CHAPTER 1 — Night Shift
The night shift clung to Ash Keller like a second skin that didn't quite fit.
Fluorescent light still buzzed behind his eyes, ghostly afterimages burned into his vision. Antiseptic clung to his hands no matter how many times he washed them. Even out here, in the cool air behind the hospital, he could taste saline and metal and the stale tang of recycled oxygen.
He had spent twelve hours walking the narrow ledge between life and loss, and most nights that edge cut deeper than he ever admitted.
The automatic doors hissed shut behind him with a soft hydraulic sigh, like the building itself was relieved to let him go. Ash stepped off the concrete apron and onto cracked asphalt, his scrubs hanging loose, his hoodie too thin for the hour. The parking lot gleamed with oil-slick puddles reflecting a warped moon. A handful of cars sat abandoned under the sickly glow of sodium lamps, their windshields catching light like blind eyes.
He felt hollow.
Not empty by absence, but empty by erosion—like something essential had been scraped out of him grain by grain, shift by shift, until all that remained was a shape where a person used to be.
Behind him, a siren rose, then cut off abruptly. Somewhere inside, a monitor began its shrill, panicked rhythm. Someone shouted for labs. Someone else yelled "Pressure's dropping—" and a door slammed.
Ash didn't turn back.
He knew the cadence of all of it too well.
He crossed the parking lot, his shoes whispering on wet pavement, and took the narrow footpath that wound away from the hospital's rear loading bay, past dumpsters and humming generators and a bent section of fence that someone had patched with zip ties.
The footpath led into the small park the city had lodged behind the hospital like an afterthought, as if someone had remembered at the last minute that human beings sometimes needed trees.
It was little more than:
• a crooked strip of grass,
• a stand of old oaks leaning toward one another like conspirators,
• a scattering of benches along the cracked concrete path.
But it was almost always empty at this hour. No dog walkers. No joggers. No families.
Just the quiet.
Most nights, the park felt like the last honest thing in the city.
Tonight, even the quiet seemed wrong.
The air had a weight to it. Not just humidity, not just exhaustion thickening his thoughts—something else. Like the world was waiting for him to do something and refusing to tell him what.
Ash shoved his hands in his hoodie pockets and walked deeper beneath the trees.
Streetlamps buzzed faintly, haloed by mists of insects swirling in lazy, drunken orbits around the light. Their shadows spilled long and warped across the path, distorting the familiar lines.
The farther he got from the hospital, the quieter his mind should have become.
It didn't.
He saw fragments instead:
• the overdose kid with the track marks who'd coded twice tonight,
• the old woman whose hand he'd held while the doctor explained nothing else could be done,
• the middle-aged man who'd lifted his head just enough to ask "Is it going to hurt?" and the way Ash had lied with practiced gentleness.
You did good, his charge nurse had said on the way out. You were a help tonight.
But Ash knew the difference between helping and losing slower.
He followed the path around the stand of oak trees and toward the bench he always used when he needed five minutes before pretending to sleep.
He was halfway there when he realized he wasn't alone.
Someone was already sitting on the bench.
⸻
The man's coat was too thin for the cold.
Ash saw that first—a worn overcoat buttoned crooked at the neck, the fabric frayed where cuffs met bone. The man sat, hands folded atop a cane.
He was small, hunched, brittle-looking. The sort of old that looked like the world had pressed on him for a very long time and he'd bent instead of breaking.
Streetlight washed over his face in brittle strokes, pulling deep lines out of his skin. His hair was thin and white. His eyes…
His eyes were wrong.
They were too sharp. Too clear. Too awake for that body.
Ash slowed without meaning to, his steps growing quieter.
The man was watching him.
Not casually, not in that vague, shared-space way of late-night strangers. His gaze tracked Ash with surgical precision, as if he'd been waiting for exactly this moment and would not accept substitutes.
Ash's shoulders tensed.
He considered turning around.
But the man smiled—not warmly, not even politely. It was a small, knowing twist at the corner of his mouth, like he'd been handed proof of something he hadn't been sure he'd see.
"Long day?" he asked.
