Jayu woke with a start.
His heart pounded with disordered violence in his chest, as if it had forgotten its own rhythm while he was unconscious. He blinked several times, disoriented, his thoughts slowly reassembling like pieces of a puzzle spilled on the floor.
He was lying on something soft. Too soft. Sumptuous bedding, embroidered pillows smelling of lavender and something spicy he didn't recognize. He moved his arms and felt the friction of an unfamiliar fabric — fine, flowing, adorned with gold embroidery, clothes that had nothing to do with his usual jeans and hoodie.
He sat up abruptly.
He was in some kind of palanquin — a carriage closed with thick curtains, richly decorated, gently swaying to the rhythm of a slow, cadenced movement, as if carriers were walking with measured steps beneath him. Through the gaps in the crimson silk curtains filtered glimmers of light — sun, foliage, and something that looked like banners in the wind.
The roof of the dance school, he thought. I was on the roof.
The curtains were suddenly pulled aside.
A young woman stared at him with eyes wide as saucers — lively, dark eyes, framed by stray locks escaping an elaborate bun. She wore a dress of a cut he had never seen, both ancient and foreign, and her expression shifted in a fraction of a second from total surprise to something resembling terror mixed with exaltation.
"The Omega from the other world has woken up!" she cried in a shrill voice, pivoting to alert someone outside his field of vision.
Jayu opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"The Omega from the other what?"
Before he could ask a sensible question, the procession halted. The curtains were pulled wide open by two maids who stepped back with a synchronized curtsy, and a woman appeared in the frame, bathed in light like someone accustomed to being looked at.
She was strikingly beautiful — the kind of beauty that immobilizes, silences thoughts. Her black hair was styled in an intricate architecture held in place by jeweled pins. Jewels covered her wrists, her neck, her ears, each piece worked with a delicacy suggesting extraordinary craftsmanship. Her dress, a deep blue like a night sky, rustled at the slightest movement. She was majestic. She was perfect.
And she was looking at Jayu with something more complex than mere curiosity in her eyes.
"Where am I?" he asked, his voice coming out smaller than he intended as he clumsily tried to descend from the palanquin, his feet still in his satin slippers — his dance slippers, completely absurd in this setting.
The woman let a measured smile bloom on her lips and inclined her head slightly.
"Dear Omega from another world," she said in a voice as calm as deep water, "I am delighted to welcome you among us. I am Maëva Sylphé, Duchess of the lands of Reindal."
She paused, as if giving him time to absorb each word.
"If you have been summoned to our world, it is because the Sylphé family could not give the kingdom of Tilphe what was promised: an Omega to marry the Emperor of the T'ho Empire, and thus guarantee peace between our two nations. The magic of the gods led us to you."
The sun was warm on his cheeks. Birds sang somewhere in the trees of a forest whose species he didn't recognize. The wind made banners flap, adorned with symbols he had never seen.
Jayu felt a very old, very familiar weariness settle into his shoulders.
"I didn't ask for anything," he said slowly, articulating each syllable carefully. "I didn't ask to be born Omega. I didn't ask to be treated like a second-class citizen. And I certainly didn't ask to be summoned into a fantasy world to marry a stranger."
There was something calm in his voice that was far more eloquent than anger — the exhaustion of someone who has already shouted into the void too much and no longer believes in noise.
"Send me home and find someone else."
The duchess's face tightened slightly. Not offense — something more painful than that. Something resembling shame.
"Please," she said, and her voice lost some of its composed assurance, something real appearing in the cracks. "Help our country. The wedding procession is already on its way to the T'ho Empire. We cannot arrive without an Omega to marry."
She took a step toward him and, with a gentleness that took him by surprise, took his hand in hers.
"My husband and I cannot conceive. When the gods place us before this trial, they allow us to summon an individual from another world to be our child. And so... you are my son. My little Omega."
Her hand was warm. Her palms were soft.
Jayu looked at her — truly looked at her — and saw something he hadn't seen for a long time in a stranger's eyes: sincerity.
"We cannot send you back anymore," she continued softly. "We don't know how to do that. But here, in this world... you can do everything you dreamed of doing. Without the chains of the other world."
Everything you dreamed of doing.
The phrase floated in the warm afternoon air like a soap bubble — fragile, iridescent, threatening to burst at the slightest breath.
His dream. To be a danseur étoile. New slippers squeaking on polished floors. Spotlights turning sweat into light. His mother watching from the wings with shining eyes.
Jayu looked down at his feet. His satin slippers — pink, worn, completely out of place on this dirt path surrounded by ancient oaks — were still there. He had dragged them from one world to another without meaning to, as if a part of him had refused to leave anything behind.
There was no technology here. No conservatories, probably. Maybe no classical ballet at all.
But maybe there was also no one to tell him his gender was an obstacle.
He didn't know yet.
He knew nothing of this world — its rules, its beliefs, the way its inhabitants looked at Omegas. Maybe it was the same. Maybe it was worse. Maybe — and this thought, small and stubborn, refused to die — maybe it was different.
His eyes rose to the duchess who waited, her hand still extended toward him, her gaze both pleading and respectful, as if she understood she had no right to his answer.
Jayu took a long breath.
The air tasted unfamiliar — clean, herbal, without the metallic undertone of urban pollution. The air of a new world.
He hadn't said yes yet.
But for the first time in a very long time, he also didn't feel like the answer was already written for him.