The shift had been brutal.
Selarion's boots scraped against the cracked pavement as he trudged home, each step heavier than the last. His back ached. His hands were raw. His mind had long since stopped producing thoughts worth keeping — it was running on nothing but the single promise of a mattress and silence.
He didn't even notice when his feet carried him into that place.
Not until the chill hit him.
It crept up from somewhere beneath the ground, sliding along his spine like a cold finger tracing each vertebra one by one. Selarion slowed. His exhausted eyes scanned the narrow stretch of road ahead — the broken streetlight, the crumbling wall to his left, the dark patch of earth where the police tape had been ripped down weeks ago.
Right. This place.
Last month, this unremarkable stretch of ground had become the most talked about spot in the city. Three bodies. Found within days of each other.
The first — no head. Just gone. Clean, some said. Too clean.
The second — both arms, both legs removed. The torso left behind like something discarded after the useful parts had been taken.
The third... Selarion's jaw tightened at the memory of the news report. He hadn't even finished reading it. Someone — or something — had opened that person up and taken everything inside. Every organ. Every piece of the body that made a human being function. Left behind was something that looked less like a person and more like an emptied bag of skin.
The rumors spread fast after that.
Black magic. People whispered it at bus stops and across dinner tables. Sacrificial rituals. Dark summoning. Ancient evil hungry after centuries of sleep.
Selarion exhaled slowly through his nose.
Black magic.
Ridiculous.
He wasn't a superstitious man. He was a tired man who worked twelve-hour shifts and paid his taxes and wanted nothing more from this world than a hot meal and eight hours of unconsciousness. Magic wasn't real. Evil men did evil things — that was the only explanation the world had ever needed.
Go home, Selarion. Just go home.
He picked up his pace.
That was when he saw it.
A glow.
Faint. Pale. Sitting right in the center of that dark patch of earth where the bodies had been found — where the soil had been dug up and photographed and pored over by investigators who ultimately found nothing useful. The glow pulsed slowly, almost like breathing.
Selarion stopped walking.
Every rational thought in his head lined up immediately and delivered the same verdict: turn around, go home, this is not your problem.
He turned around.
He took three steps.
Then he stopped again.
What is that?
The question lodged itself in his brain and refused to leave. He stood there in the dark, facing away from the glow, feeling it at his back like a second pair of eyes watching him. His hands balled into fists at his sides. His exhaustion, somehow, had evaporated entirely — replaced by something he hadn't felt in years.
Curiosity. The dangerous kind.
If you go look at it, he told himself, you are an idiot.
He turned back around.
I am an idiot, he confirmed, and walked toward the light.
Up close, it was worse.
Or rather — more. It was more than he expected. What he had assumed was a simple glow turned out to be a circle etched into the earth, geometric and deliberate, its lines running in patterns too precise to be natural. It spanned nearly two meters across. Someone had made this. Someone had spent real time and real effort carving this into the ground.
The circle was divided.
One half swallowed all light — a darkness so deep it seemed to pull at Selarion's eyes, like looking into something that looked back. Not the darkness of night or shadow. Something older. Something with intention.
The other half was red.
Deeply, viscerally red. The color of something that had recently been alive.
Selarion crouched slowly, squinting. The lines on the red side weren't carved. They were written. Characters and symbols he didn't recognize — didn't belong to any language he had ever seen — but the medium they were written in made his stomach drop completely.
Fresh blood.
Still glistening. Still wet.
Okay, he thought, very calmly. I am leaving now.
He stood up.
The circle moved.
The dark half rippled like disturbed water and from it — rising slowly, deliberately, like fingers uncurling from a fist — came shadows. Not cast by anything. Not attached to any shape. They moved on their own, stretching upward, reaching, twisting around each other with horrible patience.
Tentacles of pure darkness.
Selarion ran.
He got three steps before one of them wrapped around his ankle. The grip was absolute — not painful, not cold, just total. Like being held by something that did not understand that letting go was an option.
He hit the ground. Clawed at the dirt. Screamed something — he didn't even know what. Behind him, he heard the circle change. The hum of it shifted from something low and felt in the chest to something that pressed against the inside of his skull.
He looked back.
The circle was gone.
In its place was a hole. Not dug into the earth — torn into existence itself. Black at its edges and blacker at its center, spinning slowly, consuming the light around it like a drain consuming water.
The shadows pulled him toward it.
