Lucien's POV
The first time it happened, I thought I was dreaming.
I'd fallen asleep on the second floor, near the window where the dust danced most clearly in the morning light. My back against the wall. One foot still in the hallway.
It was late.
Too late to be thinking, too early to be resting.
I closed my eyes for a second—
And when I opened them, the room was different.
Not gone. Not distorted.
Just unoccupied.
The dust was frozen midair. The creaking of old wood stopped. The quiet ambient hum of the night disappeared. Araragi's sleeping breath—gone. Kiss-shot's presence—gone.
Even the light felt... paused.
Like the entire world had taken one long, impossible breath and forgotten to exhale.
I stood up slowly, and the floor didn't protest.
I spoke—just to see.
"Hello?"
My voice didn't echo.
It didn't go anywhere.
It simply was, and then it wasn't.
I walked through the hallway. Every step felt like stepping between two panes of glass that refused to shatter. I passed the room where Kiss-shot had been—empty. The couch still held the dent of her weight, but nothing else.
Not gone. Not erased.
Just… waiting.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and stared at the door.
It didn't feel like a door anymore.
It felt like a choice.
Something inside me twitched. Not pain. Not fear.
Something older.
Instinct.
I stepped through the doorway.
And the world bent.
Not in a violent way. Not in the cinematic, stomach-turning way you expect when people cross dimensions in comic books or anime.
It felt like exhaling into a cooler room.
Like blinking too slowly and opening your eyes in a mirror you don't remember walking past.
I wasn't in the cram school anymore.
I wasn't sure where I was.
The sky above me was violet. Deep, storm-cloud purple with no sun or moon. Just a ceiling of shifting color, like the world had been rendered with memory instead of light.
The ground beneath me was solid, but undefined. Blacktop? Sand? Wood?
I was standing in a space that remembered being places, but no longer committed to any of them.
It was familiar.
Not in content—nothing I recognized.
But in sensation.
It felt like the moments before I woke up in this world.
The alleyway. The silence. The way reality had bent and let me in.
This was that moment again—just stretched wider.
I wasn't dreaming.
I wasn't hallucinating.
I was in-between.
I looked down at my hands.
Still solid.
Still mine.
But the air around them shimmered faintly. Like heat. Like static. Like every atom of me knew it wasn't quite in sync with the world.
And then a thought occurred to me.
A question, simple and sharp:
"What happens to time when I leave it behind?"
The world didn't answer.
But it didn't need to.
I already knew.
This was the rule.
Time stands still in the world I leave.
Because whatever this ability was—whatever this strange space was—it broke the script.
And the script refused to keep playing if one of the actors walked off stage.
I stepped forward, just once.
The violet sky cracked like glass—faintly. A spiderweb ripple spread across it.
And in that ripple, I saw something.
Not clearly. Not yet.
But enough.
A face I didn't recognize. A place I hadn't been. A version of something familiar—but not mine.
Another reality?
Another possible?
Then the pressure pulled.
Like gravity in reverse.
And I fell backward—
Back through the doorway—
Back into the silence of the cram school.
The dust moved again.
The sounds returned.
A breeze stirred the curtain.
Kiss-shot's voice floated from the next room, casual and sharp:
"You were gone."
I walked in slowly.
"Was I?"
She looked up at me.
Not smiling. Not smirking.
Studying.
"You were."
I didn't ask how she knew.
I didn't have to.