It was a weird feeling, almost as if I were suspended in nothingness.
There was no sound, no light, no sense of my own body, only a faint pull stretching through the empty space before slowly tightening around me.
It kept growing until it tugged hard enough to consume me all at once, and for a second, it felt as though I had been falling endlessly and had finally hit the bottom.
Then consciousness returned to me.
Wait, what? Wasn’t I dead?
I remembered the rooftop, the blood-red eyes, the sword, and the warmth spreading through my chest before everything had gone dark. I had been killed by the very character I had written, which was not something I had ever expected to add to the list of ways my life could go wrong.
How the hell was any of that possible? Had I truly lost my mind after all those years? Yet no matter how impossible it sounded, I knew what I had seen.
Something soft pressed against my back, a weight covering me from above.
A bed.
For a moment, I was almost scared to open my eyes, scared of what would be waiting for me when I did. Maybe it had all been one long nightmare. Maybe I would wake up in my apartment, the coffee gone cold in my hand, and none of it would have been real.
That thought gave me enough solace to finally open my eyes.
My vision blurred as it struggled to adjust to the light, but the moment I pushed myself upright, the body beneath me answered wrong.
It was too light, the weight of it sitting in places it never had before, while the muscles moved beneath my skin with a weakness that I never remembered having.
My heartbeat, at least, remained familiar, rattling hard enough against my chest that I could feel it behind my eyes.
Once my vision cleared, I found myself inside a room far more ornate than anything I recognised.
A chandelier hung from the centre of the ceiling with faint orbs of light glimmering inside it instead of flame, dark wood covered the walls, and a thick carpet stretched across most of the floor beneath the bed. A desk stood at one end with a stack of battered books resting on it, while a cupboard and a tall mirror occupied the other.
The windows were open, their grey curtains shifting in the cold wind as a faint crimson radiance spilled across the room, glowing softly against the pale morning light. Something about that colour made my stomach turn.
"No fuc..."
My own voice came out unfamiliar, higher and smoother than the rough rasp years of smoking had left behind in my old one.
I looked down at myself. A pale shirt hung loosely around my neck, matching trousers covered thin legs, and both looked almost stark against the sickly skin beneath them.
The body was frail, almost painfully so.
No, no, no. No fucking way.
My heart thundered as I raised my trembling hands before me, revealing forearms thin enough that the shape of bone showed beneath the skin. Fine grey lines ran across both arms, beginning around my wrists before disappearing beneath my sleeves, countless strands layered over one another like strings pressed just beneath the flesh.
I knew what they were. I had known from the moment I saw them; I simply did not want to accept it.
A few years ago, I had sat at my desk and decided how a Mark worked, when it came to someone, what it meant, what it gave them, and what it took in return.
And now I had one of my own.
Despite the body trembling beneath me, I forced myself onto my feet, my bare soles meeting the cold wooden floorboards as I nearly tumbled straight back down.
The limbs felt foreign in every possible way, moving too lightly and too quickly whenever I tried to tell them what to do, while questions crowded through my head faster than I could answer any of them.
Why had he been on that roof, and why had he killed me? More importantly, why had I not died, and why was I now standing inside the world he was supposed to belong to?
Taking a few hesitant steps, each one feeling longer than the last, I stopped before the mirror at the far end of the room and met my own eyes.
Sharp grey irises stared back at me, their colour almost jarring against the rest of the face.
The chin was narrow, the nose slightly turned up, and black hair fell loosely across my forehead, glowing faintly crimson beneath the strange light pouring through the window.
The face was beautiful in its own cruel way, which felt like a particularly weird consolation while I stood there wearing the body of a stranger.
My hand hovered before the mirror as I touched my skin, my nose, and my forehead, each movement trembling slightly as if I expected the reflection to disappear the moment I reached for it.
What the hell did any of this mean?
Who the fuck was I?
My head snapped towards the open window, the cold air slipping into the room and making me shiver as my body carried me towards it before I had even decided to move.
Then I looked at the sky.
It was early morning, the sun barely beginning to rise over the horizon, and yet two moons still stood high above the world.
