The city wore its lights like armor.
From the sixth-floor window of a concrete dorm that tried to look older than it was, the night spread in panes and stripes: neon signs breathing, traffic signals counting seconds for people who never had enough of them, office towers blinking their tired Morse code into low clouds. Rain had come and gone at dusk, leaving the asphalt varnished black. Tires hissed. Somewhere a siren rehearsed tragedy and then thought better of it.
Light D. Trail sat with one knee hooked over the other, a quiet line in a room full of small noises—the soft whirr of a laptop fan, the rhythmic tick of a cheap wall clock, the muted bass of a party two floors down that refused to admit it was almost midnight. His desk lamp held a halo like a saint with a day job. The screen in front of him showed the blank page of an assignment due tomorrow that had already decided not to be written tonight.
He wasn't the sort who needed to announce himself. Even in crowded lecture halls, attention found him like iron filings finding a magnet—almost embarrassed to be caught, but helpless anyway. Handsome, people said when they thought he couldn't hear. Clean jawline, unruly black hair that fell over storm-grey eyes. But what made strangers go quiet mid-sentence wasn't his face; it was the way he carried silence. As if he knew what it weighed. As if he had been the one to weigh it.
He watched the street without seeing it, fingers worrying the edge of a pendant beneath his shirt. The chain had warmed to his skin over the years, but the shard itself was always cooler than it had any right to be. A sliver of something that didn't quite belong to metal—irregular, asymmetrical, etched with a sigil so faint that some days he thought he imagined it and other days he was sure it imagined him.
"Keep this close," his mother had said, pressing it into his palm on a winter night when breath made ghosts in the air. "Even if you don't know why."
She had been a small woman with quick hands, her laugh always half-swallowed like she didn't trust joy to stay if she let it out all the way. Grief had taught him economy. He kept the pendant. He kept the promise. He kept most things to himself.
A message popped on his phone, the screen lighting his knuckles from below: Group Study—are you coming or ghosting again? He thumbed the device dark without answering. Another ping followed, then a GIF of a dancing skeleton. He didn't smile, but the left corner of his mouth acknowledged the attempt.
The clock ticked. Outside, a bus exhaled at the stop. A pair of students argued in the corridor, their fight already tired when it reached his door.
He stood abruptly, because sometimes stillness felt like a room filling with water, and you had to move before you learned to breathe it. Hoodie, keys, phone. He slipped the pendant out just far enough to check it was there—habit, ritual, talisman, he refused to name it—and stepped into the hallway.
The stairwell smelled of wet concrete and detergent. He took the stairs two at a time, not because he was in a hurry but because elevators were boxes that pretended not to remember they were coffins. The lobby security light flickered twice when he passed, as if reconsidering him. Outside, the air cooled his teeth.
Campus at night was a different animal: fewer voices with more room to echo, buildings leaning into their shadows like conspirators. Near the gate, two girls paused mid-conversation when he approached. One tugged her friend's sleeve. Isn't that the guy from Section B? The other whispered back something about quiet, dangerous; the word hung behind him like a coat he hadn't chosen.
Light cut across the quad, shoes thudding softly on the path threaded between squares of lawn that would be indifferent to human crises come morning. The library squatted at the far end like a ship at anchor, its glass façade catching the city's reflection and sending it back improved. The doors sighed when he opened them.
He didn't always know why he came here when the hour grew thin. It wasn't for the books, though he respected their gravity. It was the weight of the place—how whispers lived here without shame. How the air seemed trained to carry thought.
The night staff nodded. He nodded back, the way people who agree not to demand anything of each other nod. He took the long aisle that ran between Comparative Myth and Philosophy; he always did, though he wasn't enrolled in either this semester. The spines winked at him—The Names of Light, Doors Between Worlds, On Fate and Its Refusals—as if the shelves had a sense of humor.
The carrel he favored claimed him without fuss. He set the laptop down, opened a notebook to a page that had already survived one false start, and waited. Silence gathered. An impulse to move argued with an equal urge to hold perfectly still and see what arrived in the space he made.
He flipped the pen in his fingers. The motion was a learned grace: catch, pivot, catch. When it slipped, his hand found it at the very tip without looking.
A small breath sounded behind him, the kind people make when they see skill disguised as carelessness.
"Sorry!" A girl in a red scarf tucked hair behind her ear, flustered by the evidence of her own attention. "I didn't mean to—You just… do that a lot."
"Drop pens?" he asked, deadpan enough to be almost kind.
