Aster’s eyelids drag open like rusted shutters, his brain rebooting one error message at a time.
Someone’s shaking him.
Gently, annoyingly.
His limbs feel full of wet sand. His skull has all the internal clarity of a kicked beehive. But through the fog, there they are: stupidly bright cyan eyes staring down at him, wide with relief.
“You made it!” the man blurts, like he hadn’t entirely expected Aster to survive his homemade spirit-lobotomy. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually go through with it.”
Then the robed bastard throws his head back and laughs. Loud. Unfiltered. Like he’s just been told his dog didn’t die after all.
Great. At least one of them is having a cathartic experience.
Aster, meanwhile, feels like someone’s wrung out his soul and hung it up to dry.
His vision swims, but he catches it anyway—that flicker in the man’s face. Something warm. Familiar. Not pity. Not detached concern. Something worse.
Recognition.
That unsettles him more than the attic crackpipe ritual ever did.
“Sorry,” the man says, dragging himself back under control. “I haven’t been around people in a while. Guess I’m rusty.”
He offers a hand. “Matter.”
Aster stares at it like it might explode. His brain’s still loading basic motor function, but some pathetic fragment of social conditioning reaches out and shakes anyway.
“Aster,” he croaks. His own name sounds foreign in his mouth, like he’s trying on someone else’s teeth.
Matter’s grin pulls wider. His cyan eyes spark with something unreadable. He pumps Aster’s hand once and lets go.
“I’m guessing you’ve got questions,” he says, suddenly brisk, like they’re about to review a tax return. “I’ll answer what I can.”
That does it.
Aster barks out a laugh—sharp, dry, a little hysterical around the edges. “Yeah. First question: what in the everloving hell is this? What is the Astral Realm? Why does it feel like I huffed paint thinner and woke up inside a Pink Floyd album?”
Matter doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t sigh. Doesn’t give him the look sane people reserve for the terminally unstable. He just tilts his head slightly, weighing his answer.
“The Astral Realm,” he says at last, “is simple to answer on the surface. But if you go deeper, the answer becomes… impossibly complex.”
Aster groans. “Of course it does. God forbid anything in my life come with a short version.”
Matter jerks his chin toward the open window. “Come on. Easier to show you.”
Aster gets to his feet before his brain signs off on it. His body feels wrong—too light, too floaty, like someone’s turned gravity down to eighty percent and forgotten to mention it.
Something prickles at the back of his neck.
He turns.
And nearly chokes on his own spit.
There he is.
His body.
Sitting in the attic inside that faintly shimmering golden dome, folded in lotus position like a junkie Buddha halfway through enlightenment. Head slumped. Pipe still clutched in one hand. Motionless.
Too motionless.
It looks less like sleep and more like a corpse no one’s bothered to report yet.
Aster’s throat goes dry.
“Am I dead?” he rasps. “Am I a ghost now? Or is this some next-level fever dream where my unpaid taxes literally come to haunt me? Because honestly, I wouldn’t put it past the government.”
Matter doesn’t answer. He’s already halfway out the window.
“Keep up,” he calls.
Aster tears his gaze away from his own abandoned meat suit and scrambles after him, panic skittering up his spine.
Lucky he’s an orphan, he thinks wildly. No parents left to stumble into the attic and find their only son folded over a ritual circle, looking like he tried to overdose on both meth and occult nonsense in one efficient evening.
His thoughts are sprinting in twelve directions at once.
Ghost. Spirit. Hallucination. Psychotic break with architectural ambition.
Whatever this is, it feels too real to dismiss. His hands look solid. Feel solid. But the body in the attic begs to differ.
When he finally catches up to Matter, they’re standing on the roof.
The night air is cool, but not cold. Dream-cool. Wrong in a way that refuses to settle anywhere concrete.
Aster’s breathing is still ragged. He’s about to ask something stupid, like whether he even has lungs here, when he sees the city.
And forgets how to speak.
It’s the same nightmare he stumbled through a few days ago with his sanity hanging by a shoelace, except now he can see all of it.