His voice was low, dry, threaded with an accent Ash couldn't place. Not from here. Not recent.
Ash stopped a few paces away.
Everything he'd been taught about late nights and strange men in parks whispered that he should keep walking and pretend he hadn't been addressed.
But something in the man's gaze—some gravity Ash couldn't name—held him still.
"Yeah," Ash said at last. "You could say that."
The man's fingers tapped once against the curve of his cane.
"They needed you," he murmured. "All those bodies, all that blood, all that quiet terror hiding in waiting rooms… they needed your hands, your back, your patience."
He tilted his head.
"And yet you don't feel needed. Not truly."
Ash's spine stiffened.
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to." The man's eyes shone faintly in the half-light. "You feel present. Useful, even. But not… necessary. Not to the story of the world. You feel like a man standing in the tide, trying to push the ocean back with a mop."
A humorless sound escaped Ash before he could stop it.
"Been spying on me?" he asked.
The old man's smile deepened by a fraction.
"Observant men don't need to spy," he said.
The cane shifted slightly as he adjusted his grip. The faint tap as it touched the concrete wasn't the soft knock of wood.
It rang sharp and hollow—metal on stone. Cold. Absolute.
Ash's skin prickled.
"What do you want?" he asked, and there was less politeness in it than usual. Twelve hours of scraped-out empathy had left him too tired to pretend.
The man looked up at the sky as if considering how much of the answer to give.
"What I want," he said finally, "is to die."
Ash's training kicked in before his mind could catch up.
He took an instinctive half-step forward. "If you need help, I can get you back inside. There's a crisis—"
"No."
The refusal landed with a quiet finality.
The man's voice thinned to a whisper, but the words didn't grow weaker for it.
"I don't need a doctor," he said. "I need a successor."
The night tightened.
The wind, which had been brushing the leaves, fell still. The buzz of the overhead streetlamp seemed to fade. Somewhere, far away, a car passed—but its sound felt muted, off, like the world had taken three steps back to give this conversation room.
Ash swallowed.
He was very suddenly, very awake.
"I don't know what you think I—"
"You don't yet," the man cut in calmly. "But you will."
His gaze sharpened, pinning Ash in place more efficiently than any physical grip.
"I am old," he said, "older than your hospitals, your governments, your tidy explanations. And I am tired. Power weighs heavier than age, boy. Heavier than all your shift work and grief combined."
He lifted one trembling hand, fingers thin and knotted like roots.
"I carry something that must be passed before I go," he said. "Something that cannot remain ownerless."
Ash's heartbeat dug at the inside of his ribs hard enough to hurt.
"You're not making sense," he said, but the words felt weak. He'd seen psych patients in florid episodes, heard all kinds of delusions spoken with absolute certainty.
This didn't sound like that.
This felt like being told a terrible secret in a language his body understood and his mind refused to translate.
The man chuckled.
It was entirely the wrong sound for that fragile chest—deep, low, like a stronger voice had been shoved into an aging frame.
"Sense is for those whose burdens are small," he said.
He leaned back against the bench and said nothing for a long, slow moment.
Then:
"Ash Keller."
He said the name with precision. No stumble, no doubt.
Ash flinched.
He hadn't introduced himself.
"Tell me truthfully," the man said, his voice softening to a razor. "When you look at this world—the suffering, the cruelty, the endless decay—do you see something worth saving?"
Ash's mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
Images lashed through his mind like someone flipping channels too fast:
• the overdose victim turning blue on the gurney tonight, lips cracking as chest compressions forced blood through unwilling veins,
• the small boy he'd carried once down a too-bright corridor, mother wailing behind him because the gunshot had entered at just the wrong angle,
• the woman who came in every few weeks with new bruises, who always signed herself out against medical advice and always said, "He said he'd change,"
• the man he'd watched die alone in a hallway chair because there were no available beds and the triage system insisted someone else was worse.
He saw paperwork filled out in tidy boxes to summarize ruined lives.
He saw administrators shrug at systemic failures and call them unfortunate realities.
He saw the way everyone seemed to have quietly agreed that some people were just… disposable.
His jaw clenched.
