No—not just darkness. The complete absence of everything. My eyes were open—I could feel myself blinking—but there was nothing. No light. No shadows. Just void pressing against my eyeballs like physical weight. The first coherent thought that punched through the fog was: Where the fuck am I?
The second was: Why am I naked?
Survival first, existential crisis later.
I pushed myself up slowly, every muscle tensed for... what? Attack? Pain? My palms pressed against something smooth and cold—marble, maybe?—that sucked the warmth from my skin like ice. The chill crept up my arms, making damn sure I knew this wasn't some vivid dream brought on by too many late-night shifts at Dim Sum & Then Some.
Think, Ben. Last memory. Go.
Keys jangling. The satisfying click of restaurant locks. Eighteen hours of slinging dumplings and dodging Karen's complaints about the "authenticity" of our cheung fun. Did I pass out in the parking lot again? Dammit, I really needed to stop using my steering wheel as a pillow. But this wasn't my Honda's cracked leather seats beneath me.
Blue light erupted overhead like reality had thrown a rave.
"What the—"
The words died in my throat as fractal patterns began swirling above me, outlining a massive dome that curved down to meet the floor. I was trapped inside some kind of cosmic snow globe designed by a mathematician. The patterns shifted and danced, hypnotic in their complexity, beautiful in a way that made my head hurt.
"Alien abduction dream," I muttered, stumbling to my feet. My voice echoed strangely, bouncing off invisible walls. "Has to be. Though usually the aliens have the decency to leave me with pants."
It could be the government interrogation dreams too, but there were no suited assholes interrogating me about the secret ingredient in my cinnamon buns (it's cardamom). And those dreams always came with clothes, terrible fluorescent lighting, and at least one guy who looked like he'd stepped out of a Men in Black movie.
This was... different.
The blue patterns shifted, and I couldn't look away. Blue bled into brilliant white, white melted into warm yellow, yellow exploded into radiant gold. The colors converged with mathematical precision, forming something so impossibly complex that my brain basically threw up its hands and said nope.
A symbol blazed against the void—white-hot, searing, alive. It lasted maybe a heartbeat, but in that heartbeat, my mind was flooded with concepts that shouldn't fit inside a human skull:
- Sunlight streaming through a magnifying glass, concentrating into a pinprick of liquid heat.
- A dying star's final, defiant scream as it went supernova, turning darkness into day across light-years.
- The moment of revelation when everything you thought you knew gets obliterated by blinding truth.
Light.
Not just light—Light with a capital L that deserved its own postal code. Every photon that had ever existed or would exist, condensed into a single rune that my meat-brain was desperately trying to process without melting.
The symbol vanished, and I hit the floor hard enough to rattle my teeth. My knees cracked against the floor as spots danced behind my eyelids. My eyes burned like I’d been staring directly at the sun.
"Okay," I gasped, pressing my palms against my eyes. "Either I'm having an elaborate stroke, or I just downloaded the concept of light directly into my brain. Neither option seems great."
Through the pain and confusion, one thing was crystal clear—this wasn't a dream. Dreams didn't come with full sensory packages or make your retinas feel like someone had used them as a welding surface. Dreams definitely didn't implant the complete understanding of electromagnetic radiation into your consciousness like a cosmic Wiki download.
Above me, a spotlight blazed to life at the dome's apex. Pure white, cold and clinical. It should have been blinding, but I stared straight into it without flinching. And somehow, don't ask me how, I knew I could change it.
The knowledge sat in my brain like it had always been there, as natural as knowing how to breathe. This light could be any color I wanted. Warm yellow would be so much easier on my already-abused retinas.
The light shifted to yellow.
My breath caught. Not because it changed—somehow I'd known it would—but because of how instantly my thought became reality. No delay, no effort, no complicated hand gestures or magic words. Just pure intention made manifest.
"What the fuck?" I whispered, watching the light shift through a rainbow of colors as I willed it. Harsh white to deep purple to a shade of green, that I was pretty sure didn't exist in nature. "Not quite a Jedi mind-trick."
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The joke fell flat in the empty dome, but humor was all I had to cling to as my brain tried to process what was happening. I cycled through colors like a kid with a new toy—crimson to cobalt, to something I vaguely remembered from art class.
"Smaragdine," I said to the light, which obligingly turned bluish green. "Though honestly, you could've turned hot pink and I wouldn't have known the difference. Who the hell names a color smaragdine, anyway?"
That's when I noticed it—the creeping sensation that this was all perfectly normal. That experimenting with my newfound light powers was more important than figuring out where I was or how I'd gotten here. The feeling slithered through my thoughts like an oily whisper, and recognizing it made my skin crawl.
"Oh, hell no." I shook my head hard, like I could physically dislodge whatever was messing with my brain. "I've seen this movie. This is the part where the guy gets mind-controlled into doing something stupid."
The fascination evaporated too quickly, replaced by a bone-deep cold that hit me like a wave. My breath came out in visible puffs, and suddenly being naked wasn't just embarrassing—it was potentially lethal.