"Catch things," she corrected. "Like you knew they'd fall before they did."
He considered that. "Then I should work on not dropping them."
She laughed, bright and brief, then seemed to realize the library didn't permit laughter to behave like that. "Right. Um. Good night."
"Night," he said. His voice was a low aqueduct, efficient, carrying more than it showed.
When she left, the silence returned grateful.
He opened the laptop and stared at the cursor blinking like a Morse code for be someone. He typed a sentence and disliked how false it felt. Not the words—the posture of pretending he was a person to whom this sentence belonged. Delete key. He tried again. The same. He closed the document before resentment attached to the assignment and contaminated the class.
His hand went to the pendant again without permission. He drew it out, letting the shard kiss the light. The sigil winked—just once, like a decision changing its mind.
"What are you?" he asked softly, testing the room's appetite for questions.
The pendant answered as it always had: with temperature, with weight, with the feeling of the skin at the base of his throat remembering the pressure of a fingertip that had reassured a child version of him. He slid it back under his shirt. The chain found the familiar path as easily as a river finds its old bed after floodwater recedes.
Time did its agreeable impression of moving. The library announced closing in a voice that had smoked for forty years and then quit. Light packed up, nodded to the desk again, and traded lamplight for streetlight.
On the athletic field, the sprinklers had decided to misbehave even after rain. A boy chased a rogue spray with a traffic cone like a knight misunderstanding his quest; his friend howled encouragement and slipped in the grass. Light skirted the chaos, pausing only when a phone skittered into his path, screen-first.
He stooped, checked the glass for cracks, and held it out. The owner took it with both hands, guilty gratitude making him younger.
"Thanks, man," he said. Then, after a beat: "You're Light, right?"
"So they tell me," Light said.
The boy blinked, as if expecting more and receiving exactly that in the negative. "Cool. Uh, good night."
The path home rose gently, a slope that fooled shins into believing they weren't working. He climbed it with the same economy he applied to most things—no wasted motion, no concession to the drama of fatigue. At the dorm entrance, a group in varsity jackets occupied the steps like a small country. Their laughter made room for him as he approached; someone nudged someone else and said watch it, but it wasn't a warning, more a ritual.
He took the stairs again, because they were honest. On the sixth floor, he keyed the door open, flicked the switch, then immediately turned the overhead light off in favor of the lamp. Harsh light made rooms confess things he preferred they keep.
The room exhaled. He let his bag fall to the chair. The hoodie went on the back of the chair with military precision he would deny if accused. He crossed to the window and laid his palm against the glass. It was colder than he expected, and that seemed generous of it.
Below, the city continued its work. Buses like patient whales. Taxi headlights threading themselves into necklaces that never broke. A girl on a bicycle railed at a pedestrian with so much passion they both started laughing before they'd finished being angry. He felt affection for them all without wanting to be any of them.
He leaned his forehead to the cool pane and closed his eyes.
Sometimes—more often lately—he felt pressure behind his ribs, not pain exactly, not heat, a tide. As if something out there were breathing and he was on the shore of it. It would rise and fall. When it was high, he could almost hear it speak. When it retreated, he was left with the sense that he had missed a word that mattered.
He pulled away, rubbing at the mark his skin had left on the glass, and caught his reflection not quite catching his gaze. The eyes in the window were grey with storms he hadn't scheduled. His mouth was a line that meant you are fine in the syntax of men who had practiced the sentence before they needed it. The pendant chain was a faint diagonal across the throat. He lifted the charm into view and let it rest against his sternum, feeling the small click of recognition as it found the exact hollow it liked.
His phone vibrated, rattling against the desk with the urgency of a small trapped animal. He glanced at the screen. Uncle Aaron. He hesitated and picked up.
"Light?"
His uncle's voice had the carefulness of people who had broken delicate things and never forgiven themselves. "Sorry it's late."
"It's fine."
"I… found a box," Aaron said. "In your mother's things. I should've noticed it sooner. There's a letter with your name. It looks… older than it should be."
Light's grip on the phone shifted by a millimeter. "Older how?"
"The paper," Aaron said, as if looking at it while he spoke. "And the ink. It's probably nothing. I thought I'd bring it by tomorrow."
Silence built a chair and sat down between them.
"Tomorrow is fine," Light said.
"And, Light?"
"Yes."
"You still wear the shard?"
"Yes."
"Good," Aaron said, too quickly. Then, because he had to be someone older: "Keep it close."
The call ended, not rudely, not properly either—like a song cut for radio. Light set the phone face down as if tucking it into bed.
