The Veil Tears

The voice of Archmage Mordecai, Keeper of the Silver Flame, Warden of the Void Sepulcher, Chronicler of the Unwritten War, rolled across the October woods like a thunderclap that had been to drama school.

“And so the Flame descends!” Mark Delacroix thrust his foam staff toward the canopy of red and gold maples, his repurposed graduation gown billowing behind him with a grandeur that almost—almost—sold the moment. “Not as fire, but as judgment! Not as light, but as the memory of light that burned before the first star was kindled! I call upon the Silver Flame to pierce the veil between—”

“Lily says dada.”

Dave Kowalski said it to no one, really. He was sitting on a fallen log ten feet away, phone tilted toward his face, and the smile that cracked across his square jaw was the most genuine thing in a twenty-mile radius. The big man’s tactical vest—the one he wore to every session, the one Mark was ninety percent sure was actual surplus from his Army days—shifted as he leaned forward, thumbs already moving to reply.

Mark’s staff arm sagged. “Dave.”

“Hmm.”

“Dave, I was mid-invocation.”

“Uh-huh. Lily says dada.” Dave held up the phone, showing a blurry video of a baby in a high chair, fist deep in what appeared to be sweet potato, mouth forming a sound that was generously interpreted as a word. “She’s ten months old and she’s a genius, Mark. I need you to acknowledge this.”

“I acknowledge your daughter is a prodigy. I acknowledge that the Silver Flame weeps at the interruption. Can I finish?”

Dave pocketed the phone with the careful precision of a man who had once disarmed IEDs and now treated a cracked iPhone screen with the same reverence. “Floor’s yours, Mordecai.”

“The moment is gone, Dave. You can’t just—the invocation requires sustained dramatic energy. There’s a build.”

“So build again.”

Mark opened his mouth to argue, but a sound like duct tape losing a fistfight interrupted him from the east clearing. Alex Chen—five-foot-seven, built like a fire hydrant someone had taught to smile—stood in the leaf litter holding the two halves of a foam sword that had, until three seconds ago, been a single foam sword he’d duct-taped together in his apartment that morning.

Alex stared at the halves. Looked up at the group. Looked back at the halves.

Then he raised both pieces overhead, one in each fist, and bellowed, “I HAVE INVENTED WAR!”

“You’ve invented a warranty claim,” Lisa said, without looking up from the leather-bound notebook in her lap. Lisa Okonkwo sat cross-legged on a camp blanket, mechanical pencil in hand, annotating what appeared to be a hand-drawn map of their campaign world with the focus of someone defusing a bomb. She was always annotating. Mark was fairly sure Lisa annotated in her sleep.

“Dual-wielding, Lisa. Dual-wielding.” Alex swung the halves experimentally. One of them shed a strip of duct tape that drifted to the forest floor like the saddest confetti ever manufactured. “Every great warrior improvises.”

“Every great warrior uses weapons that aren’t held together with adhesive from the dollar store.”

“The dollar store is the forge of the people.”

Mark tried to recapture the thread. He planted his staff—a broomstick handle topped with a glass orb that Alex had rigged with color-changing LEDs, his single greatest engineering achievement—and drew a breath from his diaphragm, the way his voice coach at Washburn had taught him. Project from the gut. Fill the space. Make them forget they’re standing in the woods behind the Shawnee Lake parking lot.

“I call upon the Silver Flame,” he began again, pitching his voice into the register he used for Prospero, for Cyrano, for every character who had ever been bigger than the actor playing him, “and the Void Sepulcher, twin forces of creation and—”

“Stop.” Lisa’s pencil was pointing at him like a weapon. “Stop right there.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You can’t invoke the Silver Flame and the Void Sepulcher in the same breath, Mark. They’re cosmologically opposed.”

“It’s a dramatic invocation, Lisa, not a peer-reviewed—”

“They’re cosmologically opposed. I established this in Session Forty-Seven. The Flame represents ordered creation. The Void Sepulcher represents entropic dissolution. Invoking both simultaneously would create a paradox that, according to the lore document you wrote, would collapse the caster’s soul into a recursive loop.”