One was pale and white, while the other loomed far larger beside it, glowing blood-red as it bathed the land in the same crimson radiance filling the room.
The sight brought with it a sense of finality, and my heart dropped as the truth settled into me.
I was so, so fucked.
This was the world of Bleeding Crimson, the very first novel I had ever written and the only one I had abandoned halfway through.
A short, almost crazed laugh tore its way out of my throat.
"T-this is insane," I muttered between broken bursts of laughter, all in a voice that was still not mine.
I had abandoned the novel because of what waited for this world. I had written myself into a corner so deep that every possible answer felt too easy, too convenient, or too fucking dishonest, until eventually I did what any responsible creator would have done and walked away from the whole thing.
Now I was standing inside the story I had left to die, facing the very ending I had been too much of a coward to solve. If this was truly my reality, then I was doomed along with everyone else.
My steps stumbled as I caught myself against the wall, only for a sharp pain to tear through my head as though something had been driven into it and deliberately twisted.
Images flashed across my mind before I could understand them, foreign at first, their onslaught refusing to pause as they drowned out everything else.
I crashed to my knees with a yelp, my fingers clutching at my forehead as though I could somehow press the pain and images back out.
Then I saw him.
Yun Claiom, a stranger who shared my name.
I saw him as a child, small and quiet, trying desperately to earn the approval of people who had already decided he was different.
I saw him loved by his mother, his father, and his sister, while he returned that love with the desperate need only a child could carry.
Then I saw his mother slaughtered in front of him while he stood there and cowered, too frightened to move and too powerless to do anything except watch.
I saw the house break apart afterwards, his father burying himself in work until he seemed to forget that he still had children left to raise.
I saw Yun take up a sword thin enough for his frail arms to lift, swinging it badly before trying again, then returning every morning for years because some part of him still believed that if he became useful enough, his father might finally look at him.
I saw the day he received his Mark only a week ago, and then I saw him die last night when that same Mark consumed him for reasons I still could not understand.
My eyes blurred as an entire stranger’s life settled behind them, every last piece of it now mine to carry.
But what troubled me most was the boy himself.
I did not remember writing Yun Claiom at all, and the Waking Dream, the head of House Claiom, had never been supposed to have a son.
Yet somehow, I was standing in that son’s skin.
It took me a while to get off the floor, the last of those memories still settling behind my eyes as I looked down at the faint grey lines running along my forearms.
I was Marked, one of the few people capable of carrying a god’s lineage and being reached by its Domain. If I passed my first Soul Trial, that Mark would make me Touched.
It was a system I had built in an afternoon because I needed the world to make sense, but the system itself was not what worried me.
It was what this particular Mark had already done.
If I understood the memories correctly, the power Yun had spent his entire life craving had consumed him, only to accept me in his place and fit me into the gap he left behind as though the two of us were somehow interchangeable.
I could feel every one of his memories sitting within me, everything he had endured, wanted, feared, and enjoyed arranged neatly inside my head.
Yet none of the weight they had carried for him was there.
I did not feel his love for his family or his resentment towards the rest of this house. I had watched his mother die through his own eyes and felt nothing worse than the discomfort of seeing a stranger suffer.
In the end, that was all his memories were to me, images stripped of everything that had once made them matter.
Some part of me still wanted to walk out of this room and see the world I had written standing before me, while the rest was busy remembering that I had been murdered by a man who should never have been on that roof, then placed inside the body of a boy I had never created.
Really, what in the two worlds of shit was going on?
Letting out a long breath, I sank onto the bed, clutched my forehead, and let myself fall flat against the sheets.
"What the hell should I even do?"
My voice carried through the empty room, still unfamiliar enough that hearing it made something inside me twist.
My last life had not been much, and I doubted there was a single person back there who would care enough to notice that I was gone, but that did nothing to make this one easier to accept.
This world was doomed, and I knew that better than anyone alive because I was the one who had doomed it.
Everything waiting here was a long string of wars, deaths, and things crawling from Rifts, countless people losing everything because I had once decided suffering made a story more meaningful.
