The camp smelled of lightning.
Ash drifted in lazy spirals over the ridge where the containment circle had scorched the earth. Every tent within twenty paces had melted at the seams; the ward-stones were black glass now, smoking faintly.
No one approached him for a long time.
When they finally did, it wasn't reverence that guided their steps—it was fear.
The general came first.Her armor was unbuckled, hair undone, face streaked with soot. She stopped several yards away."Arathen," she said, voice hoarse, "tell me what we just survived."
Arjun turned toward her. The movement was wrong—too fluid, like the air resisted him a heartbeat too late."Not survived," he answered. "Paused."
She looked past him at the shattered wards."You've lost control of it."
"I never had control," he said quietly. "I only borrowed it."
Something in the phrasing made her flinch. "From whom?"
He didn't answer.
By midday, rumors had already infected the camp.
Some whispered that the Archmage's soul had split in half—that he was speaking with ghosts, or gods, or both.Others said they'd seen him glowing in the storm, his shadow bending the wrong way.
When Arjun walked among the tents, soldiers stepped aside, saluting out of habit but averting their eyes. Children of the quartermasters peeked from behind supply crates, whispering charms for protection.
He couldn't blame them. His reflection in their armor looked half-transparent.
Inside his tent, the mirror told the truth.
The crystalline cracks along his hands had spread to his wrists and neck, faint veins of light under the skin. His pulse no longer kept a human rhythm—it followed the slow, steady beat he could feel beneath the world itself.
He pressed a finger to his throat, searching for panic, for any trace of the man who had once sat in a fluorescent-lit dorm room.Nothing.Only stillness.
You wanted belonging, he told his reflection. Now you belong to everything.
The general returned at dusk with three elders from the war council.They stood in a line outside his tent, unwilling to enter.
One of them, an old scholar whose beard reached his belt, bowed stiffly. "Lord Archmage," he said, "the council asks a simple question. Are you still one of us?"
Arjun met his gaze. The question should have insulted him. Instead it relieved him; at least someone had said it aloud.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I'm still fighting for you."
The scholar's eyes narrowed. "And if the thing you've become decides we are the wrong world to save?"
No answer came.
The general broke the silence. "We owe him our lives. That has not changed."
The scholar shook his head. "Oaths mean little when the gods start speaking through mortal mouths."
They left before the sun fully set. The general lingered, torn between duty and superstition.
"Whatever happens next," she said, "you can't stand alone against both worlds."
"I already am," he said.
When darkness fell, he tried again to summon the smallest spell—a globe of light to read by.Nothing came.
Instead, the air shimmered.For a heartbeat, he saw the outline of a kitchen window, a woman's silhouette beyond it, and the faintest shape of a child sleeping nearby.
He reached out, fingers trembling. "Maya…"
The image vanished.
Outside, the soldiers began to sing the old war hymn—low, mournful, full of distance. It was a song for heroes who died standing, bodies turned to salt by divine fire.
Arjun listened, realizing with bitter clarity that this was how they had already begun to remember him:not as a man who lived, but as a story the world would soon file under miracles and warnings.
He stepped out into the night.
Above the ruined wards, the sky burned with two overlapping constellations—his world's and hers—shimmering together like mismatched eyes.
He whispered a single promise to the horizon:"I'll find the seam again. I'll fix it before it chooses for us."
The wind answered with the crackle of distant glass.