Mark stared at her. “I wrote that at two in the morning after three IPAs.”

“You wrote it in the canonical lore bible. Canon is canon.”

“You’re going to hold me to drunk worldbuilding?”

“I’m going to hold you to your own rules. That’s what a lore keeper does.”

From the far side of the clearing, quiet as a held breath, Jordan Reeves tied off a length of paracord to a low-hanging oak branch and stepped back to admire his work. The trip-wire was nearly invisible—a thin line of dark green cord stretched at shin-height between two trees, connected to a snare mechanism he’d rigged from a carabiner and a bent sapling. Jordan didn’t announce his traps. He just built them, tested them, and waited for someone to walk through the wrong gap in the trees. He’d been a mechanical engineer at Spirit AeroSystems for six years, and he approached LARP the way he approached turbine assembly: methodically, silently, and with a quiet satisfaction that never required anyone else’s attention to be real.

Mark watched him work for a half-second, felt the familiar pang of something he didn’t want to examine—the effortless competence of a man who made real things for a living—and turned away.

Across the clearing, Sarah Park had Emily Vasquez’s right arm cradled in her lap and was unwinding an ACE bandage with the practiced hands of someone who did this forty hours a week for a living. Emily’s wrist was swollen and faintly purple from a fall at work three days ago—something about a folding table and a church fundraiser and a chain of events Emily described as “structurally inevitable.” Sarah rewrapped the joint in clean loops, her dark hair falling forward, murmuring the kind of nothing-words nurses used to keep patients calm. Emily, for her part, was enduring the treatment while scrolling through the group’s shared supply list on her phone, one-handed, lips moving as she counted.

“We’re short on water,” Emily said. “Someone was supposed to bring the extra case.”

Six heads turned toward Mark.

“In my defense,” Mark said, “I was composing the invocation.”

“The cosmologically impossible invocation,” Lisa added.

“We have the cooler,” Sarah said, tearing medical tape with her teeth. “It’s fine. How’s the range of motion?”

Emily flexed her wrist, winced, and flexed it again. “Like a three out of ten.”

“Stop flexing it.”

“You literally just asked me to—”

“I asked about range of motion. I didn’t say test it to destruction. Hold still.”

Mark looked out across the clearing—this little stretch of woods they’d claimed every Saturday for three years, with its familiar fallen oak and its carpet of rust-colored leaves and the distant sound of cars on Highway 75—and felt the thing he always felt at these moments. The warm, complicated ache of being somewhere he belonged and simultaneously nowhere at all. Seven friends in the woods playing pretend, and he was the one who needed it most and could never quite say why.

Two hundred and seventeen subscribers. Forty-three rejection letters. His mother asking, every other Sunday over pot roast, whether the bookstore had dental.

“I never know when you’re being real with me.”

Priya’s voice lived in the back of his skull like a tenant who’d stopped paying rent but still got mail. He’d drafted eleven texts to her since June. Sent none. Written four podcast scripts about vulnerability instead. Published two. The other two were sitting in a folder on his desktop labeled “DO NOT UPLOAD - TOO REAL” and he checked them every few days the way you check a bruise, pressing to see if it still hurts.

It still hurt.

“Mark.” Dave’s voice snapped him back. “You going to finish, or are you waiting for a director’s note?”

Mark grinned—the performance grin, the one that worked on everyone except Sarah and, formerly, Priya—and lifted his staff again.

“From the top,” he said. “And this time, nobody mention babies, broken swords, or canonical paradoxes until I’ve finished the bit.”

“No promises,” said Alex, who had gotten both halves of his sword stuck in a bush and was waging a small, private war to free them.

Mark drew one more breath. The October light caught the glass orb on his staff and threw a tiny rainbow across the leaf litter, and for just a second, the woods looked like somewhere else entirely.

Jordan found it.

