London, 1966.
Cormac Anwar Halvorsen had a very stupid problem.
He had spent the whole morning thinking about it.
He thought about it slowly, one piece at a time, like a man doing simple math.
First piece: he was dead.
Or he used to be dead.
It was hard to say the right words for it.
He was standing in a London alley right now, eating a meat pie he did not pay for, so “dead” felt like the wrong word to use.
Second piece: he did not remember dying.
He thought that was rude of the world.
People always talk about a man’s last moments like they matter so much, and his own soul had not even bothered to keep the memory, the bastard.
The third piece was the worst one.
Somewhere between not remembering his death and waking up as a 17 years old guy in London, he had picked up a second set of memories.
A whole other life.
A whole other world.
That other world had cars and phones and a friend he did not remember the name of.
That guy would always talk for hours straight about some mobile game, while Cormac-
‘Cormac?
Is that my new name?
Well it has a nice ring to it at least’
Anyway, he really, really wished he had listened.
For the first few days, he told himself a simple story.
‘This is just another Earth,’ he thought.
‘A strange one, but still normal enough.’
His mother’s family did pray to an old feathered snake alongside their Catholic prayers, but lots of families have odd habits, what’s a little heresy these days.
He actually liked the statues of that little snake.
They felt safe, he even had a necklace with a yellow tipped feather given by his mother.
He reminisced about her and her kindness that he never got in his past life.
Then a girl running with a floating apple down the street into what appeared to be a barber shop ruined it completely.
And not long after another girl wearing a blue coat and a boater hat followed her inside.
Seeing that, something in the back of his head sat up straight and started screaming.
‘Arcanists?’
He was mulling over what triggered his brain so much until a third girl arrived as well wearing a high-collared, elegant turtleneck white dress.
Then it clicked in the deepest parts of his head.
That was the “Marcus” part of his memory.
‘Oh!
I remember now, his name was Marcus.’
The part that was full of half heard ramblings about why femboys are superior to tomboys and all that nonsense.
‘Oh no, I remember now.’
He did not remember much else from that talk with Marcus.
Four hours of talk after a few drinks does not exactly stay in a man’s head.
‘Although I think I remember really liking the music’
But two words had stayed with him, stuck behind his ribs like a splinter.
The Storm.
Something about rain falling the wrong way.
Something about not getting caught outside when it happens.
Something about a girl with a suitcase who could not be undone the way everything else could.
That information would have been really useful before he started this recollection.
Now the sky over London was raining upward.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
He watched it from a small side street.
The strange colors that were spreading all over the city.
The outlines of buildings falling apart at the seam.
His meat pie sat forgotten in his hand.
The rain climbed, drop by drop, back up toward a sky that had turned the wrong color.
It was not the grey of a normal storm.
It looked like an old bruise trying to remember what color it used to be.
A man made of static had already stopped being a man at all.
Across the street, a newspaper stand folded in on itself, like a flower closing at night.
Then it opened back up as something with far too many corners.
A tram rolled past without any sound.
The people inside it sat frozen, mid laugh, mid argument, mid life, just waiting.
Down the street, the high-collared girl ran towards who knows where
She ran like someone who had done this exact thing far too many times already.
Cormac had at least three good reasons to run away.
He had no suitcase.
He had no badge from any Foundation, no umbrella, no real idea what most of these words even meant.
If the little he remembered was true, in less than ten minutes he might be erased, or reshuffled, or thrown back to some year in the past.
Nobody left alive might even remember he had stood in this street at all.
So, of course, he did the only sensible thing.
He stepped out into the most open area where the girl with a blue coat who was stuffing someone else into a suitcase could clearly see.
He walked to the middle of the street.
He looked the Storm right in whatever passed for its eye.
He did not have a real plan.
He just had one stupid thought.
‘If this is my last afternoon on this Earth,’ he thought, ‘I refuse to hide in some unremarkable place like some NPC.’
‘If the universe wants to erase me, it can at least let me farm some aura while doing it.’
He put his hands behind his back, like a critic about to be served by a rat.
He frowned his lip at the sky, his eyes full of disgust the same look a superman copycat with a weird obsession with milk would look at someone who coughed in front of him.
“Disgusting.
Absolutely tasteless.
Rain going the wrong way.
Who allowed this?”
It was a very weak bluff to try against something that could unmake the idea of him.
But something in his chest pulled tight, like a desire he can’t suppress.
Some small thread from his previous life was still in his blood, someone who would joke about the mustached Austrian with a German, of course he wouldn’t laugh about it, German humor is not a laughing matter after all.
But for one strange moment, he could actually see it.
Not just the rain, and not just the wrongness.
Underneath all of that, he saw the shape of the thing itself.
It was huge.
It was patient.
It did not care even a little bit about his opinion of it.
“Rude.” he kept scowling at it even more as if truly offended.
That was the exact moment the girl in the blue coat looked back over her shoulder.
The other girl, the one wearing an orange jacket that he saw with a floating apple, already had one hand already reaching for the latch of an old brown suitcase.
Then they saw him.
An idiot, standing perfectly still in the open street, arms behind his back, glaring up at the end of the world like it had personally insulted his hair.
Their eyes met for maybe one second.
Cormac Anwar Halvorsen had no plan, no suitcase, and no friends nearby.
He had a very small window of time before the world quietly took him apart.
So he smiled at her.
It was not a scream.
It was not a plea for help.
It was just a small, easy, slightly annoying grin.
‘Isn’t this all a bit much?’ the smile said.
‘Charming and mysterious,’ he hoped it said
Not; ‘possibly concussed’ he really hoped
‘If I really go this time,’ he thought, ‘all the way, no second life waiting after it, I might as well confuse others while I’m at it, I just do it for the love of the game.’
The rain kept climbing.
The sky kept folding in on itself.
Behind the girls, the apple was shouting something about wasted time.
For just a moment, the girl in a blue coat’s face stopped looking so professional.
‘Well,’ Cormac thought, feeling very pleased with himself.
‘Worth it.’
Start of the story proper