get to be picky, only deliberate. I crouched and touched the ground. The silt near the drip was smoother, disturbed by recent water. The other direction held more grit, more dust. People track dust. Water tracks itself.
I chose dust.
Three steps, careful. The sabre's guard breathed against my hip with each move. My boots scuffed gritty stone. I kept my left hand on the wall, fingers sliding over damp mineral until the damp stopped and the rock went dry. The air changed by inches—less cold, more stale. The drip faded behind me. My ears filled with my own breathing.
I wished, fiercely and stupidly, for Lila's hand on my wrist, for Nora's solemn pat on my forehead, for Max's dinosaur pressed to my chest. The wants came like a wave and I let it pass through me. You don't carry a wave. You duck and keep moving.
The tunnel widened. I felt it before I saw it, the way the sound changed when there was more space for it to hide in. The ceiling rose just enough that I didn't have to hunch. The ground evened out.
A faint seam of lighter dark opened ahead. Not an exit. A bend, maybe, where the ceiling crack's light bled down the side of a different passage. I shifted the stone to my left hand and let my right rest on the sabre's grip, not drawing, not telegraphing.
"Armand Valerion," I said quietly, trying the name on. It fit in my mouth like a sentence and a promise both. I wasn't sure which I meant.
Something moved.
I froze. The stone in my hand turned heavy.
It wasn't the water drip. That was behind me now. This came from the wider dark ahead. Soft at first, a scrape like cloth on rock. Then a pause, like whoever owned the cloth had remembered that sound exists.
I didn't breathe.
The sound came again, clearer, a whisper of foot on grit. Not an animal's padding. Not a river. A human step, careful, trying to be nothing.
It stopped just out of sight.
"Hello?" I asked the dark, because I was an idiot or polite or both.
Silence.
Then, from the black mouth of the tunnel, something answered with a sound that didn't belong to any hospital, any ward, any world I'd ever known:
a wet, slow inhale.