Was the world worth saving?
Yes.
No.
Sometimes.
He didn't know how to pack that into words.
So he said nothing.
The old man's shoulders eased.
He nodded once, as though silence was exactly the answer he'd expected.
"You are weary of watching the world break," he whispered. "But not yet numb enough to abandon it."
He extended his hand.
His fingers barely shook now.
"In that case," he said, voice suddenly very clear, "you will do."
Ash took an involuntary step back.
"Do for what?"
The man's smile turned almost gentle.
"For this."
⸻
The spark leapt before Ash could move.
It wasn't lightning. Lightning was a crude comparison. Lightning was a blunt force; this was precise, deliberate, intimate.
Golden light erupted from the man's outstretched palm—pure, violent, alive. It didn't arc through the air so much as choose a path, streaking toward Ash's chest like an answer to a question he hadn't known he'd asked.
Impact.
It hit like a hammer made of burning suns.
His lungs seized.
The world inverted.
His knees hit the path—hard—but he barely felt it. Fire roared through his ribcage, not on his skin but inside it, tearing through bone and marrow, ripping along nerve pathways like someone had poured molten metal into his veins.
Ash tried to scream.
No sound came.
His vision burst open.
Color flooded everything—colors he had no names for, hues that seemed to exist at angles to reality rather than within it. Sigils spun through his sight, intricate golden glyphs, spirals, circles inside circles, constellations made of geometry and song. He saw entire structures of meaning unfolding and rewinding in an instant, as if an impossible language had been jammed into his mind all at once.
A voice—not the old man's—rang through the chaos.
Not in his ears.
Inside his skull.
OLDER THAN YOU.
OLDER THAN HIM.
OLDER THAN THRONES AND GRAVES.
YOU ARE CHOSEN BEARER.
The words weren't sound. They were understanding forced into him like breath into drowning lungs.
Something vast unfurled inside his chest.
A sealed door that had always been there, unnoticed, slammed outward. Behind it lay a reservoir—no, not a reservoir; that implied limits. A space. A pool of crackling, living power that had weight, texture, temperature, intent.
Not sentience.
Not exactly.
But awareness.
It flooded into him, through him, around him, until he couldn't tell where his body ended and it began.
Then—
Silence.
The power did not vanish.
It settled.
Like a beast curling into coils around his spine, heavy and waiting.
Reality snapped back into focus.
Ash was on his knees on the cracked concrete path.
His heart hammered out a war rhythm in his ears.
His palms were scraped raw.
His breath came in ragged gasps that hurt.
He dragged air into his lungs and stumbled forward, reaching for the old man.
"Hey—hey, wait—"
He caught him just as the man sagged sideways.
The cane clattered to the ground with that same hollow metal ring.
The man's weight was shockingly light, like someone had already emptied him.
His skin felt cooler than it should. Too thin.
Ash hooked an arm under his shoulders, half-raising him.
"I'm calling an ambulance," Ash rasped. "You need—"
The man's hand found his wrist with surprising strength.
"No," he whispered.
Ash's protest died in his throat.
The man's breath smelled faintly of dust and something older—old paper, old stone, rooms that had gone unopened for decades.
"You…" Ash swallowed. His vision still crackled faintly at the edges with afterimages of gold. "What did you just do to me?"
The man's eyes met his one last time.
They were softer now.
Less sharp.
Less anchored.
"You were always going to break," he murmured. "The world was going to break you. Slowly. Efficiently. Incrementally. I simply… interrupted the schedule."
His grip tightened once, a last, fleeting pressure.
"I don't want—" Ash started, but the sentence never finished.
Because the man unraveled.
Not metaphorically.
Right there, in Ash's arms, the old man's body shuddered once, like something letting go. His skin lost what little color it had. The lines in his face smoothed—not with youth, but with absence.
Then his form broke apart.
Flesh did not rot.
It did not liquefy.
There was no smell of decay.
He simply… turned to dust.
Fine, pale ash poured through Ash's fingers and onto the bench, into the curve of the old coat, drifting down onto the path in a slow, impossible cascade. For a heartbeat it held the shape of a man in his arms, like a shadow made of powder.