He didn't turn the music on. He didn't open the laptop again. He moved through the small space—sink, towel, lamp—as if arranging pieces on a board so that each one knew its job when the game started. Every neat line, every folded corner, an argument against the suspicion that some other geometry waited, one that didn't care for human symmetry.
He clicked the lamp to its lowest setting. The room softened. The shadows grew brave enough to mean more than absence. He sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his shoes slowly, as if the night might change its mind if he hurried it. The pendant lay cool against his chest, clocking his pulse like a metronome with preferences.
Down the hall, a door banged. Laughter flared and guttered. Somewhere out in the city, a dog decided it was its turn to narrate.
Light lay back, hands folded on his sternum, eyelids lowering. For a long breath, nothing happened. Then the room seemed to contract around the pendant, the way a hand closes when it recognizes what it holds. A sensation like a whisper moving through stone brushed the edges of his attention.
He didn't sleep yet. He let the not-sleep have him. He let the night try a sentence and fail, try again, closer this time.
On the other side of the glass, the sky flickered as if someone had changed channels behind it.
Light opened his eyes. He didn't say what was that. The question felt too small for the answer.
He turned his head toward the door.
And somewhere deep in the building—no, not the building, deeper—the first hinge of fate began to move.
Sleep didn't come to Light as rest; it came as collision.
The moment his eyelids shut, the room around him dissolved into a battlefield he had never walked, but somehow remembered. The air reeked of ash and iron. The earth quaked beneath armies that screamed with mouths no longer human. Fire threaded the horizon, jagged and alive, like veins of a heart that had decided to burn itself down.
He stood—not in hoodie and jeans, but in armor that wasn't his, plates scarred by wars older than his lifetime. In his right hand, a sword gleamed with light that refused to be defined: sometimes fire, sometimes lightning, sometimes something quieter but far more final. The blade hummed like it had waited centuries just for his grip.
Around him, figures fought in silence, their mouths moving without sound. A great winged beast clawed through the clouds, wings blotting out constellations he didn't know but felt he should. When its eyes fell on him, he staggered under the weight of its gaze. It wasn't hatred. It wasn't hunger. It was recognition.
The ground fractured, and through the cracks he saw not magma, but worlds. Oceans frozen in shards of ice. Cities glowing with crystal spires. Endless deserts beneath twin suns. Worlds colliding and breaking apart, threads of existence weaving, tangling, snapping.
This isn't mine, Light told himself, the thought echoing without voice. This isn't me.
But the sword pulsed in his hand, as if to correct him: It is. It always was.
A voice cut across the battlefield—not from the soldiers, not from the beast, not from anything with flesh. A woman's voice. Clear. Urgent.
"Light…"
The syllable carried weight, like a key turning inside the lock of his bones. He spun, searching. Amid the smoke and ruin, he glimpsed her—silver hair whipping like threads of light in the storm, eyes blue as a sky unbroken. Her lips formed his name again, though the distance devoured her sound.
"Light… find me."
His chest tightened. His feet moved forward before he commanded them, armor heavy, the battlefield fighting to hold him back. The sword seared in his hand, veins of flame racing up his arm, and still he pushed forward.
Then another voice came—colder, heavier, older than the stones splitting beneath him. It wasn't shouted. It was truth spoken as casually as weather.
Not of one blood, but of many.
Light froze. The air shuddered.
Not of one world, but of all.
The battlefield fractured further, collapsing into a kaleidoscope of dimensions. He saw shards of himself reflected in them all—Light with a bow drawn against a star-dragon, Light with guns blazing in a neon city, Light with staff raised against a tide of shadows. A thousand possibilities, all anchored to the same storm-grey eyes.
Gather what is scattered.
The sword in his hand cracked like glass, splintering into countless weapons that floated behind him—blades, rifles, spears, shields, all orbiting him like obedient stars.
Bind what is sundered.
The pendant at his throat blazed, light tearing through armor, through chest, through the dream itself.
You are the Key. You are the Hybrid.
The world trembled as if kneeling.
You are Infinity.
The words detonated inside him. His vision went white. His breath vanished. His body jolted as though dropped from a height.
He woke in his narrow dorm bed with a strangled gasp, sweat chilling his skin, heart hammering against the chain of the pendant. The room was quiet, too quiet. The laptop blinked in sleep, the clock ticked like nothing had happened.
But the pendant burned against his chest—not painfully, but with a heat that didn't belong to metal.