Of course Jordan found it. Jordan found everything—loose bolts, stress fractures, the one screw in a thousand that was threaded wrong. His eyes were built for noticing the thing that didn’t belong.

“Hey,” he said, in the flat, quiet tone that meant he’d found something worth looking at. “Come see this.”

He was crouched near the base of the fallen oak, in the hollow where the root ball had torn free from the earth years ago, and he was looking at something half-buried in the leaf litter with the expression of a man who had just found a screw that didn’t belong in any blueprint he’d ever read.

Mark got there first because Mark always got there first—the gravitational pull of something interesting was a force he had never learned to resist. He dropped to one knee beside Jordan and brushed away the wet leaves, and his hand touched metal.

Not cold metal. Warm metal. Blood-warm, like it had been sitting in someone’s pocket.

It was roughly the size of a dinner plate, disc-shaped, and made of a material that looked like bronze but felt like something else—smoother, denser, with a faint vibration that Mark registered in his fingertips before his brain caught up. Symbols covered its surface in concentric rings, etched deep, flowing into each other with the organic logic of Celtic knotwork or Arabic calligraphy or something older than both.

The others gathered. Dave stood back two paces—always two paces—and scanned the trees by habit before looking down. Alex arrived with half a foam sword still in each hand. “Is that a quest item? That’s clearly a quest item.”

“It’s a—I don’t know what it is.” Jordan ran his thumb along the edge. “It’s not rusted. It should be rusted. It’s been in the ground.”

Lisa was already there, notebook closed, phone in hand, camera app open. She took a photo. Frowned. Took another. “The symbols are wrong,” she said.

“Wrong how?” Dave asked.

“They’re different.” She showed him the screen. In the first photo, the innermost ring of symbols appeared to curl clockwise. In the second, taken three seconds later, they curled the opposite direction. “They moved between frames.”

“Symbols don’t move, Lisa.”

“Thank you, Dave, I’m aware of the physical properties of engraved metal. And yet.” She took a third photo, and this time the camera app stuttered—the preview image flickered, scrambled into a mosaic of color, and resolved into something that looked nothing like the object in front of them. She stared at her phone with the specific displeasure of a woman who held a doctorate from MIT and did not appreciate being contradicted by reality.

Mark lifted the disc out of the leaves. It was heavier than it looked—dense in a way that felt deliberate, like the weight was part of the design. Just warm, the way a living thing was warm.

“It’s humming,” Sarah said quietly. She hadn’t touched it. “I can feel it from here.”

“I can’t feel anything,” Emily said.

“It’s subtle. Like a phone vibrating in another room.”

Mark turned the disc in his hands. The symbols caught the afternoon light and seemed to drink it, the etched lines darkening to a blue-black that was almost luminous. He thought of his podcast—Episode 147, “Artifacts of Threshold: Liminal Objects in World Mythology”—and felt the familiar itch of a story assembling itself.

“So here’s the thing,” he said, his voice shifting without permission into the podcast register. “Every culture has threshold objects. The Norse had Bifrost. The Greeks had Charon’s obol. Objects that exist at the boundary between one world and—”

“Mark,” Dave said. “Focus.”

“I am focused. I’m contextualizing.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a metal disc with impossible symbols that broke Lisa’s camera. I don’t know what it is. That’s what makes it interesting.”

Alex crouched beside him and poked the disc with one of his foam sword halves. The foam touched the metal and the LED lights in Mark’s staff orb—fifteen feet away, propped against a tree—flickered on, cycled through their full color range in two seconds, and went dark.

They all looked at the staff. They all looked at the disc.

“Okay,” Alex said. “That was cool and also very concerning.”

Jordan took the disc from Mark’s hands—gently, the way he handled precision instruments—and turned it over. The underside was smooth except for a single symbol at the center: a spiral that wound inward to a point so fine it seemed to pull the eye toward it like a drain.

“We should call someone,” Emily said. “If this is some kind of ordnance—”

“It’s not ordnance,” Dave said, with the quiet authority of a man who had seen ordnance. “Wrong weight, wrong composition, wrong everything.”