Then the wind moved again.
A soft breeze swept under the oaks, lifting the dust in a gentle, swirling column. It spiraled upward, around Ash's hands, around his face.
He flinched, but there was nothing to push away.
The dust dispersed into the night air, carried off as if the man had never been there at all.
The cane lay where it had fallen.
The bench sat empty.
The park hummed with the small, indifferent noises of the world:
• insects ticking,
• a distant car door slamming,
• the buzz of the streetlamp overhead.
Ash stared at his empty hands.
His chest heaved.
His heart felt like it was trying to escape through his throat.
"Okay," he whispered hoarsely. "Okay. Okay."
He scrubbed his palms down the front of his hoodie as if he could erase the feeling of dust that was no longer there.
The world looked the same.
It didn't feel the same.
The air seemed thicker, charged. Shapes had edges he'd never noticed before. Every surface felt like it was being outlined by something unseen.
Something inside him had awakened.
Something impossible.
With shaking hands, Ash backed away from the bench until his calves hit the low edge of the path. He almost tripped, catching himself on the trunk of a tree.
He pressed his palm flat against the bark.
It felt real.
Rough.
Cold.
Unchanged.
He closed his eyes.
"What," he whispered, voice barely audible, "did you give me?"
The answer came from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Not out loud.
Inside.
A whisper, the same tone that had spoken during the burst, now quiet and precise:
POINTS AVAILABLE: 3
Ash's eyes flew open.
The words weren't sound. They were a presence—information appearing in his mind as clearly as if someone had projected them on the inside of his skull.
Three.
Three of what?
He stared at the empty bench, the fallen cane, the faint smear of dust on the concrete already fading into the night.
The world had shifted.
He could feel the seam where Before and After had been stitched together in his chest.
He was no longer just a tired hospital orderly walking home from work, weighed down by other people's tragedies.
He looked down at his hands. They were shaking violently. Not with fear—something deeper. Something primal. As though a current pulsed beneath his skin, electric and ancient, racing through his veins.
He couldn't catch his breath.
He pressed a palm to his chest, expecting to feel a heartbeat hammering wild.
Instead he felt heat.
A faint, golden warmth spreading outward from the point where the old man's hand had struck him. Not burning… but dawning. Like sunrise under the skin.
Ash stumbled away from the impossible event that had just unfolded. His boots scraped against the gravel path as he backed up until his shoulders hit the trunk of a crooked oak.
"What… what did you do to me?"
No answer.
No voice.
Just the night—still holding its breath.
Ash squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the world to stop tilting around him. His lungs felt too tight. His pulse too loud. The warmth in his chest deepened, coiling like a rising ember.
He dragged a slow breath in.
Another.
And another.
The trembling didn't stop.
He tried to step back. The tree bark dug into his spine. He pushed off from it, stumbling forward, boots crunching on gravel as he paced blindly.
"This is impossible," he whispered. "This is… some kind of hallucination…"
But hallucinations didn't dissolve old men into dust.
Hallucinations didn't move with intelligence.
Didn't speak in mechanical clarity.
Didn't settle into a human chest like a second heartbeat.
He swallowed hard, throat raw.
The warmth inside him pulsed again, a slow expansion like an unseen tide pushing outward—brushing his ribs, his spine, the crown of his skull.
Not painful.
Not pleasant.
Just aware.
Ash clutched the lamppost beside him, grounding himself with cold metal.
"What do you want?" he rasped.
The whisper didn't speak.
But the warmth shifted—like it was listening.
Ash lifted his head, breath shaking out of him in uneven gusts. The park was still empty. Still silent. Still locked in that uncanny stillness that made the hairs on his arms rise.
He turned in a slow circle.
Nothing.
No shadow.
No figure.
Just the distant city lights beyond the trees, faint and indifferent.
Ash's stomach twisted.
"I'm nobody," he whispered hoarsely. "A hospital orderly."
But the warmth inside him didn't dim.
Didn't retreat.
As if disagreeing.
Ash pressed a trembling hand to his chest again.
"…I don't want this."
The night didn't care.