Selarion's fingers found nothing to hold. The ground offered no resistance. The world offered no resistance.
And then the hole swallowed him whole — and the world he had always known ceased to exist entirely.
There was nothing.
Not darkness the way a room is dark when the lights go out. Not emptiness the way a field is empty when no one stands in it. This was a different category of nothing — the kind that sat behind the universe before anything was decided. The void that existed before the first question was asked.
Selarion floated in it.
No hunger. No thirst. No weight in his limbs or ache in his back. The exhaustion he had carried home from work — gone. His body felt like it had been stripped of every complaint it had ever filed. For a single, irrational moment, he thought: this is actually kind of nice.
Then a second passed.
Then another.
Then what felt like a day.
Then what felt like a week.
The nothing didn't change. It had no interest in changing. It simply was — vast and patient and utterly indifferent to the small, confused human floating somewhere inside it.
Selarion's thoughts began to fray at the edges.
He couldn't tell if he was sleeping or waking. Couldn't tell if time was moving or if the concept of time had simply stopped applying to him. He tried to speak and heard nothing — not even his own voice. He tried to move and felt no resistance — not because he moved freely, but because there was nowhere to move to.
It felt like heaven.
It felt like hell.
The line between the two, he was discovering, was thinner than he had ever imagined — and it was called stimulation. Without it, the human mind did not rest. It unraveled.
He felt himself starting to drift. Not physically. The other kind of drifting. The kind that ended with a person who no longer remembered their own name or why it had ever mattered.
No.
The word arrived with surprising force.
No. I am Selarion. I had a job. I was walking home. I am not going to lose myself in the dark.
He started counting.
One second. Two seconds. Three.
It was the only anchor available to him and he seized it with both hands and held on. He counted seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days. He lost count and started over. He lost count again and started over again. He wept at some point — or tried to, though he wasn't certain tears worked here. He raged at some point. Then the rage passed, and the grief passed, and what remained was something quieter and harder.
Endurance.
Pure, stupid, human endurance.
He counted.
And counted.
And counted.
Until the number in his head reached three billion, one hundred and fifty-three million, six hundred thousand.
3,153,600,000 seconds.
One hundred years.
The light appeared without warning.
A pinprick of it, impossibly far away — or perhaps impossibly small, it was impossible to tell the difference here. But it was there. Real and warm and entirely out of place in all this nothing.
Selarion moved toward it. He didn't know how. He simply wanted toward it and the wanting was enough.
It grew as he approached. Or he grew as he approached it. Same result either way.
When he reached out and touched it —
The nothing ended.
He hit the water hard.
Cold shocked through him like a second set of bones made of ice, and for a full second his body forgot everything it had ever learned about surviving and simply panicked. Then instinct took over — arms pulling, legs kicking, lungs screaming — and he fought his way upward until his head broke the surface and the sky — the actual sky, real and grey and full of clouds — pressed down on him from above.
He swam.
It took everything he had left. His muscles had no memory of the last hundred years — they operated on the body's most recent recollection, which was a twelve-hour shift and a long walk home. They were not prepared for an ocean.
But he reached the shore.
He dragged himself onto the bank and lay there for a long time, chest heaving, fingers dug into actual solid earth that smelled like soil and salt and something floral he couldn't name. He stayed there until the trembling stopped. Then he sat up, stripped off his outer layer, and spread it across a rock to dry in the pale, grey sunlight.
Then he looked around.
The shoreline curved away from him in both directions. Behind it, a town — small, dense, the buildings pressing close together with a particular kind of architecture that Selarion had only ever seen in history books and period films. Stone facades. Steep pitched roofs. Gas lamps — actual gas lamps — lining a cobbled street that wound upward toward a cluster of taller buildings at the town's center.
Victorian. Unmistakably Victorian.
Alright, Selarion thought slowly. Alright. That's... fine. That's a thing that is happening.
He looked down at the water, then back at the town.
Then, because there was nothing else to do, he did the math he had been quietly dreading since the moment he touched that light.
3,153,600,000 seconds.
One hundred years.
He had been suspended in that darkness for one hundred years.
The world he had left behind — his apartment, his job, the cracked pavement, the broken streetlight, the city that had been ordinary and unremarkable and his — was a century gone.
Selarion sat on the bank of an unknown shore in what appeared to be the wrong era, wearing wet clothes, with no money, no identification, no allies, and no explanation.
He took a long, slow breath.
Okay, he thought. One problem at a time.