Ed's boots slapped against rain-slick cobblestones as he sprinted through the narrow alley behind the tavern.
The night air tasted sharp—wet stone, distant cook-fires, the faint rot of the river that cut through the lower city. Lanterns flickered in upper windows like sleepy eyes, but the streets below were empty. Good. No witnesses.
His lungs burned, not from exertion—he'd run farther distances carrying twice his weight in supplies—but from the wild, giddy pressure building behind his ribs. Every step felt lighter than the last, as though gravity itself were loosening its grip.
Eight seconds remaining.
The voice in his head was precise, unhurried, the same calm monotone that had counted down in a hundred different languages across a hundred different skies.
Ed almost laughed aloud. After all this time, the countdown still sounded faintly amused.
He rounded the final corner. The old bell tower rose ahead—crooked, moss-eaten, abandoned since the last siege twenty years ago. Its single arched doorway gaped like an open mouth.
Ed ducked inside without slowing, boots skidding on centuries of pigeon droppings and leaf litter.
Darkness swallowed him. The only light came from a narrow slit high in the wall, a pale silver rectangle that barely reached the floor. He pressed his back against cold stone, chest heaving, and closed his eyes.
Three… two… one.
Zero.
The world didn't explode. It simply… dissolved.
A soft white radiance bloomed behind his eyelids, warm and strangely familiar, like stepping into sunlight after years underground.
His body felt weightless for a heartbeat—then heavy again, as though gravity had remembered its job.
When he opened his eyes, the bell tower was gone.
He stood on a perfect mirror of water that stretched in every direction. The surface didn't ripple under his boots; it held him like polished glass.
Above, an endless dome of soft, pearlescent light replaced the sky—no sun, no stars, only a gentle, sourceless glow that made long shadows impossible. The air tasted clean, faintly sweet, like the moment after rain when everything feels new.
Countless doors stood in neat rows across the infinite plane. They came in every size and style imaginable: simple oak planks, carved rosewood arches, iron-bound portcullises, delicate paper screens, even one that looked carved from living bone. Each bore a small brass plate etched with a number.
Ed exhaled slowly. His shoulders dropped.
The practiced tension he'd carried for a year and a half—the constant small adjustments to seem harmless, useful, forgettable—finally bled away.
"I can't believe it took a full year this time," he muttered. "Longer than expected. I'm exhausted."
He rolled his neck until it cracked, then looked toward the center of the space.
A plain wooden table waited exactly where he remembered it, the only piece of furniture in this endless nothing. On it sat the same pure-white book, its cover unmarked, and the same faceted crystal that looked like frozen starlight.
Ed walked toward it. Each step sent faint ripples across the water-floor that vanished the instant his boot lifted.
"Damn deity," he said conversationally.
"You really dragged this one out. A whole year of playing the useless porter just so you could meet your arbitrary conditions. Happy now?"
Silence answered. The same perfect, maddening silence he'd received every time he returned here for the last century.
Ed stopped at the table and rested both palms on its edge. The wood felt warm, alive, as though it remembered every hand that had ever touched it.
"I've done it," he said.
"One hundred worlds. One hundred heroes. One hundred expulsions. Every single condition you wrote in that ridiculous guide has been met. So how about it? Time to fulfill your end of the bargain. Let me go home already."
Still nothing.
He laughed once—a short, tired sound—and straightened.
"Yeah. Thought so."
His gaze drifted across the rows of doors. Most of them were dark, their brass plates dull. A few still glowed with faint golden light—the ones he hadn't yet opened, the ones that waited for the next cycle that would never come.
Never again.
He turned back to the table. The crystal pulsed once, slow and deliberate, like a heartbeat.
Ed raised an eyebrow.
"Oh? A reward after all? Generous of you."
He placed his right hand on the crystal's surface. It was warm, almost feverish. A current of something bright and electric raced up his arm, into his chest, then straight to the base of his skull. Colors he had no names for flickered behind his eyes. Knowledge poured in—not words, not images, but pure understanding.
When it finished, Ed staggered back a step, blinking hard.
"Seriously?" he muttered.
"Another absurd ability… but this one's single-use. And the effect…"
He trailed off, staring at his open palm as though he could see the power coiled inside it.
"This is the kind of thing you save until the very last moment, isn't it?"
He looked up.
In the far distance—impossibly far, yet somehow close enough to read—the space wavered.
A new door had appeared, standing alone in the opposite direction from all the others. Its number was simple, stark, etched deeper than the rest.
0.
Ed's breath caught.
He took one step toward it, then another. The water-floor carried him forward without resistance.
When he reached the door he stopped, staring at the brass plate as though it might vanish if he blinked.
"Zero-zero-zero…" he whispered.
"The beginning. My original world."
A hundred years of carefully buried longing surged up at once—sharp enough to cut.
Faces flashed behind his eyes: his mother's tired smile when she handed him lunch before school, the way his best friend used to elbow him and laugh too loud at bad jokes, the smell of rain on concrete outside the apartment block.
Then reality intruded.
"Wait," he said aloud.
"Time flows normally in every world I visited. If I spent a century out there… then a century passed here too. Everyone I knew—they'd be gone. Dead. Forgotten."
His hand hovered over the handle.
The crystal on the table pulsed again—brighter this time, almost impatient.
Ed turned slowly.
"You're really going to make me read another damn book, aren't you?"
As if in answer, a slim white volume fell from nowhere and landed on the table with a soft slap.
Ed sighed, walked back, and picked it up.
He opened it to the first page.
The number marked on each door indicates how much time has passed in that world since your departure.
He flipped to the last page. A single line waited there, written in crisp black ink:
World 0000 – Elapsed time: 0 years, 0 months, 0 days.
Ed stared at the numbers until they blurred.
He looked back at the door.
"If I open that… I go back to the exact moment I was taken. The same day. The same hour. Nothing changed."
His knees felt weak.
He laughed again—this time soft, shaky, almost disbelieving.
Then he reached for the handle.
It didn't move.
He frowned, tugged harder. Nothing.
Another book fell from the sky, landing beside the first with a louder smack.
Ed glared upward.
"Seriously? Another one?"
He opened it reluctantly.
A small silver key lay inside, nestled in black velvet.
Tucked beside it was a folded note written in the same elegant hand:
Complete Exile Commemoration
Using this key, you may open any door you have previously visited and return here afterward. The key will vanish upon use, and the door to World 0000 will open.
Why not visit one last world? Witness its conclusion with your own eyes.
Ed read the note twice.
Then he laughed—longer this time, bitter and exhausted and strangely fond.
"You won't even let me quit clean, will you?" he said to the empty air.
"Fine. One last sightseeing trip. Then I'm done."
His gaze drifted across the rows of doors until it settled on the very first one he had ever opened. Its number was 001. The wood was plain pine, already beginning to silver with age.
He remembered stepping through it a lifetime ago—clueless, terrified, barely stronger than a village guard, armed with nothing but a ridiculous skill called Inevitable Accident that had dragged him straight into a hero's party he had no business joining.
A lot had happened behind that door.
Ten years, by the world's reckoning.
Ed slipped the silver key into his pocket.
"Alright," he murmured.
"Let's go see what kind of peace they built without me."
He walked to door 001, rested his palm against the wood, and pushed.
Light swallowed him whole.