The warmth remained.
Patient.
Silent.
Unyielding.
A presence waiting for him to stop panicking long enough to understand what he had become.
Ash let himself sink down onto the bench—the same bench where the old man had vanished—and dropped his head into his hands.
He sat there for a long time, trying to breathe.
He didn't succeed.
But he also didn't run.
And slowly—so slowly—his shaking stopped.
Not because the fear faded.
But because something heavier settled over it:
A realization.
A direction.
A beginning.
The world had changed.
And it would not change back.
Ash dragged in one last unsteady breath and whispered into the silence:
"…What happens now?"
Ash stayed on the bench until the cold finally seeped into his bones.
The night regained its movement gradually—first the wind, brushing leaves overhead in a hesitant sigh, then the far-off hum of a bus engine, then the chirping of insects reasserting their place in the world.
Reality was returning.
But Ash was no longer part of it in the same way.
He could feel the difference.
A hollow pressure lingered in his chest, like a door had been opened inside him—one that led into vast, empty space. Not a void. Not darkness.
Potential.
Waiting for his command.
He wasn't sure if the sensation comforted or terrified him.
"Three points…" he muttered under his breath. "What does that mean?"
The whisper didn't answer.
But the knowledge lingered anyway.
Like instinct.
Like muscle memory he'd never earned.
He stood slowly, bracing a hand on the bench until his balance steadied. His legs felt untrustworthy—like they were remembering how to belong to someone different now.
He looked at his hands. They seemed unchanged.
Human.
Flawed.
But when he flexed his fingers, the air around them quivered—so slight he thought he imagined it.
He needed to get out of the park.
He needed walls.
A place to think.
A place where the world felt normal.
Even if normal was gone now.
He started walking.
⸻
The path wound through the trees, streetlamps casting halos of pale gold across cracked pavement. Ash's footsteps echoed too loudly in his ears. Every sound seemed amplified, every shadow more defined. The night had a texture now—threads he could almost sense tugging at him, waiting for a command he hadn't yet learned to give.
The city loomed through the trees—buildings rising like jagged silhouettes against the night sky. For once, the thought of returning to the noise, the crowds, the broken humanity… felt safer than the empty park.
As he left the tree line, the wind hit him—cold and honest, carrying the scent of asphalt, distant exhaust, and wet concrete. The real world. The world he understood.
He crossed the dim sidewalk and stepped under a flickering streetlight. The light buzzed overhead, struggling to stay alive. The world felt less mythical beneath it. More grounded. More mundane.
But the warmth in his chest didn't fade.
It followed him.
It belonged to him.
A car passed, headlights casting long shadows. Ash winced at the brightness. His senses were too sharp, tuned to a frequency he didn't recognize. The sound of the tires on wet pavement rang through him like grinding gears.
He rubbed his temples.
This was too much.
He needed to get home.
He needed—
"Kid."
Ash froze.
A man leaned against the corner of the bus stop. Hoodie pulled low, eyes bloodshot from either exhaustion or addiction. Ash recognized the look. He'd seen it a thousand times in the ER.
"You got the time?" the man asked.
Ash checked his phone automatically.
12:47 a.m.
When he lifted his gaze again, the man wasn't looking at him anymore. He was staring at Ash's chest. Not aggressively. Not suspiciously.
Like he'd felt something.
Ash's hand tightened around his phone.
"Yeah," Ash said quietly. "It's quarter to one."
The man nodded slowly but didn't answer.
Didn't move.
Didn't blink.
Ash stepped around him, muscles tight.
The man watched him go with an expression Ash couldn't name.
Not fear.
Not recognition.
Something closer to instinct.
Like an animal sensing a predator it didn't understand.
Ash's pulse quickened.
He hurried down the sidewalk.
⸻
His apartment wasn't far—a third-floor unit above an old laundromat, cramped and loud but affordable on an orderly's wages. The familiarity soothed him. Brick walls. Neon buzzing. The hum of the city, ugly and comforting.
He reached the stairs and climbed quickly, taking them two at a time. By the time he reached the landing, his breath was ragged—not from exertion, but from the weight of what followed him from the park.