Light sat up slowly, running a hand over his face, dragging breath into lungs that felt newly used. He clenched the shard in his fist, whispering into the dim light of his lamp:
"…What the hell am I?"
Outside the window, the city carried on as if no prophecy had just carved itself into the marrow of its sleeping son.
The night should have ended there—sweat cooling on his skin, the echo of strange voices dissolving into silence. But silence never lasted long in Light's life.
A sound interrupted.
Knock.
Three firm strikes against his door.
Light's head snapped up. The clock on the wall whispered 2:17 AM. At this hour, no one came unless they were drunk, lost, or both. He stood, every muscle taut with an instinct he didn't know he had learned.
Knock. Knock. Louder this time, urgent, the wood shuddering faintly as if whoever was outside was about to fall through it.
Light crossed the room in two steps, bare feet silent on the floor. His hand hovered over the knob. He hesitated—not out of fear, but out of caution. The dream still pressed against him, heavy in his lungs. A girl's voice had called his name there. And now, someone called at his door.
He twisted the knob.
The door swung open to reveal not a drunken student, not a security guard with questions—but a girl collapsing into him.
Silver hair spilled across his arm like molten moonlight, sticky with blood. Her body was fever-hot, trembling, a weight too real to belong in dreams. A white dress, shredded and stained scarlet, clung to her. Her lips parted, pulling ragged breaths, each one a fight.
Light caught her automatically, the reflex smooth, as if his body had rehearsed this moment. The iron scent of blood filled the air, clashing with the detergent-clean hallway.
Her eyes—brilliant, ice-blue, glowing faintly even half-closed—fluttered open just enough to meet his storm-grey gaze.
"…I… finally found you."
Her voice was a whisper, but it cracked the stillness like thunder.
Light tightened his hold, pulling her inside before anyone else could see. He shut the door with a sharp motion, leaning her against him as he lowered her to the bed.
"Who are you?" His voice was low, steady, but edged with steel. "What happened to you?"
She coughed, blood on her lips. Yet her gaze never wavered from his. "…Your… blood…" Her fingers, trembling, brushed the pendant at his chest. "…It's not human."
The chain burned cold against his skin.
Light stilled. "Not human?" His tone sharpened, suspicion and something darker beneath.
Her hand slid away, falling limp against the sheets, but her lips still shaped words. "…Soul… Bound…"
The room shifted. Light felt a surge—a pull deep in his chest, like gravity had chosen a new center. His veins sang with heat, his skin prickled as though every nerve had been rewired. Pain lanced his arm—sharp, immediate. At the same instant, she gasped, clutching her side where no new wound had touched her.
His breath caught. The realization struck like lightning: their pain was the same. Their hearts beat in unison, mismatched rhythms forced to synchronize.
Light's storm-grey eyes widened, pupils dilating with something dangerously close to fear. "…What did you do to me?"
The girl's lips curved in a faint, exhausted smile. "…Not I… fate."
Her body sagged, slipping into unconsciousness. But the bond—whatever had taken root between them—remained. He could feel it humming, invisible yet undeniable, a silver chain drawn tight between their souls.
Light stared at her, at the silver hair matted with blood, at the fragile figure now inexplicably tied to his existence. He clenched his fists, his jaw hardening.
A stranger. A prophecy. A bond he had never asked for.
And yet, something deep inside him whispered, louder than fear, clearer than denial:
This is the beginning.
The girl lay limp on his bed, her silver hair spilling across the dark sheets like spilled starlight. Her breath was shallow, ragged, but steady—each rise and fall of her chest echoed in his own lungs, as if the rhythm belonged to them both.
Light pulled the desk chair close, sitting at her side. His fingers hovered over her wounds, uncertain. The blood had slowed, not by his hands but by something else—something he didn't understand. He should have been panicked. He should have called for help. But something deeper, primal, told him that the moment he involved anyone else, everything would break.
Her lips moved again, soft, almost inaudible.
"…Light…"
He stiffened. She had spoken his name in the dream. She spoke it now, here, bleeding in his bed.
"Stop talking," he muttered, voice low but sharp. "Save your strength."
Her eyes fluttered half-open. For a heartbeat they burned with clarity, piercing into him like blades. "Your name… your blood… the world is wrong about you."
Then her head turned weakly, and the movement tugged at the chain around his neck.
The pendant slipped free of his hoodie, clattering against the wooden floor.
The sound was small. The reaction was not.
Her eyes snapped wide, glowing faintly. She struggled upright, her hand reaching out—not for him, but for the shard.
