The Crossing of Souls
The apartment was silent except for the hum of traffic below. Dim afternoon light filtered through half-drawn curtains, casting shadows across peeling wallpaper and a floor littered with empty takeout containers. In the center of this small room sat a young man, slumped in a creaking chair, his dark hair falling across hollow eyes.
His name was Arjun, though it had been weeks since anyone had spoken it aloud.
In his trembling hands, he held a photograph. The edges were worn from countless times he'd traced his fingers over the faces captured there. Three people smiled back at him from a better time. On the left stood Maya, her eyes bright with laughter, one hand throwing up a peace sign. On the right was Vikram, his arm slung around Arjun's shoulders, grinning like he owned the world. And in the middle was Arjun himself, younger, healthier, still believing that tomorrow might be better than today.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to their frozen smiles. His voice cracked. "I couldn't do it. I couldn't keep going. I tried, I really tried."
The promise had been simple. After graduation, when they'd stood together on that campus lawn, drunk on cheap wine and cheaper dreams, they'd sworn they'd all make it. No matter what life threw at them, they'd survive. They'd thrive. They'd meet again in five years, successful and happy, with stories to tell.
But life had other plans.
Maya had moved abroad for work. Vikram had gotten married and drifted into his own world of responsibilities. And Arjun had stayed behind, watching everything he'd built crumble. First the job he'd lost when the company downsized. Then the months of rejection letters and failed interviews. His savings had evaporated. His family had stopped calling, tired of his failures. Friends became strangers who crossed the street to avoid uncomfortable conversations.
The weight of it all had pressed down on him like a physical thing, crushing the air from his lungs day by day until he woke each morning wondering why he bothered to wake at all.
Arjun set the photograph down gently on the small table beside him. His hands moved with practiced certainty now, no more trembling. He'd thought about this moment for so long that his body knew what to do even as his mind floated somewhere far away.
"I couldn't keep the promise," he said again, softer now. An apology to ghosts of happier times.
He leaned back in the chair. The world around him began to blur at the edges, sounds fading to a distant murmur. He felt strangely peaceful, like he was finally putting down a burden he'd carried too long. The ache in his chest that had been his constant companion for months began to ease. His breathing slowed. The room grew darker, or perhaps his eyes were simply closing.
Somewhere in that gathering darkness, Arjun felt his life slipping away like water through open fingers. There was no pain anymore. No fear. Just a profound sense of letting go, of falling backward into an abyss that promised nothing but the absence of suffering.
And then, in that final moment, something changed.
In a world called Erondrachen, where three moons hung in lavender skies and magic hummed through the very stones beneath people's feet, a young man named Jheran knelt in the dusty attic of his family's mansion.
The resemblance was uncanny. Had Arjun and Jheran stood side by side, one might have mistaken them for twins. The same sharp jawline, the same dark eyes that held depths of unspoken pain, the same way their shoulders curved slightly inward as if defending against invisible blows. But Jheran had never known an Arjun, had never heard of a place called Earth, and was focused entirely on the desperate ritual before him.
The attic was cluttered with forgotten things. Old furniture draped in white sheets loomed like ghosts in the candlelight. Cobwebs stretched between rafters, and dust motes danced in the air. Jheran had chosen this place because no one came here anymore. His family wouldn't interrupt. Wouldn't stop him from doing what needed to be done.
On the floor before him lay a circle drawn in his own blood. His palm still stung from the knife's edge, though he'd wrapped it hastily in cloth. The circle was intricate, covered in symbols he'd spent months researching in forbidden texts. Runes of binding and calling, of offering and exchange. Around its perimeter, seven candles burned with steady flames, their wax dripping onto the wooden boards.
Jheran began to chant. The words were ancient, from a language that predated modern Erondrachen. They tasted like copper on his tongue, each syllable resonating with power that made his bones vibrate. He was performing a summoning ritual, reaching across the veil between worlds to call forth something that might save him.
Because Jheran, like Arjun, was drowning.
Not in debt or unemployment, but in something worse. Magic flowed through his world like blood through veins, and those born with the gift were revered, powerful, essential. But Jheran had been born empty. No spark of magic lived in him. In his family of renowned mages, he was the broken child, the disappointment, the shame they tried to hide away in attics and distant rooms.
This ritual was his last hope. If he could summon a spirit of power, bind it to himself, perhaps he could finally prove he wasn't worthless. Perhaps he could finally earn the love that had been withheld from him his entire life.
The chanting grew louder. The candles burned brighter, their flames stretching upward like reaching fingers. The air in the attic thickened, becoming heavy with unseen pressure. Jheran's voice rose, calling out to whatever existed in the spaces between worlds, offering himself as a vessel, promising servitude in exchange for power.
Then the window burst open.
A gust of wind roared through the attic, scattering dust and sending the white sheets billowing like sails. Jheran's eyes snapped to the window, his concentration breaking for just a moment. The wind caught one of the candles near the circle's edge, toppling it.
