I woke up with the taste of sand and salt in my mouth. My lungs burned. Every inch of my body felt like it had been tenderized by a meat mallet.
I dragged myself upright, coughing up brine. I was on a beach of white, powdery sand, surrounded by the jagged ribs of the ship. There were no other survivors. No bodies. Just me and the wreckage.
I spent an hour scavenging, my hands shaking. I found nothing but twisted steel. I needed a weapon, but my soft, "good degree" hands couldn't even snap a dry branch, let alone shape metal. I felt the first real wave of panic rising—a primal, animal fear of being alone and preyed upon.
I started walking the shoreline, my footsteps the only sound in the eerie silence. Then, I saw it.
Tucked into a crevice of volcanic rock was a crystal. It didn't look natural. It was the size of a grapefruit, perfectly smooth, with eight distinct hollows carved into its surface. It pulsed with a rhythmic, multi-colored light.
As I reached out, my fingers brushed the rim of a deep, crimson hole.
THRUM.
A surge of warmth, like a shot of neat whiskey, flooded my veins. The red hole flared with a blinding intensity. Before I could even recoil, the air in front of me buckled. A vortex—smaller than the ones over the city but just as terrifying—tore open.
A hand, massive and calloused, reached through the void and seized my collar.
I didn't let go of the crystal. I jammed it into my pocket as I was jerked off my feet, the world spinning into a kaleidoscope of colors that didn't exist in nature.
When I stopped tumbling, I wasn't on a beach anymore. I was standing on a stone floor inscribed with glowing runes. I looked up, ready to fight or die, but I stopped.
A man stood over me. He was huge, dressed in heavy, layered robes that looked both ancient and functional. Behind him stood others—a woman with a staff that hummed with a low frequency, and several guards in silvered mail.
They didn't look like monsters. They looked like... us. But their eyes were full of a haunting combination of pity and crushing guilt.
"Ahem... welcome, stranger," the big man said. His voice was like grinding stones. "Welcome to the world of Avulum. My name is Akhtar, and I am the one who pulled you through the veil, from your world to ours."
I didn't know his language. I shouldn't have known his language. But the words didn't hit my ears—they hit my mind, translating instantly into the cynical prose of my home.
"Another world," I whispered. I stood up, dusting the sand from my torn jeans. I felt a strange, detached exhaustion. Fear was a luxury I'd run out of hours ago. "I'm ___. And I'm going to need a lot more than a name. How do I understand you? Where am I? And why do you look like you just kicked my dog?"
The woman with the staff stepped forward. "A simple 'Universal Language' magic spell," she said, her voice crisp. "It bridges the gap between souls, not just tongues."
"Magic," I breathed. The word felt electric. "Real magic?"
A grin, wide and jagged, broke across my face. For the first time in my life, I felt a spark of something that wasn't cynicism. It was a hunger.
"This is it," I whispered. "The way out."
Then it hit me, a nauseating feeling , my head spinning.
For a heartbeat that felt like an eternity, I existed in a place where "down" was a memory and "light" was a physical weight pressing against my eyes. It felt like being pulled through a straw while my blood turned into carbonated water. The red crystal in my pocket throbbed against my hip, its heat the only thing keeping me anchored to the idea of having a body.
Then, gravity returned with a vengeance.
CRACK.
My knees hit the stone floor first, sending a jolt of white-hot pain up my spine. I coughed, but instead of salt water, I inhaled the dry, charged air of the laboratory. It tasted of ozone and old parchment. I stayed there for a second, pressed against the cold floor, my vision swimming with geometric shapes that slowly resolved into the runes etched into the ground.
"Breath, stranger," a voice boomed—Akhtar's voice. "The 'Crossing' is never kind to the uninitiated."
I looked up, my ears still ringing. That's when the sheer scale of the Nexus of Convergence hit me.
The air in the "laboratory" didn't just feel heavy; it felt wrong. It had a metallic, ozone-heavy scent that reminded me of the air right before a massive thunderstorm. As I looked around, I realized this wasn't a place of worship or wonder. It was a factory of cosmic proportions.
Gigantic glass cylinders filled with swirling, viscous fluids lined the walls, lit from within by flickering violet sparks. In the center, the floor was etched with a geometric nightmare—a massive "summoning circle" that looked less like art and more like a complex mathematical equation written in blood and starlight.
"This place..." I started, my voice echoing off the high, vaulted ceiling.
Akhtar nodded, his massive frame casting a long shadow across the runes. "The followers of the demon king Zalarus called this the Nexus of Convergence. They spent decades calculating the vibrations of other planes. They weren't looking for 'monsters' to bring here; they were looking for a world to consume, our world."
"Your world? then what is happening in my..," I said, the bitterness rising in my throat as an idea formed in my mind that i didn't like, not one bit.
"By accident," the woman with the staff—who I later learned was named Elara—interrupted. She walked toward a hovering map of glowing ley lines. "Zalarus didn't want your world. He wanted the core of Avulum. We intercepted their ritual here, in this very room, and attempted to sever the connection. But magic of that scale... it doesn't just disappear. It's like a snapped cable under immense tension. It whipped across the void and latched onto the nearest stable resonance it could find."
She pointed to a flickering blue dot on the map.
"Your world was the anchor. Our 'rescue' effort is what tore the sky open over your oceans."
I looked at the crystal in my pocket, feeling its warmth through the fabric of my jeans. "So, to save yourselves, you threw us to the wolves."
Akhtar didn't look away. The guilt I had seen earlier deepened into a hollow sort of grief. "We did not choose your world as a sacrifice. But we are the reason the door opened. And now, the Demon King's 'Vanguard'—the dregs and monsters that follow his wake—are pouring through those cracks. They aren't an army yet. They are a scouting party. If we don't close those gates, the King himself will follow."