For a time, Arjun lived as if he had always been there.
Days stacked into a rhythm that felt inevitable. He woke before dawn, renewed the wards that stitched the camp's perimeter, shared counsel with generals, and studied the strange, shifting runes that only he seemed to understand.He no longer thought in two tongues; he no longer reached for metaphors that belonged to a different sky.
When soldiers spoke of the Archmage, their eyes carried reverence, not curiosity.And Arjun—Arathen—smiled and answered with patience and precision.
Peace settled on him like a cloak.
Yet every peace carries its hairline fractures.
The first crack appeared in the river.
One morning, he found its flow reversed. The current moved upstream, carrying silt and broken reeds against the natural pull of gravity.
The soldiers assumed it was magic gone wrong—a remnant of enemy sorcery. But when Arjun stepped close, the water whispered.
Not words exactly, but memories.
He saw flashes of another river—brown, city-bound, choked with refuse. He smelled exhaust, heard the clang of distant trains.
And then it was gone, leaving only the bright, impossible water of this world.
He stumbled back, heart hammering.The soldiers saw only confusion on their commander's face and hurried to excuse themselves. But Arjun knew what he had felt.
Earth. His Earth. Trying, somehow, to reassert itself.
The next fracture came in the night.
He dreamt—not of battles or councils, but of a classroom. Dust motes, whiteboard, a professor's voice droning about cause and effect. He was half asleep, half aware.Then he realized: it wasn't memory replaying. The people in the room moved too fluidly, the light too real.
He was watching it happen.
And there, at the back of the lecture hall, sat an empty seat. His seat.
A friend leaned across it, whispering, "Do you remember Arjun? He just stopped coming."
The professor sighed. "Another one lost to pressure, I suppose."
The sound of chalk against the board scraped his nerves raw.
When he woke, his pillow was damp, his throat tight as if he'd been shouting.
Outside, a new star had appeared in the night sky—burning faintly red. He could feel its pull like a pulse under his skin.
By the fifth week, the fractures were no longer subtle.
When he touched the scrying pool, reflections no longer showed the battlefront—they showed places that shouldn't exist here: skyscrapers bleeding through clouds, cars streaking like comets, neon signs in languages no one around him could read.
His apprentices thought he was experimenting. He let them think that. But every image left a residue—static in the air, a faint vibration in his bones.
And sometimes, faintest of all, he heard a child's voice saying, Come back, Uncle Arjun, Mum says you promised you'd visit.
He had no nephew. No family like that. Yet the voice stung with a familiarity that made him double over.
The general found him one evening staring at nothing.
"You're fading again," she said quietly. "The soldiers whisper about it. They say sometimes, when you stand by the fires, your shadow looks thinner."
He forced a smile. "I'm only tired."
She didn't look convinced. "You've been our anchor. Don't let the sky take you too."
He opened his mouth to reassure her, but behind her words he felt another voice coil through the air—his own voice from another world, distant, calling his name.
The sky rumbled softly. Twin moons blinked like eyes trying to stay open.
That night he climbed the ridge alone.
From there he could see everything—the endless fields, the shimmer of the wards, the stars wheeling overhead. They were his now, weren't they? His people, his sky, his place.
And yet the edges of the world flickered faintly, like paint cracking under heat. Through those fractures he glimpsed brief flashes of another skyline: gray towers, a campus quad, the yellow of sodium streetlights reflected in puddles.
The air trembled. Two realities, humming in unison, slightly out of tune.
He spread his arms, as if balance alone could hold them apart.
"Stay," he whispered—to the world, to himself, he wasn't sure. "Stay."
The wind answered with a sound like paper tearing.
When he looked down again, the river's reversed current had stilled, and the camp below slept soundly. For a moment, he thought the fracture had passed.
Then the red star above brightened—pulsed once—and the mountains on the horizon rippled as though they were reflections in water.
A line of light tore across the night, silent but devastating.
The world sighed, deep and low, as if exhaling.
Arjun dropped to his knees. Magic roared in his veins, half ecstatic, half agony. The taste of ozone filled his mouth.
Somewhere, impossibly far away, he heard another breath—his own, ragged, in a dorm room that should no longer exist.
Two heartbeats.Two worlds.One thread tightening.
He whispered into the dark, voice shaking:"I belong here."
But even as he said it, he could feel the lie crumble between his teeth.