"No!" Jheran reached out, but it was too late.
The candle fell directly onto the bloodline of the circle. Hot wax splattered across the carefully drawn symbols, and the blood beneath hissed and bubbled. The circle's integrity shattered. What had been a controlled gateway became a gaping wound in reality.
Jheran felt it immediately. The ritual, no longer bound by proper form, seized him with invisible hands. His soul, the very essence of what made him Jheran, was being ripped from his body. He screamed, but no sound emerged. His physical form remained kneeling on the floor, frozen, while something fundamental was dragged out of him into the howling void the broken ritual had created.
He found himself standing in a place of absolute nothing. Not darkness, but the absence of everything. No up or down, no light or shadow. Just an endless gray void that stretched in all directions.
And then he wasn't alone.
Another young man appeared before him, materializing out of the nothingness. The stranger looked confused, disoriented, his form flickering like a candle in wind. He wore strange clothes, utterly foreign to Jheran's eyes. And his face...
Jheran stared. It was like looking into a mirror, if mirrors could show you paths not taken, lives not lived.
The stranger—Arjun, though neither knew the other's name—stared back with equal shock. His mouth moved, forming words that didn't reach across the void. Where am I? What's happening?
They stood there, two souls torn from their moorings, reflected echoes of pain and desperation wearing different faces of the same fundamental loneliness.
Then the broken ritual finished what it had started.
The void began to collapse inward, reality reasserting itself with violent force. Jheran felt the pull first, a terrible suction that gripped his very essence. He reached out instinctively, whether toward the stranger or toward some hope of escape, he'd never know.
The last thing he saw was the stranger's eyes widening in horror as the ritual's magic, now completely wild and uncontrolled, seized Jheran's soul and tore it apart.
He didn't scream. There was no mouth to scream with, no lungs to give it breath. But if souls could scream, the sound would have shattered worlds. Jheran's essence fractured into a million glittering pieces, each fragment spinning away into the void like stars dying. Everything he'd been, every memory and hope and fear, scattered into nothingness. The broken ritual consumed him entirely, needing a sacrifice to close the wound it had opened.
Arjun floated in the destruction, unable to move, unable to understand. He'd been dying in a small apartment, and now he was watching someone who looked like him be destroyed in ways that defied comprehension.
Then the void seized him too.
But instead of tearing him apart, it pulled him forward. Jheran's body, empty now, knelt in a dusty attic in a world of magic and three moons. The ritual, having consumed one soul, hungrily drew another to fill the vacancy. Arjun felt himself being compressed, folded, forced into a space that wasn't quite his shape.
The sensation was indescribable. Like being poured into a mold both too small and too large. Memories that weren't his flickered past, fragments of Jheran's shattered soul still clinging to the body. Images of stern parents and whispered disappointments, of magical academies where he'd failed every test, of siblings who shone while he remained in shadow.
Then, with a rushing sensation like breaking the surface of water after nearly drowning, Arjun slammed into full awareness.
He gasped, his lungs filling with air that tasted of dust and candlewax. His eyes flew open, and he was staring at wooden rafters. His hands, his hands were pressed against rough floorboards, and they were real, solid, alive with sensation.
His heart pounded. He was breathing. He was alive.
But when he looked down at those hands, they seemed both familiar and strange. The same shape as his own, but subtly different. A scar on the left palm he'd never had. Calluses in different places.
Arjun scrambled backward, his mind reeling. The attic spun around him, utterly foreign. This wasn't his apartment. This wasn't anywhere he'd ever been. And in the center of the floor, the broken circle smoldered, its candles guttering out one by one.
He touched his face with shaking hands. Same features, but the bone structure felt just different enough to notice. He looked at his clothes—rich fabrics he'd never owned, tailored in a style he'd never seen.
"What..." His voice emerged hoarse, but it was his voice. Mostly. There was something different in its timbre.
The window still hung open, revealing a sky beyond that made Arjun's breath catch. Three moons hung there, one pale silver, one faintly gold, one tinged with blue. Stars scattered between them in unfamiliar constellations.
This wasn't Earth. This wasn't anywhere close to Earth.
And in the depths of this new body, in spaces between thoughts where memory lived, Arjun felt the echoes of the soul that had been there before. Jheran's memories, fragmentary and fading, but present. A whole life of pain and exclusion, of trying desperately to be someone he could never be.
Arjun sat in the dusty attic of a mansion on a world called Erondrachen, in a body that was and wasn't his own, and began to laugh. It was a broken sound, edged with hysteria, but also something else.
Wonder, maybe. Or perhaps just the absurdity of finding that letting go of one life had somehow led him into another.
The candles went out one by one, leaving him in darkness lit only by three moons that had no names he knew. And in that darkness, Arjun—no, not just Arjun anymore—began to understand that his story, their story, was far from over.
It was, impossibly, just beginning.