He unlocked the door with shaking hands.
The moment he stepped inside, the presence in his chest expanded—like a sigh of recognition.
The apartment greeted him in silence:
Peeling paint.
Secondhand furniture.
Laundry he meant to fold.
Receipts scattered on the counter where he'd dropped them after another long shift.
He closed the door behind him.
Locked it.
Then leaned his forehead against the wood, eyes shut.
The moment he exhaled, the whisper returned—
POINTS AVAILABLE: 3
AWAITING COMMAND
Ash's eyes snapped open.
This wasn't a dream.
This wasn't a delusion.
This wasn't something he could outrun.
The power was real.
And it was waiting for him to take the first step toward becoming whatever the old man had claimed he would be.
Ash backed away from the door until his legs hit the couch and he dropped onto it, breath shaking.
He whispered into the empty room:
"I didn't ask for this."
The whisper answered anyway.
Not unkind.
Not cruel.
Just inevitable.
BEGIN.
Ash swallowed hard.
His hands slowly curled into fists.
"…What do you want me to do?"
The whisper didn't change.
BEGIN.
Ash stared into the darkness of his small apartment—
and realized the night shift that had begun in the hospital…
was only the prologue to something far greater.
And far more dangerous.
———————————
Ash didn't move.
For a long time, he simply sat there—half folded into the couch, breath shallow, fingers pressed hard into his knees as if bracing against an invisible current. The apartment felt too small now. Too thin. Like the walls couldn't contain the thing inside him.
The hum of the power pulsed again, faint but insistent.
BEGIN.
He dragged his palms down his face.
"Begin what?" he whispered. "I don't know what I'm doing."
The answer didn't come in words.
Instead, knowledge surfaced inside him—quiet, inevitable. Like something rising from deep water.
Three points.
Three moments of creation.
Three chances to test reality's boundaries before the reservoir reset.
A trial run.
Training wheels for a god.
He stood slowly, as though afraid the floor might shift beneath him. It didn't. But the air reacted—subtle and responsive, a thin golden shimmer coiling around the edges of his awareness.
He stepped into the center of the living room, facing the sagging armchair, the chipped coffee table, the dusty lamp that hadn't worked in months.
Normal things.
Things that couldn't hurt him.
Probably.
He exhaled.
"Okay," he said. "One point. Something small."
He scanned the room for a target.
His eyes settled on the old lamp.
The switch had snapped off sometime last winter. He kept meaning to fix it, but every time he came home from work he collapsed into sleep instead.
Ash held out his hand.
The air tightened.
Reality leaned toward him, attentive.
"Fix the lamp."
It happened instantly.
A pulse—clean, bright, like a heartbeat of light.
The lamp straightened.
The dent in the shade vanished.
The broken switch reformed with a soft metallic click.
Then—
POINTS USED: 1
POINTS REMAINING: 2
The lamp flicked on.
Warm yellow light filled the room.
Ash stepped back, nearly tripping over the coffee table.
"Oh… God…"
He stared at the lamp as if it might leap at him. As if the act of mending it had crossed some forbidden line.
He touched the shade.
Warm.
Solid.
Real.
Not illusion.
Not hallucination.
Not imagination.
He had rewritten matter.
"I can't…" He pressed his fingers to his temples. "I can't do this. I can't—"
The presence inside him didn't retreat.
It listened.
Waited.
Expected.
Ash swallowed hard.
The lamp glowed like a quiet truth.
He wasn't dreaming.
He wasn't lucky.
He wasn't cursed.
He was changed.
And the power wanted more.
⸻
He paced the room—short, frantic strides back and forth, like a caged animal trying to wear grooves into the floor. His pulse pounded in his ears. His thoughts spun. Every instinct screamed to stop.
But something deeper pulled him forward.
"This can't be real," he muttered. "I'm just a hospital orderly. I clean rooms. I change bandages. I don't—"
His words died.
Because he remembered dozens of patients who should have lived.
Patients who didn't make it because the system failed them.
Because funding was cut.
Because someone clocked out early.
Because the world had already given up on them.