“Could be a movie prop,” Sarah offered.

“A movie prop that scrambles phone cameras and turns on LEDs from across a clearing,” Lisa said flatly. “Sure.”

Mark looked at the disc. The disc, in a way he couldn’t articulate, seemed to look back.

He felt the pull of it—not physical, not even emotional, but narrative. The pull of the moment in the myth where the hero picks up the strange object and speaks the words that change everything. He recognized it because he’d written that scene a hundred times, in campaign plots and stories that never got published and podcast episodes that reached two hundred people on a good week.

The invocation was sitting on his tongue like a song that wanted to be sung.

“I’m going to do the invocation,” he said.

Dave looked at him. “Why?”

“For the bit.”

“Mark—”

“Just for the bit, Dave. It’s a weird disc in the woods and I have a dramatic monologue ready to go. The universe is clearly setting me up.”

He didn’t wait for permission. That was the thing about Mark—the thing Priya had seen, the thing his mother worried about, the thing that made him a magnetic performer and an unreliable friend. When the spotlight appeared, he walked into it. Every time. Without checking whether the stage was sound.

He stood. He planted his feet. He cradled the disc in his left hand and raised his right toward the canopy, and he found the voice. Not the LARP voice, not the community theater voice—the real one. The voice from the closet studio at two in the morning, the one that came from somewhere deeper than his diaphragm, somewhere in the architecture of his chest where breath became belief.

“I call upon the Flame that burned before the first star kindled.” The words of Archmage Mordecai, canonical paradox and all, rolling out of him like something inevitable. “I call upon the Void that waits beyond the last horizon. Twin forces, opposed and inseparable, I invoke the threshold between. By word and will, I speak the Veil thin. By breath and bone, I call the worlds to answer.”

It was nonsense. It was beautiful nonsense he’d written on a napkin during his shift at Turning Pages, jotting between customers while Meredith pretended not to notice, pulling phrases from Sumerian hymns and Norse eddas and the King James Bible and his own need to make language do more than communicate.

Lisa was going to be furious about the cosmological paradox.

But the words weren’t the point. The words were never the point.

The point was seven people standing in a circle in the October woods, and every single one of them—Lisa mid-objection, Dave mid-vigilance, Alex mid-chaos, Jordan mid-analysis, Sarah mid-care, Emily mid-worry—was listening. And in the space of that listening, in the breath between Mark’s last syllable and the silence that followed, every single one of them was imagining the same thing. Not deliberately. Not consciously. But the way people do when a story is told well enough—they stop seeing the parking lot and the highway and the gas station across the road, and they see, just for a second, the world the story is building.

Another world. A world that hummed.

The disc pulsed.

Not metaphorically. Not subtly. It pulsed in Mark’s hand like a heart resuming its beat, and the warmth of it spiked from blood-temperature to almost-too-hot in less than a second, and the symbols on its surface blazed blue-white, and the hum that Sarah had felt from across the clearing became a sound that everyone could hear. A sound that started in their teeth and spread to their sinuses and then to their skulls, a resonance that wasn’t quite sound and wasn’t quite vibration but lived in the space between, the way a word lives between the mouth that speaks it and the ear that hears it.

“Mark,” Dave said, his voice cutting clean through the noise because Dave’s voice always cut clean through noise. “Put it down.”

Mark tried. His fingers didn’t close on the command. Not because the disc was holding him—it wasn’t magnetic, wasn’t pulling—but because some part of him, some deep and treacherous part, was leaning into the hum the way you lean into a song you know but can’t place.

“I can’t,” he said, and was surprised by how calm his voice sounded.

Then the ground dropped.

There was no light. No sparkle, no shimmer, no cinematic glow. The stories always got this part wrong, Mark thought, in the fraction of a second he was still capable of coherent thought.

The ground simply stopped being there.

Gravity released them—not gently, not the floating sensation of a roller coaster’s apex, but a violent unhinging, as if the fundamental contract between their bodies and the earth had been voided without notice. Mark’s stomach lurched into his throat. Emily screamed. Someone—Alex, maybe—grabbed for someone else and caught only air.

