Aster opens his eyes to the grey-washed ceiling of the real world and lies there blinking while the damp cotton of the Material Plane settles back over his senses.
Waking up is, for once, the easy part.
Everything here feels muted. The colours are duller, the air heavier, like someone has replaced reality with an old VHS tape and forgotten to adjust the contrast. No celestial grandeur. No soul-rattling pressure. Just dust, stillness, and the faint hum of city life leaking through the windows.
Just gravity. Silence. And the fact that Matter is dead.
That fact sits on his chest like a boot. Matter is dead. Not waiting in some higher metaphysical waiting room to dispense another cryptic life lesson. Dead. And the whole thing still refuses to fit inside his skull properly. Aster has barely known the man. A few visions, a handful of dry exchanges, and then a sacrificial ritual that carved a parasite into Aster's soul and left a crater where his ribs used to be.
He stays still for a moment, hoping the ache in his chest might turn out to be a dream too.
It doesn't.
The insulting part is how rested he feels.
His body—the traitorous meat husk—has spent the last day comfortably comatose while his astral self got dragged through divine bureaucracy, existential horror, and whatever the hell Blenkinsop counts as sexual education. Now it stretches and realigns like it has just come back from a spa weekend. Joints pop. His spine cracks. Limbs remember how to function with an enthusiasm he doesn't appreciate.
With a groan that feels more emotional than physical, he pushes himself out of the chair and stands.
His stomach growls hard enough to count as a political statement.
Right. Food.
Matter's final conversation had happened just over twenty-four hours ago. The fasting had started a week before that. Which meant he hadn't eaten properly in days.
Breakfast first. Emotional collapse after.
As the omelette hisses in the pan and the cappuccino machine gurgles its way toward usefulness, Aster finds himself briefly offended by the surreal normality of it all. Twenty-four hours ago he'd been watching a man die in order to shove an ancient cosmic problem into his soul. Now his greatest accomplishment is not burning breakfast.
He takes the plate and mug up to the roof.
The city sprawls below him in its usual organised indifference—concrete veins, steel bones, glass teeth. Rigid. Predictable. Dead in all the ways the Astral Plane isn't. He eats slowly, staring over the skyline and feeling faintly insulted by the pigeons. After floating islands, soul storms, and cosmic wildlife, they seem aggressively underqualified.
By the time he drains the last of the cappuccino, it is ten.
He has the whole day before class in Galamad. Plenty of time to spiral.
The house behind him looms like a mausoleum. Matter lingers in it anyway—in the walls, in the silence, in the ugly little fact that Aster hadn't asked enough questions before the man went and got himself martyred. He can already feel the thoughts circling, sharpening their claws.
You could've saved him.
You should've asked more.
He died because you existed.
Aster stands abruptly, brushing crumbs off his shirt like they are the problem.
No. Not today.
He'd spent the last three weeks hiding inside 7 Heart Lane, waiting for the world to stop trying to eat him. If Matter had been right, the ritual is done and the Wyrm Eaters are off his back. Time to test the theory.
So, with grief in his chest and common sense apparently on leave, Aster shoves his hands into his pockets and steps out into Johannesburg.
________________________________________
Johannesburg is loud in a way the Astral Plane never had the audacity to be.
Aster moves through its streets like a ghost reluctantly reinserted into the land of the living. It takes him twenty minutes to walk from Matter's suburb to the city proper—twenty minutes of clipped hedges, cracked sidewalks, and late-morning joggers politely nodding at the same man who, a week ago, had been sprinting down these roads swinging a broken street sign at invisible horrors.
He hopes nobody had CCTV.
Then the city hits.
The air thickens with exhaust, fried food, sweat, roasting maize, and something that might once have been meat. Taxi horns bleat like aggravated geese. Street vendors shout over one another. Somewhere nearby, a woman is conducting an entire domestic war over speakerphone. It is chaotic, overheated, and deeply comforting in a masochistic sort of way.
The Astral Plane has been too much—too vast, too beautiful, too important. Like being handed the secrets of the universe only to discover they came with monthly instalments and complimentary schizophrenia. Johannesburg, by contrast, makes no such promises. It is just capitalism with body odour and traffic.
He should feel grounded in it. Instead he feels overfull.
