The night before the worlds touched, the camp felt wrong.
The wards along the ridge should have hummed with the usual low pulse of contained magic.Instead they sang—high, fragile, beautiful. Too beautiful.A song stretched so thin it might snap.
Arjun tried to ignore it.He told himself he was only tired, that the river's reversed current and the strange new star were coincidences of mana flow.But when he reached for the nearest ward-stone, it flared red, then blue, then clear, and in that clear moment he saw another sky burning through it—his old one.
A city. Windows.Someone standing behind one of them, hand raised.
Her.
He didn't know her name yet, only the impression of a woman's eyes—dark, fierce, terrified—and the shimmer of a child's blanket behind her.
He had seen soldiers look at him like that before a battle: half pleading, half accusing, certain he could fix the unfixable.But this gaze was closer. It reached through him.
He stumbled backward, choking on air that had turned too thin. The ward-stone pulsed again, the vision sharpening until he could see his own reflection overlapping hers.
Two silhouettes divided by a plane of glass.
And then the glass moved.
Light tore the world open.Not a rift this time—an alignment.
Every rune he had ever drawn lit at once, their threads rising from the ground like roots seeking a sky that wasn't there.The storm he'd been holding back for weeks finally broke, bursting upward through his chest in a roar of wind and light.
He felt his body dissolve—nerve by nerve, memory by memory—until what remained was awareness tethered by one impossible cord.
Through it, he heard her voice.Low, steady, frightened."Stay away."
He wanted to obey. He tried. But the current dragged him closer.
"Maya," he said without knowing how he knew her name.And when she whispered Arjun, it wasn't an answer; it was recognition.
The glass appeared again—though here, it wasn't glass but the thin, shimmering skin of the world itself.He lifted his hand, pressed it against the barrier. It yielded like warm water.
Her touch met his.Two pulses, one beat.
Then came the flood.
He saw her life pour into him in flashes—crowded buses, the weight of a child's feverish body, the smell of detergent and exhaustion.And beneath it all, a hunger that matched his own: to be seen, to matter.
It hurt more than any wound he had taken in battle.
He realized, suddenly, that the thing pulling them together wasn't magic or chance.It was recognition—two broken halves of the same wish, answering each other across creation.
He felt her begin to fall away."Stop," she cried, "I'll tear apart if I go further!"
"Then let me anchor you," he said, though he wasn't sure he could. He tried to give her stability, shaping the magic into a loop instead of a bridge. It worked for a breath, maybe two.
When the light cleared, he was kneeling on stone, his palms smoking from contact with whatever the barrier had become.The wards had gone silent.
In the reflection of the river, he saw not the stars of his world but a single pale sun rising over hers.
"Arjun?"
The voice was still faint, echoing in the air around him.
"I'm here," he whispered. "I closed it. For now."
The wind carried her reply—soft, barely audible—What do you want me to do?
"Remember," he said. "So the world doesn't forget either of us."
Then the current vanished.
He stayed kneeling until dawn turned the tents silver.His hands shook. Every muscle ached as if he'd been remade.When he looked down, the skin of his palms was marked with faint, crystalline lines—delicate, glass-like fractures that caught the light.
The general found him there. "You were gone for hours," she said quietly. "The wards dimmed. The men thought the sky had swallowed you."
"Not yet," Arjun murmured.
She frowned. "You look… different."
"I saw the other side," he said. "And it saw me."
That night, when he finally allowed himself to sleep, he dreamed of a small boy's laughter and the smell of warm cereal.For the first time since crossing over, he wept.
Because he realized what the connection had cost:the walls between their worlds were no longer holding, and the magic that sustained his realm was now braided with the heartbeat of a woman and a child who had never asked for it.
And somewhere in the silence between dreams, he felt her whisper his name again.
It no longer sounded like recognition.It sounded like warning.