Then gravity came back. Not from below. From everywhere. A compression, a flattening, as if the air itself had become a fist. Mark’s ears popped so hard he heard something tear inside them, a wet percussive snap followed by a ringing that swallowed all other sound. The taste of copper flooded his mouth—not the faint copper of biting your tongue, but a full metallic saturation, like he’d been drinking pennies, like his blood had reversed direction and was flowing toward his teeth.

And then the pulling.

He was moving through something that wasn’t space. There was no direction to it, no up or down or forward, just a sense of through—being threaded through an aperture that was simultaneously vast and impossibly narrow. Colors bled across his vision: not colors, but what colors would be if they had a frequency below red and above violet, hues that registered as pressure on his optic nerve rather than information. His brain was trying to render things it had no capacity for, and the result was a kaleidoscopic nausea that made him certain he was about to die.

Sound came back as every frequency at once—a white-noise roar compressed into a single chord that vibrated his ribs and the plates of his skull. Then it cut to silence. Absolute, annihilating silence.

It lasted two seconds. Maybe three. Long enough for Mark to think this is how I die: in a rented graduation gown, holding a frisbee from hell, in front of six people who will have to explain this to my mother.

Then he hit the ground.

Not the leaf-litter and loam of the Shawnee Lake woods. Something softer, something that gave beneath his palms and then pushed back, like pressing into the skin of a sleeping animal. He landed face-down and the impact knocked the clever out of him and left only the animal: breathing, blinking, trying to figure out which way was up.

Sound returned in pieces—gasping, coughing, a groan that might have been Dave, a high thin whimper that was definitely Emily. His ears were still ringing, but through the ringing he heard something else.

A hum.

Not the disc’s hum. This was deeper, wider, coming from everywhere at once—from the ground beneath his palms, from the air in his lungs, from somewhere in the substructure of the world itself. A low, rhythmic pulse, like a resting heartbeat.

Mark opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was light, and the light was wrong.

It didn’t come from above. It came from the trees—if these were trees. They rose around him like the pillars of a cathedral designed by something that understood grandeur but had only heard of wood secondhand. Enormous. Eighty feet, a hundred feet, with trunks wider than cars and bark that pulsed with a faint blue-white luminescence in a slow, measured cadence. Two seconds on, two seconds dim. On, dim. On, dim. The rhythm of a heart.

The light hurt. Not the way sunlight hurts—this was a different frequency, a wavelength that sat wrong on his retinas. Like trying to hear a note a quarter-tone off from any note he knew. Close enough to process. Wrong enough to ache.

He pushed himself to his knees. His palms pressed into a carpet of low-growing bioluminescent something—not grass, not moss—that glowed pale blue-green in veins and whorls across the forest floor. The glow pulsed in time with the trees, and where his hands pressed into it, the light brightened around his fingers, the way pond water ripples around a dropped stone.

The air was thick. Not humid—thick, the way the air in a cathedral is thick, dense with something that occupied the same space in his lungs as moisture but wasn’t. Every breath tasted of ozone and pine and something floral he had no word for, a scent that triggered the part of his brain where language formed but delivered nothing. A word on the tip of his tongue that didn’t exist in any language.

He looked up. The canopy filtered light into prismatic patterns that drifted across the ground like living stained glass. Through gaps in the leaves, he caught fragments of sky—wrong sky, diffuse and directionless, as if the sun existed as a concept rather than a location.

Mark’s brain, trained by twenty-nine years of story and seventeen years of dedicated mythology obsession, tried to find the narrative frame. Tried to locate the genre, the trope, the archetype that would make this manageable. This is the part where the hero realizes he’s not in Kansas anymore. Literally. Literally not in Kansas.

The thought didn’t help.

“Sound off,” Dave said.

His voice came from Mark’s left, rough and scraped. Dave’s command voice. Not the LARP version. The real one, the one that had coordinated actual human beings in actual danger in places he didn’t talk about.