Matter. The ritual. The council. The parasite in his chest. The impossible colours of the Astral still cling to the edge of his vision like afterburn. He knows now that none of it had been a hallucination. Which only makes Matter's absence feel sharper. The man had left him with a void in his chest and approximately no user manual.
Aster has questions. About his parents. About the infection. About why any of this had landed on him.
All of them are now trapped in the corpse of a man who'd died keeping a promise Aster hadn't even known existed.
He barely notices the streets thinning as he drifts toward the edge of the business district. Tower blocks rise ahead of him, hard-edged against the pale sky. He crosses an intersection on autopilot, bumping shoulders with strangers who have no idea they are passing a man who might, at some point, become a planetary liability.
He envies them.
Galamad is next. With it, answers. Maybe. Because nothing says welcome to cosmic horror quite like structured academic curriculum.
His thoughts are still circling when the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
Someone is watching him.
Aster stops and turns.
Nothing obvious. Just pedestrians, traffic, movement. Nobody staring. Nobody strange.
The feeling stays.
It isn't the Wyrm Eaters. The parasite in his chest would have started writhing if they were near. This is something else. Something human.
He picks up the pace, weaving through the crowd and trying to look casual. Casual, in his case, mostly means pretending he isn't already planning five escape routes and a murder.
Then he catches it—a dark alley in the corner of his eye, tucked between two buildings like the city has forgotten to finish swallowing it.
His heart skips.
A blur of motion.
Something drops over his head.
Darkness slams down.
There isn't even time to shout. One second he is walking, the next he is yanked sideways through a burst of force and thrown hard into something metal. The impact knocks the breath from his lungs. A second later the trunk lid crashes shut above him with a finality that makes the air itself flinch.
And in the dark, breathless and folded into cold steel, Aster has one clear thought:
He has survived gods, rituals, cosmic parasites, and grief.
But he has not, apparently, survived Johannesburg.
Not yet.
________________________________________
The bag comes off his head in one violent jerk.
Aster flinches as light punches his retinas before he simply squints—because acknowledging reality means acknowledging who's smirking at him like a crocodile in loafers.
"Frikkie," Aster mutters flatly, blinking away the stars in his vision.
Of course, it's him. I was starting to worry this day might end with a shred of dignity.
Sergeant Frikkie—the once-decorated cop turned crime-scented fungus—sits across from him like a man who hasn't spent the last decade converting police brutality into a full-time hustle. His hands are folded politely on the table, as if they haven't broken at least three ribs and a few spirits in the last week alone.
The room smells like sweat, damp concrete, and cheap cologne worn as war paint. Frikkie always carries himself like Johannesburg owes him a medal for surviving its rot—conveniently forgetting that he's become one of its most infectious parts.
"Well, well," Frikkie drawls, arms spread like they're old friends meeting at a braai.
"Look who decided to skip a payment."
Aster's head throbs as he tries to sit up. "Fifteen thousand," he mutters. "I missed one payment. Not a war crime."
Frikkie tutts like a disappointed uncle. "A payment's a promise, Aster. And you don't break promises to me."
He leans forward, meaty elbows sinking into his knees, his smile all teeth and zero warmth. "Especially not when you're living in a three-point-six million rand house registered in your name."
Aster blinks. "You checked the title?"
"Of course I did," Frikkie says. "Imagine my surprise. You, with property. Fancy car. Cooped up for days on end doing god knows what. And here I thought you were just another little street rat dodging my ledger."
The number in Aster's head balloons before Frikkie even says it.
"Your balance," Frikkie continues, "has been adjusted. Interest, reassessment, and a convenience fee for my time and the two goons it took to stuff your limp body in a car."
Frikkie grins. "R1.8 million."
Aster stiffens. "You just added six hundred thousand for a week late?! That's not interest. That's armed robbery."
Frikkie shrugs. "Welcome to the economy."
Aster opens his mouth—to explain, to negotiate, maybe to offer a tasteful bribe—but a knock at the door interrupts him.
Frikkie doesn't even turn. "Bring her in."
Aster clenches his jaw, trying to gather his thoughts. He has enough. Barely. Matter left him just over two million in cash and stocks before he'd need to touch his house and car. Paying Frikkie off now would clean his account, cripple his cultivation budget, and leave him crawling for every spiritual crumb until the next loan comes knocking.
But he'd be free. Clean slate.