He remembered watching them slip away—helpless, furious, human.
His jaw tightened.
"What if I could change that?" he whispered.
The presence in his chest stirred—soft approval, like a nod from a teacher he'd never met.
The room seemed to brighten.
Not because of the lamp.
Because Ash's resolve sharpened.
"…No hospitals," he murmured. "Not yet. Not something that big."
He needed control.
He needed proof.
He needed a test that meant something—but wouldn't risk lives.
His eyes fell on the scar along his forearm, pale against his skin—earned from a broken bottle years ago.
A small scar.
Meaningless.
But constant.
He lifted his hand.
"Okay," he whispered. "Let's try something harder."
The air grew heavy.
Electric.
Alive.
The presence waited for his command.
Ash sucked in a breath.
"Fix this."
His fingers brushed the scar.
A pulse of golden heat surged through his skin—
Not pain.
Not warmth.
Something cleaner.
Sharper.
Perfect.
The scar faded beneath his touch.
Then vanished.
The skin beneath was smooth.
Whole.
Untouched.
Ash inhaled sharply. His hand fell to his side as he stared at the unmarked flesh.
"Holy—"
POINTS USED: 1
POINTS REMAINING: 1
The whisper returned.
Not spoken.
Understood.
ONE MORE.
Ash stepped back until his spine pressed against the wall.
"One more…"
He looked around the apartment.
At the leaky faucet.
At the dying plant on the windowsill.
At the dented fridge.
He could fix any of them.
All of them.
But none of that mattered.
What he needed was clarity.
Understanding.
Direction.
He closed his eyes.
"What did he give me?" Ash whispered. "What am I supposed to be?"
Silence stretched.
Then—
A shift.
The presence condensed—a point of radiant pressure blooming behind his ribs, then rising into his mind like a cresting wave.
Words formed.
CREATE.
Ash opened his eyes.
"Create what?"
ANYTHING.
Ash looked down at his hands again.
Hands that had held dying strangers.
Hands that had broken.
Calloused hands that had never held power like this.
He lifted them slowly.
The air trembled around his fingertips.
Reality bent—waiting, ready.
Ash swallowed.
"I want…"
His pulse quickened.
"…to see what I really am now."
The golden presence surged—
bright
blinding
exultant—
POINT USED: 1
POINTS REMAINING: 0
A mirror formed in the air before him.
Not glass.
Not metal.
Pure light.
Ash staggered backward, shielding his eyes—
Then forced himself to look.
And what he saw was not human.
Not entirely.
His reflection flickered with golden veins of power pulsing beneath the skin, threads of light running through him like molten circuitry. His eyes glowed faintly—not yellow, not gold, but the color of sunlight seen through deep water.
His shadow stretched unnaturally behind him, long and sharp, as though cast by a much larger figure.
And behind his reflection—
A throne silhouette loomed.
Dark.
Enigmatic.
Waiting.
Ash's chest tightened.
His breath hitched.
The mirror dissolved in an instant.
Light scattered across the room, then vanished.
Ash collapsed into the armchair, shaking uncontrollably.
His voice was barely a whisper:
"…What am I becoming?"
The answer sank into him like a stone dropped in deep water—
THE BEGINNING.
——————
The armchair creaked under Ash's weight as he pressed both palms into his face, trying to steady his breath. His pulse thundered in his ears. His skin buzzed as though electricity crawled beneath it.
The mirror of light had vanished, but the image seared into his mind refused to fade.
Veins of gold under skin.
Eyes glowing like submerged suns.
A shadow too large for one man.
A throne—waiting behind him like a prophecy.
Ash curled forward, elbows on his knees, fighting the tremor in his hands.
"I didn't ask for this," he whispered into the quiet room. "I didn't want this."
No answer.
Just the hum beneath his ribs—quiet, patient, unyielding.
Destiny didn't need permission.
He leaned back, staring up at the ceiling, breath shaky. The lamp he had mended cast a soft gold haze through the room, catching dust in the air like drifting embers.
The world had not changed.
But he had.
A faint pressure built behind his sternum—subtle at first, then stronger. Not painful. More like a hand pressed gently against his heart, insistently, steadily.