“Here.” Sarah, somewhere behind Mark. Shaking.

“Present.” Lisa, closer, her voice clipped to a single clinical syllable.

“I’m—yeah. Here.” Alex, from the right, coughing.

“Emily?” Dave said.

“I’m here.” Small. Thin. The voice of a woman who was holding herself together with both hands.

“Jordan?”

A pause. Then: “Yeah.”

One word. But Mark heard the wrong thing in it—not fear, not confusion, but something flatter. Something extinguished. He turned and saw Jordan sitting in the bioluminescent groundcover with his hands in his lap, staring at the pulsing trees with an expression that made Mark’s chest hurt. Not wonder. Not terror. Something closer to recognition.

Mark got to his feet. The ground vibrated beneath his soles—that deep living pulse, constant, inescapable—and as he stood he realized something was wrong with standing itself. His body felt lighter than it should, his center of gravity sitting a fraction of an inch higher than his muscles expected. He swayed, compensated, and filed the wrongness away.

He looked at his hands.

His hands were glowing.

Not dramatically. A soft luminescence that sat just beneath his skin, blue-white, pulsing in time with the trees. In time with the ground. In time with the low, omnipresent heartbeat of this place. As he stared, the light brightened—not because he willed it, but because he noticed it, as if his attention was a bellows and the glow was a coal.

He flexed his fingers. Motes—tiny points of light—arced from fingertip to fingertip and dissolved in the thick air like sugar in water. They were effortless. He wasn’t doing anything to produce them. They were just there, the way breath was there, the way his heartbeat was there.

Like breathing.

Like remembering.

“Mark.” Dave was on his feet, steadier than anyone had a right to be, scanning the tree line. His phone was in his hand. No signal. The battery indicator was dropping visibly—ninety-one percent, eighty-nine, eighty-seven—as if hemorrhaging power into the thick air. He turned it off and pocketed it with a clenched jaw.

“Nobody panic,” Dave said.

The words landed like a physical weight. Mark felt them settle across his shoulders, felt his racing heartbeat slow, felt his body respond to the command before his mind had processed it. Everyone in the clearing went still—not calm, not comforted, but stilled, the way a tuning fork stops vibrating when you press it to a surface.

Dave noticed. Mark saw the flicker of something cold and uncertain cross the big man’s face before he locked it down. Dave’s voice had always carried authority. But it had never done that.

Alex broke the silence, because Alex always broke silences.

He sneezed.

It was a real sneeze—violent, full-bodied, the kind of sneeze that comes from breathing air your sinuses have never encountered. And when it happened, a gout of flame erupted from his face.

Not a puff. Not a flicker. A directed blast of orange-white fire that shot forward six feet and hit the nearest tree trunk with a crackling hiss. The bioluminescent bark blackened and peeled in a hand-sized patch, and the tree’s pulse of blue-white light stuttered and skipped before resuming its rhythm, like a heart that had missed a beat.

Alex stood there, eyes streaming, eyebrows singed, the smell of burned ozone mixing with the alien floral scent of the forest.

He looked at Dave.

“I just set a tree on fire with my face, Dave.”

Dave stared at him. The muscle in his jaw was working. “I see that.”

“With my face.”

“I see that, Alex.”

“So when you said ‘nobody panic’—”

“I stand by the instruction.”

Sarah was moving before the conversation ended—the nurse’s instinct overriding everything. She went to Emily first, because Emily was closest, because Emily’s wrist was still bandaged and swelling, because Sarah’s hands were already reaching before her conscious mind had filed a flight plan.

She knelt in front of Emily and took the injured wrist in both hands, gently, the way she’d done a thousand times in the ER and a hundred times at LARP. “Let me see the—”

She stopped.

Her palms were warm. Not the warmth of skin contact. A deeper warmth, radiating outward from the center of her hands, pouring into Emily’s wrist like water flowing downhill. Mark watched as the swelling visibly receded—the purple-bruised puffiness deflating in real time, the skin returning from mottled violet to its normal brown in a gradient that took maybe ten seconds and should have taken ten days.