"No…" Her voice was hoarse, panicked. "That… That symbol… It can't be here—"
Light caught her wrist before she could snatch it. "Explain. Now."
Her body trembled, her strength failing. Still, her gaze clung to the pendant like a drowning soul clings to air. "That is no trinket… no ornament. That is… an Origin Fragment."
The name shivered through the room like a prayer.
Light frowned, knuckles white around the shard. "Origin Fragment? What the hell does that even mean?"
Her chest rose and fell too quickly, eyes wild, yet her words were steady enough to chill him. "A piece of what binds worlds together. It should not exist here… unless…" She faltered, breath catching. "Unless you are what the prophecy spoke of."
Light's storm-grey eyes hardened. "Prophecy?"
She shook her head, pain dragging her back down onto the sheets. "No time. If you wear that shard, then fate has already chosen. And if that's true—"
Her voice broke. But the bond between them carried what words could not. He felt it: the weight of expectation, of centuries of whispers, of something too large for any one life.
The air grew heavier. The room dimmed.
Then his phone lit up, vibrating against the desk. The screen blazed with a breaking-news banner.
[EMERGENCY ALERT] — Unidentified Phenomenon in Downtown Sector. Witnesses report massive "crack" in the sky. Authorities advise shelter-in-place until further notice.
Light snatched the phone, his reflection glaring back at him from the black bezel. The feed was shaky, captured by some terrified bystander: the skyline split open, a jagged wound of light tearing across the clouds. Sparks of fire and shadow leaked out like blood from a cut in reality. Screams rose, sirens wailed.
The same sickness from his dream flooded his chest. The pressure, the tide—rising.
Beside him, the girl—Feratinnia, though he did not yet know her name—forced her eyes open again.
"…The Awakening…" she rasped. Her trembling hand reached weakly for his, their fingers brushing. "It's begun."
Light stared at the glowing screen, then at the shard burning cold against his palm, then at the girl bound to him by blood and fate.
The city outside roared in panic. Inside, his heart beat with a truth he could no longer deny.
This was no dream.
And he was no ordinary man.
The world outside his window was no longer the same.
Light stood there, one hand braced on the frame, breath fogging the glass. Beyond the dormitory walls, the city stretched into chaos. People poured into the streets despite the emergency warnings, phones raised toward the impossible sight above them.
The sky itself had split.
A crack glowed across the firmament, jagged and violent, like someone had taken a blade to the heavens. Through it bled not sunlight, not starlight, but something rawer: strands of color too sharp for the human eye, shadows that writhed as though alive, sparks that hissed when they touched the rain-soaked roofs below.
Light's storm-grey gaze reflected the wound. He didn't blink. He couldn't. Every beat of his heart matched the pulse in the fracture, as if the sky and his chest shared a rhythm.
Behind him, the girl stirred. Her voice was weak, breaking, but every syllable wrapped itself around his bones.
"…That crack… It is the door." She coughed, blood flecking her lips, yet still she forced the words out. "The worlds are bleeding into one another. And you… are the only one who can stop them."
Light turned, the cold glow of the pendant burning between his fingers. "You're telling me this is connected to me?"
Her blue eyes, dimming yet stubborn, locked onto his. "Not connected… bound. That shard chose you because you were born of two truths. You are the bridge."
The chain at his chest thrummed like a heartbeat not his own. The bond between them hummed with invisible threads, and for a moment he felt it—her pain, her desperation, her hope—all pressing against his own veins.
"I didn't choose this," he said, jaw clenched. "I never asked for it."
"No one ever does," she whispered, eyes sliding closed. "But fate doesn't ask… it demands."
Her hand slipped from his, falling limp against the sheets. The bond did not break, but her presence sank, buried in the dark weight of unconsciousness.
Light stood frozen, caught between instinct and inevitability. The pendant burned cold in his fist, and the sky screamed louder through the widening crack.
The city below erupted in panic—sirens, shouts, glass shattering under the tremor of a world losing its rules.
Light's reflection stared back at him from the window: grey eyes storming, a chain glinting at his throat, the silhouette of a girl barely clinging to life behind him.
And for the first time in his life, the silence inside him broke.
A voice not his own whispered through his chest, steady and inescapable.
This is the beginning.
The glass rattled. The pendant flared. The crack above the city tore wider, spilling fire into the night.
Light stepped back from the window, shoulders squared, storm in his gaze.
The battlefield he had only seen in dreams was no longer a dream.
It had come for him.