Okay, think. You can control light. Light equals heat. Those heat lamps at the restaurant...
I focused on the smaragdine glow, pushing my intention at it like a mental battering ram. The light shifted through the spectrum—red, deeper red, into the infrared range I couldn't see but could definitely feel.
Heat slammed into me like opening an oven door at work, and for a moment I basked in it like a lizard on a rock. Then it kept getting hotter. And hotter.
"Shit, shit, how do I turn it off?" Sweat beaded on my forehead as the heat went from comfortable, to concerning, to holy hell I'm being slow-roasted. The dome itself glowed, veins of light spreading through its structure like molten lava cutting through ice.
Then the light winked out, the floor disappeared—and I was falling through a kaleidoscope of impossible geometry.
Blue and gray patterns—much angrier this time, twisted through space around me, mathematical patterns that hurt to perceive. I tried to scream, but no sound came out. The lack of gravity and sound left me tumbling through an infinite schism of twisting lights.
Terror clawed at my chest for exactly three seconds before something else pushed it aside—a feeling of serenity so profound it was almost aggressive. Like someone had injected tranquilizers directly into my brain stem. My racing heart slowed to a steady thrum as golden circuits began carving themselves through the surrounding air.
This is not normal, the rational part of my brain insisted. Hearts don't just stop panicking because the light show got prettier.
But the golden runes that materialized around me were mesmerizing, forming a glittering, elegant network that pulsed with their own inner light. They arranged themselves in patterns that made the earlier fractals look like kindergarten doodles.
The dome—or whatever remained of it—collapsed with a sound like reality tearing. Debris rushed toward me, chunks of solid something that should have turned me into a paste. Instead, they slammed into an invisible barrier centimeters from my face, the golden runes flaring with a protective light that made my eyes water.
Curiosity finally won over self-preservation, and I looked directly at one rune.
Big mistake.
Concepts flooded my mind like a tsunami of pure information:
- The potential energy of two planets on a collision course, all that mass and gravity, compressed into a single point of infinite possibility.
- The eye of a hurricane that was somehow everywhere at once, perfect stillness married to absolute chaos.
- The held breath before a symphony begins, silence so complete it becomes its own kind of sound.
Space.
Or something like it. Not physical space. Space as a fundamental concept, the stage on which reality performed its dance. The distance between atoms and the gulf between galaxies, all wrapped up in thousands of symbols that made the Light rune look like a picture book.
I slapped my hand over my eyes, but the damage was done. My brain felt like someone had tried to stuff an encyclopedia through a keyhole. "Okay, note to self: don't look directly at the reality-defining symbols. Got it. Good talk."
I didn't even realize I could speak again before physics reasserted itself with a vengeance.
I shot backward like I'd been fired from the rail-gun. The golden runes moved with me, maintaining their protective bubble as the fractured dome shrank into the distance.
Through the nauseating acceleration, I could make out what I'd escaped from: a massive orb of seething patterns that vibrated with what I could only describe as pure pissed-off energy. It pulsed with malevolent light, and I got the distinct impression it was taking my escape personally.
"Yeah, well, you started it!" I shouted at the retreating sphere, now that my voice finally working again. "I was just trying to take a nap!"
My trajectory shifted without warning, turning my backward flight into a straight-down plummet. My stomach relocated somewhere around my throat as a shockwave of golden circuits exploded outward, creating a galaxy of protective runes in every direction. Each one blazed like a tiny star, and despite everything, it was beautiful.
Then the orb shared its feelings about my departure.
A beam of dull gray nothing lanced through space, cutting through the darkness like death had learned how to aim. Even from this distance, I could hear it—a deep, thrumming drone that made my bones ache. This wasn't light or heat or anything so mundane. This was entropy given form, the end of all things compressed into a targeted "fuck you" aimed directly at my face.
Wind chimes erupted around me.
The sound was wrong on every level—too beautiful to be real, too terrible to be beautiful. Like listening to angels having a knife fight, or a symphony played on instruments made of breaking glass. The melody tore through my eardrums, even as it filled me with an overwhelming sense of safety.
Great. Magical mood manipulation through weaponized wind chimes. Add it to the list of things that don't make sense.
The death beam struck my galaxy of golden runes and bent. Thousands of symbols above me fried instantly, overloading in showers of sparks as they redirected annihilation away from its target. The beam sizzled past close enough that I could feel its wrongness, like standing next to a black hole's event horizon, before careening off into the void.
"Holy shit," I breathed, watching the light show. "I've got magical missile defense."
The runes winked out one by one, taking their artificial serenity with them. Fear came crashing back like a tidal wave, and suddenly I was just a naked guy falling through an infinite black void with no parachute, no plan, and no pants.
"Oh, fuck!" The words tore from my throat, raw and desperate. "This is how I die! Naked and confused in space! They're going to find my body and—"
Then the ground and I had a very brief, very violent reunion, followed by absolutely nothing.
Brand of the Bloodheir