Emily felt it too. Her eyes went wide. She flexed her wrist—the same wrist she’d winced at an hour ago—and it moved freely, smoothly, without a trace of pain.

Sarah pulled her hands back and stared at them as if they belonged to a stranger. The warmth was fading, the glow dimming, but her fingers were still trembling. Not from exertion. From something worse. From the realization that she had just done something impossible, and it had been easy, and she hadn’t known how to stop.

“Sarah,” Emily whispered. “What did you—”

“I don’t know.”

Lisa was on her knees in the groundcover, drawing a symbol in the soft earth with her finger—one of the activation sigils she’d spent weeks developing for her LARP character’s spellbook.

She completed the symbol. Pressed her palm flat against it. Waited.

Nothing happened.

She redrew it. Pressed again. Waited. Nothing.

A third time, with different proportions, a different angle on the third stroke. She held her palm against the earth for a long, still moment, and Mark could see the tendons in her forearm standing taut with concentration.

Nothing. Not even a flicker. The earth sat inert beneath her hand, the bioluminescent groundcover pulsing placidly around her fingers, indifferent.

Lisa sat back on her heels. She did not look frustrated. She looked like a scientist confronting a result that violated her model of the world, and that expression was scarier than frustration.

Jordan was standing apart from the group, near the base of one of the massive trees. Mark watched him reach out—not physically, but with some extension of intent that Mark could almost see in the thick air—and grasp at something invisible. His fingers closed. His expression tightened. Then his hands opened, and whatever he’d been reaching for slipped away like wet rope.

The simple thing was there—the trap-sense, the snare-builder’s instinct. But the deeper thing, the complex mechanism, the structural understanding, had slid from his grasp.

Jordan’s face went flat and still, absorbing a blow he’d expected, and he turned away from the group.

Emily stood, testing her healed wrist with a kind of careful amazement, and then extended her hands in front of her, palms out, in the gesture her LARP character used for barrier spells. She held them there for five seconds. Ten. Her face twisted with effort, her jaw clenching, her shoulders drawing up. Nothing. Not a shimmer, not a ripple, not the faintest suggestion that the air between her palms was anything other than air. She dropped her hands and pressed them against her thighs, and Mark saw her fingers curl into fists.

Mark looked at the group. Six people in a forest that breathed. Dave, rigid and scanning. Sarah, staring at her hands. Alex, patting his singed eyebrows with an expression cycling between terror and unholy glee. Lisa, kneeling in the dirt. Jordan, turned away. Emily, fists clenched.

Through the canopy, Mark caught a glimpse of sky, and in the sky he saw stars—but wrong stars. Constellations that almost formed the shapes he knew and then didn’t. Orion’s belt, but the spacing was off. Something like the Big Dipper, but with an extra star and a curve that bent the wrong way.

From somewhere deeper, a cricket began to sing. Then a dozen, overlapping, their calls building into harmonics that layered in intervals no Earth insect produced—fifths and thirds and strange quarter-tone intervals that sounded, from a distance, like a choir warming up. Warming up for something.

A cloud of moths drifted past Mark’s face, moving in a tight spiral column, their wings refracting the tree-light into a helix of scattered motes. They spiraled upward in a pattern too organized, too deliberate, and the collective beat of their wings produced a sound like pages turning.

On the forest floor, clusters of translucent growths emitted their own pale light—soft yellows and ambers that contrasted with the blue-white of the bark. And between the branches above, gossamer threads shimmered with a faint internal luminescence, strung tree to tree by spiders Mark couldn’t see. Where the moths flew through the threads, the filaments vibrated and sang a single high, pure note.

He looked down. His shadow was wrong.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and his shadow followed—but late. A fraction of a second behind, like a dubbed film where the audio track lagged. He shifted again. The delay was consistent. Tiny, barely perceptible, but real. His shadow was rendering a half-beat behind his body.