He breathed in.
The pressure followed.
He breathed out.
The pressure stayed.
"What now…?" he murmured.
A whisper answered—not a voice, but a truth sliding into place like a lock turning.
YOU ARE NOT COMPLETE.
YOU HAVE AWAKENED, BUT YOU HAVE NOT CHOSEN.
Ash's eyes narrowed.
"Chosen what?"
YOUR PATH.
He pushed himself upright.
"My path? I'm a hospital orderly. I work nights. I mop floors. I hold hands when nobody else will. That's my path."
IT WAS.
The room dimmed.
Not like a power outage—more like the shadows themselves grew thicker, leaning inward, coiling around the edges of his vision. The air stirred, cold and warm at once, like two seasons brushing past each other.
Ash swallowed.
"What does that mean?"
IT MEANS YOU STAND AT A DIVIDE.
YOU MAY TURN AWAY.
FORGET THIS NIGHT.
LET THE POWER SLEEP INSIDE YOU UNTIL IT WITHERS INTO NOTHING.
Ash's breath hitched.
"And if I don't turn away?"
The pressure intensified—heavy, living, ancient.
THEN YOU BUILD.
THEN YOU LEAD.
THEN YOU ACCEPT THE WEIGHT THE OLD MAN COULD NO LONGER BEAR.
Ash stiffened.
He stood slowly, body moving before his mind caught up.
The worn floorboards creaked beneath his feet. The faint hum of the fridge faded. Even the city noise outside seemed distant, unreal.
He walked to the apartment window and rested a hand against the cool glass.
The hospital's faint glow still smeared the horizon. Ambulances blinked red in the far distance, tiny as dying stars.
He thought of the patients he'd lost.
The ones he'd carried on stretchers.
The ones he'd watched slip between his fingers because systems, funding, and fate had all failed them.
He thought of the old man dissolving into dust.
Of the throne behind the mirror.
Of the power curled inside him like a newborn sun.
He whispered—
"I can't fix the world."
The pressure behind his ribs pulsed once.
Not agreement.
Reproach.
Ash exhaled.
"I can't fix the world," he repeated, "but maybe I can build… something better."
Golden warmth unfurled through his chest—the first gentle emotion the power had ever shown him.
Approval.
Recognition.
Almost… pride.
Ash closed his eyes.
"Fine," he whispered. "I'll choose."
The room vibrated faintly.
Not a sound—an acknowledgment.
A vow forming.
"I don't know how to rule," he said. "I don't know how to lead."
The golden presence answered simply—
YOU WILL LEARN.
"And if I fail?"
A heartbeat of silence.
Then—
THEN YOU WILL FALL.
AND THE WORLD WILL FALL WITH YOU.
Ash's eyes snapped open.
"That's not comforting."
POWER IS NEVER COMFORT.
ONLY PURPOSE.
Ash let out a shaking breath.
His reflection in the window stared back at him—tired, frightened, transformed.
A man standing on the threshold of something vast and terrible.
A man who could walk away.
Or become legend.
He lifted his hand, pressing his palm to the glass as if touching the world beyond it.
"I choose to build," he whispered.
The golden force ignited inside him.
Not violently.
Not painfully.
But like a sun finally cresting the horizon.
A warm rush flooded his limbs.
A sensation of invisible chains slipping into place—not binding him, but anchoring him. Rooting him. Claiming him.
Ash staggered back as the world returned to normal—the hum of appliances, the faint traffic outside, the quiet of his empty apartment.
His heart hammered.
His hands trembled.
But his voice, when he spoke, was steady.
"Tomorrow," he said, "I start preparing. I don't know what I'm building yet… but I'll be ready."
The golden presence sank into stillness.
Waiting.
Patient.
Certain.
Ash closed his eyes and let out a long, unsteady breath.
His old life had ended on a park bench with a dying stranger.
His new one began now.
In a dim apartment on a tired street, beneath the indifferent glow of the city, the first ember of an empire flickered into existence.
Ash opened his eyes.
"Okay," he whispered into the quiet.
"Let's begin."