John Walker woke up to a world that refused to agree with itself.
There was a growling somewhere to his left—low, constant, patient. The kind of sound that promised teeth. He turned toward it, expecting a corner.
There was no corner.
There was distance. Too much of it. The sound came from far away, yet felt close enough to brush his spine.
The space stretched outward, unfolding into something vast enough to be a horizon, yet the air pressed against his skin like he was trapped in a closet.
He turned his head the other way.
A wall.
No—
a doorway.
No—
a room.
His mind kept trying to label it, and every label failed the moment it touched reality.
The surface had edges, but the edges led inward. Perspective collapsed on itself. Depth behaved like a suggestion rather than a rule.
It felt like standing inside a thought that hadn't finished forming.
John sat up—or at least, he thought he did. The motion happened, but the world didn't acknowledge it.
The floor might have been beneath him, or he might have been suspended, or neither concept applied anymore.
That's when the realization settled in, cold and heavy.
The world wasn't in a room.
The world was the room.
A box without outside or inside.
A space folding endlessly into itself.
A place where corners pretended to be worlds, and worlds pretended to be corners.
The growling deepened, closer now—or maybe he was closer to it.
Something in him stirred, uneasy but certain.
This wasn't a dream.
And whatever this place was, it noticed that he had woken up.
John chose a door.
It was the closest thing to a decision he could make, and that mattered more than the outcome. He stepped forward and passed through the frame—
—and the room released him.
The normal world rushed back in all at once. Sky. Street. Sound. Gravity that remembered how to behave. For a moment, relief washed over him.
Then it didn't.
Nothing was wrong in any obvious way. Buildings stood where they should. Cars moved when they were meant to. People walked, talked, lived.
But everything felt… tilted.
Not crooked. Not broken. Just off by the smallest possible margin, like a painting hung a degree too low. His footsteps echoed a fraction longer than they should have.
Wind brushed past him without quite touching. Conversations nearby paused half a second too late, as if the world needed time to account for him.
John swallowed.
This wasn't the wrong place.
This was the right place reacting badly.
He took another step. A streetlight flickered. Not out—just enough to notice. A bird took off from the sidewalk, wings beating too hard, too fast. Somewhere behind him, a car alarm chirped once and fell silent.
The air felt tight. Watchful.
Not angry.
Wary.
As if reality itself had adjusted its grip, unsure whether to hold him or push him away.
John had the sudden, uncomfortable certainty that this wasn't punishment.
The world wasn't hostile because of something he'd done.
It was hostile because of what he was.
Something about his presence disrupted the balance—nudged probabilities out of alignment, made coincidence stumble.
The rules still worked, but they worked around him now, bending just enough to keep their distance.
His chest tightened.
Instinct told him to stop moving, to blend in, to pretend he belonged.
Another instinct—older, quieter—told him that pretending wouldn't help.
Somewhere deep in his gut, a warning pulsed. Not fear. Recognition.
The world had noticed him stepping out of the box.
And it hadn't decided yet what to do about him.
John kept walking.
Not because he was brave.
Because stopping felt worse.
The city thinned the farther he went. Streets stretched too long, intersections repeating with the laziness of a half-remembered map.
Buildings gave way to open ground that shouldn't have existed—not here, not anywhere near civilization.
The horizon refused to settle.
That's when he saw them.
At first, he thought they were animals. Big ones. Too big. Shapes clashing in the distance, silhouettes tearing into one another with a violence so constant it felt routine.
The sound carried strangely—roars flattened by distance, impacts muted like thunder heard underwater.
They fought.
They devoured.
They did not stop.
One thing tackled another and vanished beneath it.
Something long and serpentine rose up, wings—or maybe just stretched limbs—casting a shadow that swallowed the ground before folding back into the chaos.
Farther out, massive shapes moved with the slow certainty of things that had never needed to hurry.
Dragons?
Dinosaurs?
John didn't know. His brain refused to commit. Names felt dangerous, like giving these things definition might pull them closer.
So he didn't.
He stayed far away. Very far away.
Every instinct he had screamed the same message: This is not for you.
The air out here was heavier, older. It smelled like iron and dust and something raw beneath it all.
The ground bore scars—craters, gouges, bones too large to belong to anything that should exist in a sane world.
And yet the fighting never spilled toward him.
Not because they hadn't noticed him.
Because he didn't matter.
That realization sat worse than fear.
These weren't monsters hunting prey. They were forces colliding. Hunger grinding against hunger. No malice. No intent. Just endless motion, like a world stuck in a single violent breath.
John backed away slowly, never turning his back, until distance blurred the details into suggestion again.
As he walked, a thought crept in uninvited:
This place isn't invading the world.
The world was remembering it.
Something old was leaking through the cracks, and John—somehow—had wandered close enough to see it. Not as a chosen one. Not as a hero.
Just as a witness who wasn't supposed to be here.
He exhaled, hands trembling, and kept moving.
Whatever this was, whatever age this belonged to—
He would learn it from afar.
For now, survival meant distance.
And distance meant walking.
That was when it hit him.
Not all at once. Not like pain.
Wrongness seeped back in, slow and heavy, flooding his chest like cold water rising inch by inch.
The air thickened. The ground felt less certain beneath his feet, as if it were reconsidering whether it wanted to stay solid.
John stopped.
I should go back.
The thought arrived fully formed, urgent in a way logic couldn't explain. Whatever this place was, it tolerated him only so long as he didn't disturb it. Walking had been acceptable. Observing, barely. Lingering was pushing it.
Running would be a mistake.
He could feel that much with absolute clarity.
This wasn't a place that reacted to speed or fear the way the normal world did. Sudden movement here felt like a challenge. Like blood in water. The moment he imagined breaking into a sprint, the wrongness sharpened, coiling tighter around him.
So he turned—slowly.
The landscape resisted the motion, not physically, but perceptually. Distance shifted. Angles refused to line up. For a terrifying second, he wasn't sure the way back existed anymore.
Then he saw it.
The door.
Standing exactly where it shouldn't have been. Upright. Ordinary. Framed in nothing at all, like it had been cut out of reality and pasted here as an afterthought.
Relief tried to make him rush.
He didn't let it.
John forced himself to walk. One measured step at a time. He kept his breathing even, his gaze steady, his movements deliberate. Every instinct screamed at him to go faster, but he ignored it.
The wrongness watched him go.
He could feel it pressing in from all sides, curious now. Testing. The distant sounds of combat seemed to dull, as if the world itself were listening.
He didn't look back.
He reached the door, hand trembling as it closed around the handle. The moment his fingers touched it, the pressure eased—just slightly. Enough to tell him he'd made the right choice.
John pulled the door open and stepped through—
—and did not run.
Because in a place like that, running might have been the same thing as screaming.