A stone lay near his foot. He picked it up—lighter than it should be—and tossed it underhand toward a gap in the trees.

The arc was wrong. Too slow at the apex, too long, hanging for a heartbeat more than Kansas physics allowed before curving down. A gentle, stretched parabola that looked right and felt wrong, the way a familiar song sounds wrong when it’s played in a different key.

Dave had seen it too.

“That’s not Earth gravity,” he said quietly.

“No,” Mark said.

“Where are we?”

Mark looked at his hands again. The motes still danced between his fingers. Effortless. Constant. As if the light had always been there, waiting beneath his skin, and this place had simply given it permission to surface.

He reached for it.

Not physically. He reached the way you reach for a memory—inward, down, toward a place in his chest where the hum of the forest and the hum of his own pulse overlapped. He reached for the thing that was producing the light, and the thing answered. It surged up to meet him with an eagerness that took his breath. A warmth that started in his sternum and flooded outward through his arms, his hands, his fingertips, and the motes between his fingers blazed into a soft, steady glow—blue-white, pulsing in time with the trees, in time with the ground, in time with everything. He cupped his hands and the light pooled in his palms like water, and it was the most natural thing he had ever done in his life.

Not like learning.

Like remembering.

The glow reflected off six faces. Dave, unreadable. Sarah, flexing her hands. Alex, who had produced a small flame on his fingertip and was staring at it with naked wonder. Lisa, masked. Jordan, watching Mark’s light with that flat, extinguished look. Emily, whose fists had unclenched just enough to let her fingers reach toward the glow.

“Well,” Mark said, because the only voice he had when the world stopped making sense was the warm, conspiratorial one. He held up his glowing hands. “This is either the best or worst LARP session ever.”

Nobody laughed.

He let the light go. It dimmed but didn’t die—settled back beneath his skin, a low hum in his palms. Waiting.

He reached for it again. Just to test.

It answered before he’d finished the thought. Instantly, eagerly, like a dog coming when called by its real name. The warmth surged, the motes bloomed brighter and steadier, and somewhere in the deep structure of his perception he felt something vast and intricate and alive—a web of energy that extended from his palms to the pulsing trees to the luminous ground to the stars he couldn’t name. It was humming, and it was humming for him, and the eagerness of its response was the most terrifying thing he had ever felt.

Not like learning a skill.

Like remembering one you’d always known but somehow forgot.

He had never been here before.

So why did the magic feel like coming home?

He tried to do what he always did—narrate it, frame it, turn it into a bit. His internal podcast voice kicked in, bright and wry and automatic: Episode 218: So You’ve Been Transported to a Fantasy World and Your Hand is Glowing. In today’s episode—involuntary interdimensional relocation, featuring seven amateur LARPers, a mysterious disc, and a fundamental breakdown in the laws of physics. Stay tuned.

The humor didn’t land. Not even for him. It sat there in his head like a line delivered to an empty theater, and underneath the joke was a truth he couldn’t shape into a punchline.

This felt more real than Topeka ever had. More real than the bookstore and the closet studio and the apartment above the dry cleaner. More real than the rejection letters and the subscriber count and the drafts he never sent. The light in his hands, the hum in his chest, the web of energy singing through the roots of this impossible forest—all of it more vivid, more present, more his than anything in twenty-nine years of a life lived in the correct dimension.

And that thought—that Topeka, Kansas, with its pot roast Sundays and its two hundred and seventeen people who sometimes listened to him talk about mythology, might be the less real place—was the scariest thing in the Shimmerwood.

He closed his hands. The light dimmed. The hum remained.

Above him, the alien canopy pulsed its slow heartbeat. Somewhere in the deeper forest, the ground shuddered with a bass note felt in the chest, and the trees brightened in response, and the moths spiraled higher, and the silver threads between the branches sang.

Mark Delacroix stood in the light and did not know how to go home.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

And that, more than the magic or the wrongness or the forest that breathed, was the thing that kept him standing there, hands closed, heart pounding, long after the others had started to move.