But wait...
If I had written this world and the fate waiting at the end of it, then perhaps there was still a chance.
If I found him, I could manipu...
Ahem.
I meant help him.
That was the purpose of why I had created him after all.
I could guide him towards the right path and let him stand against what was coming for the rest of us.
It was a perfectly reasonable plan.
Well, mostly.
Then those cold red eyes came back to me, staring straight into my soul while his hands held the sword running through my chest.
Godless bastard. I had created him, and he had the gall to kill me for it.
Then I remembered how old he had looked on the roof.
He had been in his mid-twenties, perhaps around the age he would have reached when I finally abandoned the novel, but this was before the story had even begun.
He should have been eighteen, the same age as this body.
Either he had come from the future or I was now sitting somewhere in his past. Both possibilities felt equally impossible because I had never written anything capable of carrying someone backwards through his own life.
If time had moved either of us, then something outside my own story had done the moving, and whatever that something was, it had not come from me.
I ran my hands through my hair and let out a groan, my fingers catching against the unfamiliar strands.
"Dammit. Nothing makes sense."
Whatever had happened, my answer remained the same. I needed to find the protagonist because, unless the universe had developed a particularly personal hatred for me, he was still the person most capable of stopping what was coming.
He would only need a little help.
Well, probably a lot of help, but that could be decided later.
The plot of Bleeding Crimson was still almost three years away, which meant he should be living in his village near the edge of the Domain of Dream.
Unfortunately, I was in Lucidia, the capital and seat of House Claiom, one of the six great houses of the continent, and I had somehow woken up as the only son of its head.
Curse me.
From what I remembered, the protagonist lived close to where Dream met the Domain of Life. Ressa could handle the journey’s logistics; she had served this house long enough to arrange almost anything, and a request that dull should not earn more than a passing question from her.
But before any of that, there was something more pressing.
My Mark.
I looked back at the grey lines across my forearms and finally noticed the faint connection sitting behind my temple, waiting to be called upon.
It had been there since I opened my eyes; I had simply been too busy panicking about everything else to pay attention to it.
Every person carrying a Mark possessed that connection to the Ledger, a divine remnant that allowed them to understand their lineage and what they were capable of.
It displayed everything in the Language of the Gods, using runes nobody untouched by the Ledger could ever read.
Well, that was how I had written it, anyway.
Back then, the Ledger had been nothing more than a convenience, a way to let readers keep track of every character without forcing me to explain their abilities through the prose each time.
A short, humourless chuckle escaped me. Every writer said they wanted to see their work come alive.
I would very much like to take that back.
I finally gave in to the pull, and the runes settled soundlessly into the air before me.
They were symbols and shapes I had never seen anywhere in my life, shifting faintly as if the language itself were alive, yet my mind understood them without effort.
YUN OF CLAIOM
DOMAIN: FATE
ASPECT: UNPROVEN
MARKED
RELIQUARY: DORMANT
TRIAL: UNTAKEN
My eyes ran over the words before dread settled deep into my chest. I was Marked, with no Aspect or abilities to my name, but that much was normal because I had not taken my Trial yet.
That was not what had me frozen.
I read the first line again, then a third time, as though the runes might have the decency to rearrange themselves while I was not looking.
The system I had written tied Domains to bloodlines.
Six gods, six Domains, and six great houses, one apiece, just as House Claiom had carried Dream for as long as the house existed.
That was the reason those houses held almost every Touched on the continent: being born a Claiom did not guarantee someone would be Marked, but if they were, their Domain was far more likely to be Dream.
Anomalies still happened. People occasionally awakened with a Domain their blood had no connection to, and my own protagonist had been one of them, so I would have accepted being an anomaly gladly.
My problem was the Domain itself.
Life, Death, Strength, Primal, Space, and Dream. Those were the six Domains I had created for the six gods, mostly because six was all my mind had managed to come up with at the time.
Fate had never been one of them.
A Domain identified which god’s lineage someone carried, nothing more, and somehow, inside a body that had never been meant to exist, I was carrying the lineage of a god I had never written.
A god that should not exist.