When I came to, I was heralded by slow, deliberate applause.

  Clap. Clap. Clap.

  The sound echoed, sharp against the air, like it was bouncing off walls I couldn’t see. It wasn’t cheerful. It wasn’t mocking, either. It felt... resigned. Like a man who’d been expecting something terrible for a long time and finally saw it arrive.

  “Of course my son would be the one to activate it,” came a voice I knew too well. Gravel and silk. Measured but tired. There was a weight behind it that only came from a man who’d carried something too heavy for too long.

  I didn’t need to look to confirm who it was. I had heard his voice for days now—dripping through my dreams, laced between memories that weren’t mine. I had memorized the rhythm of it. The way it rose and fell like a breath half-held. The bitterness tucked beneath forced composure. I knew that voice.

  My father.

  “Well,” he continued, stepping forward from the vague horizon, “I suppose I should take the opportunity for a little father-son bonding, shouldn’t I?”

  I stared at him. At the man who had vanished from my life and somehow decided now was the time to make an entrance.

  “Dad,” I said, my throat dry and voice low. “I’m going to be very blunt here. What. The. Fuck.”

  He paused. Gave a single nod, like that was the only appropriate reaction. “Fair.”

  There was a flicker of a smile on his face. Not warm. Not cruel. Just... tired.

  “I’d say I’ve missed you, but it’s more complicated than that.” He gestured around us vaguely, but the space didn’t cooperate. The world here wasn’t fully formed. A foggy suggestion of place rather than a real one. A flat ground with no texture. A sky that didn’t commit to color. As if reality hadn’t decided what this was supposed to be.

  “You activated the stone,” he said. “That marble. You touched it, and it woke up.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I thought it might be you,” he said, almost to himself. “You always had that pull in your blood. It runs in the family. Not just the interest in stones, but something beneath it. That itch behind your eyes when you look too long at things you don’t understand.”

  He took a slow breath, as if remembering something that hurt to recall. “I tried to hide it. Thought if I left it buried, no one else would follow. But I should have known better. The things we bury don’t stay buried. Not in this family.”

  I turned in a slow circle, taking in the strange, shifting nothingness that surrounded us. “Where are we?”

  He hesitated. “That’s... difficult. You could call it a memory. Or a crossroads. Maybe even a curse. It changes, depending on what you bring with you.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “No,” he agreed. “But it’s the best I can give you.”

  I looked at him closely. He looked older than he had in the memories. Not just aged, but worn down. Hollowed out by something. There was gray in his beard, tension in his shoulders. A sadness he wasn’t even bothering to mask anymore.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” I said. “The dreams, the voices, the way I’ve been living your life like it was mine. Why now? Why me?”

  “Because it had to be someone,” he said simply. “And I wasn’t strong enough to finish it.”

  “Finish what?”

  He looked me dead in the eye.

  “What I started.”

  The silence that followed felt like it pressed in from every side.

  “Past here…” my father continued, his eyes never leaving the rippling doorway behind him, “is a world unlike anything you've known. Your mother is from that world.”

  WHAT.

  My brain screamed it before I could even breathe, a hot panic rising like steam under my skin. The hell did he just say?

  He raised a hand gently, the gesture more weary than commanding. “Before you interrupt, let me finish,” he said with a sigh that sagged his whole body. “You deserve at least that.”

  I bit my tongue. Literally. The copper taste grounded me just enough to stop from blurting every wild thought clawing to the surface.

  “We both were preparing you,” he said, voice gentler now. “In our own ways. Your mother... more directly. Me... well. I had hoped I’d have more time. But fate doesn’t exactly ask for permission.”

  He gestured to my left hand. “The Dia-dron—the opal, the one that embedded itself? That’s not just a relic. It’s an inheritance. It's marked with hundreds—thousands—of runes from both of our bloodlines. You’ll be gaining not just my abilities, but hers too. Our families go back generations in both realms. You’re the convergence point. The culmination.”

  I stared at the stone in my palm. It pulsed faintly with shifting colors, like an oil slick under water. I had never really understood it. I’d just... carried it. It had always felt important. Now it felt alive.

  He took a slow step toward me. “Son, this is where I tell you I’m both the proudest father I could ever be... and completely, utterly terrified.”

  There was real fear in his voice. Not the kind I’d seen when he yelled, or when he fought. This was something deeper. Vulnerable. Human.

  “You have to take up the mantle now.”

  My mouth was already open. “What mantle? What did you start?! What was that briefcase way back when?! There’s thousands of questions I need to ask you!”

  He just shook his head.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  It wasn’t dismissive. It wasn’t avoidance.

  It was regret.

  “I can’t really answer any of them,” he said. “Besides, you’ll likely get your answers in time. Not all at once. Not in a nice, tidy scroll with a ribbon on it. This isn’t a quest log, Morgan. This is the real thing. And real things come in pieces.”

  He looked directly at me then, eyes sharp like cracked glass.

  “Let me be frank. How many times did you read a novel where someone is transported into a different realm to be the hero?”

  I hesitated. “Too many.”

  “How many incantations did your mother force you to memorize as a kid? Little songs, rhymes, gestures she made you repeat?”

  I blinked. “Dozens.”

  He stepped closer. “What’s the chemical compound of cyanide?”

  “What?” I blinked again, harder. “CN?. One carbon, one nitrogen. Toxic as hell.”

  He nodded, just once. “You never questioned why you needed to know that at age ten, did you?”

  I stopped. Dead still. And then... it registered.

  Holy shit.

  I had always assumed my childhood was just quirky. My mom made me practice lines like a play—only they weren’t plays, they were spells. She made me trace patterns in salt, sing songs in dead languages, and answer bizarre questions about poisons and minerals and shadow structures like it was bedtime trivia.

  And I had just done it. Because it was normal to me.

  Because they never told me it wasn’t.

  “You weren’t raising me,” I said slowly, the words forming as I spoke them. “You were training me.”

  He nodded, quieter this time. “Preparing. The world you’re going into... it doesn’t play fair. It doesn’t wait. It doesn’t hold your hand.”

  I looked past him toward the threshold, that ever-shifting, light-dripping shape that pulsed like a heartbeat. “What is it like? That world?”

  He smiled again, just barely.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. “And brutal. Think of all the myths you’ve read. The strange creatures. The impossible landscapes. Magic that feels more alive than gravity. Now remember that it’s not fiction. That it never was.”

  My pulse raced. My chest felt too tight.

  “What happens if I don’t go?” I asked. “What if I walk away?”

  He met my eyes and said, without hesitation, “Then it falls.”

  Silence again.

  He let the weight of it settle.

  “The gate’s been opened,” he said. “You stepping through won’t just answer questions. It’ll stop something. Or at least delay it. Something ancient is stirring on the other side, Morgan. And you... you were always meant to be the counterweight.”

  I didn’t like that word.

  “Meant?”

  He nodded. “Born for it.”

  I exhaled shakily. “So I’m the chosen one.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Not quite. You’re just... the one who’s here. And sometimes, that’s all destiny needs.”

  I looked down at my hand again. The opal’s light was brighter now. Pulsing in time with something. My heartbeat. Or maybe something else.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready,” I admitted.

  “No one ever is.”

  He placed a hand on my shoulder. It was warm, and heavy, and grounding in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a kid.

  “You’re not alone. Not really. Not ever.”

  The marble at my feet began to glow again, brilliant and blinding. The gateway roared.

  “Dad—what happens now?”

  He smiled, and for the first time, it felt real.

  “Now, you step through.”

  And I did.

  The world ripped away in color.

  And I fell forward, inward, into something far older than time and far greater than fear.

  ***

  “A guest of honor. Of Trial. Tradition.

  Force of reckoning. Of skill. Of sedition.

  Coming to me from beyond the shore.

  Coming to me from far before.”

  My eyes opened.

  I woke in a field made of clouds — literal clouds — soft and weightless beneath my back, shifting like breath. Flowers sprouted through the vapor as if it were fertile soil: blossoms of glass, blossoms of fire, blossoms that changed color with each blink. Their pollen drifted upward instead of down, glittering like gold dust suspended on currents that didn’t touch my skin.

  “He comes to me from a guest I know.

  Lost to time, far below.

  He graces me, another guest.

  He graces me, one to finish his quest.”

  I pushed myself upright, trying to steady my breathing as reality around me flickered like a half-remembered dream. Everything felt too vivid, too deliberate.

  Then I saw the throne.

  It rose from the cloud-field as if the sky were sculpting it in real time: gold shaped from roses, vines, drifting cloudstuff, and floating puzzle pieces that clicked softly into new patterns whenever I wasn’t looking directly at them. The throne didn’t seem made — it seemed imagined.

  And sitting atop it was a figure.

  Not human. Not inhuman. Something threshold-born.

  “Honored guest, I bear the name Thorn.

  From seas of clouds, I was born.

  Young though I seem, ancient I be.

  I must speak in rhyme so you hear truth from me.”

  “It pains me deeply, yet I must ask

  A child so young to bear this task.

  This world’s fate rests on yonder

  Please, give what I say a ponder.”

  “I… I take it you’re what my father meant when he said he had something unfinished?”

  Thorn tilted his head — the motion almost birdlike, almost ancient.

  “Negative. Correct. All the same.

  The rules aren’t written for this game.

  The world is ending, this is true.

  The world’s savior need not be you.

  You were selected by birth, by fate.

  You have all reasons to be irate.

  Stricken by grief, world cracked by a lie—

  It’s only fair you now ask why.”

  His words rolled like smoke, each rhyme shaping the air, bending it slightly around us.

  “His task was the same, the one given to thee,

  Yet his burden was not bestowed by me.

  Details I cannot give, though I long for release…

  But I must continue, ere my presence here begins to cease.”

  The cloud-field trembled at that line, as if his existence truly was thinning at the edges.

  Thorn raised a hand — or something like one — and my skin prickled.

  “Your back lies bare, engraved with a wish.

  Ink to skin, a sigil wrought, heaven’s dish.

  It binds you to me, to us, to all—

  Lets you stand in realms that rise or fall.

  It lets you speak to me, to us, to every soul here.

  It lets you voice your anguish to all you hold dear.”

  A warm pressure spread across my shoulder blades — not painful, but heavy, like something ancient was acknowledging itself inside me.

  Thorn lowered his hand. In the next instant, he was behind me—no movement, no transition, just there. His touch settled between my shoulders, light as breath.

  Then something drove into my back.

  White-hot pain flared, sudden and absolute. My knees buckled. The cloud-field lurched sideways.

  And the darkness swallowed me all over again.