The city sprawls beneath them like a fever dream mapped onto concrete. Buildings pulse under their own architecture, surfaces flexing like muscle beneath skin. Windows blink like pores. Trees erupt through asphalt and brick with obscene confidence, roots punching through roads and foundations as if civilisation has always just been a polite suggestion. Their leaves glow in impossible colours, dripping light into the skyline like someone spilled a neon hallucination and never cleaned it up.
Aster pointedly does not look too hard at the things moving between the streets.
No need to invite the panic back in for a second round.
Above them, the sky churns in colours his brain refuses to classify. Shades too green to be blue, too bruised to be purple, too wrong to belong to any natural atmosphere. The clouds fold and unfold like wet fabric being kneaded by an invisible hand.
“I thought it was a brain tumour, or sleep deprivation, or—” he gestures at nothing—the air, the sky full of magic nonsense—“this. What is this, Matter? Because I swear to god, if you tell me I’m still hallucinating—”
“You’re not,” Matter says. “Or—perhaps more accurately: the hallucinations you saw were the first leaks of this reality seeping in as your field started thinning.”
Aster’s about to ask what the hell that means when something the size of a German Shepherd suddenly zips overhead with a mechanical whine
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He jerks back just in time to see a metallic insect rocket past with the whine of a malfunctioning fighter jet—only for something larger to drop out of the sky and snatch it mid-flight.
There’s a crunch.
Aster flinches so hard he nearly steps off the roof.
The thing lands on a nearby ledge and tears into its prey without a shred of self-consciousness. Feathers the colour of wildfire. A jagged beak slick with insect guts. The body of some vulture-wolf nightmare stitched together by a committee of deeply unwell gods.
Aster stares at it.
“So it’s real,” he says flatly. “The mantis thing. The wasps. The leech. All of it.”
“Yes,” Matter says, as if they haven’t just watched a feathered murder machine shell a biomechanical dragonfly. “It’s real. And it’s what we call the Astral Plane.”
Aster says nothing. His brain is busy trying to escape through his left ear.
Matter gestures out over the city. “It overlaps with your world. Think of it as layered reality. The place you’re standing in now is the Astral Cradle—the region with the greatest overlap and the thinnest boundary between the Astral and you’re world, we call the Material Plane.”
Aster finally finds his voice. “So this—” he flings an arm at the psychedelic apocalypse around them “—is just sitting on top of reality all the time?”
“Like skin over muscle.”
Aster rubs a hand over his face. “And nobody can see it because…?”
“They’re shielded. Their Bio-Fields keep astral perception sealed.”
Aster frowns. “Their what?”
Matter points back toward the attic window. “The golden barrier around your body. It’s called a Bio-Field. Simplified, it’s the thing that keeps your spirit anchored to your body and prevents ordinary humans from perceiving the Astral.”
Aster blinks. “So nobody can see this because they’re wrapped in a magic soul condom.”
Matter pauses.
“Essentially, yes.”
“Oh, good.”
“You dissolved yours when you smoked the crystal.”
That wipes the humour clean off Aster’s face.
He looks down at himself, at his hands, at the body he knows is still sitting in the attic behind them.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “And here I thought things had peaked at ‘unmanageable.’”
The silence that follows is punctuated by the wet, disgusting sound of the bird-thing swallowing.
“And this place,” Aster says slowly, “is full of things like that?”
Matter follows his gaze to the creature now grooming itself with the casual air of a housecat.
“Yes,” he says. “And much worse.”
Aster swallows.
“This one’s a scavenger,” Matter continues. “Low-tier. It feeds on lesser aetheric organisms like the insect. Most of what you’ll find in the Cradle falls into the lower classifications. Nothing above standard F.”
Aster glances sideways. “There’s a ranking system for monsters.”
“There’s a ranking system for everything here,” Matter says. “From F-tier bottom feeders to S-tier entities capable of levelling continents. The Cradle is the shallowest end of the pool, but even here everything is competing. Feeding. Evolving. Struggling upward.”
He points toward the roiling sky.
“Only when they cross the Astral Storm do they gain access to higher forms of Aether. Real power begins there.”
Aster follows the gesture, eyes narrowing at the impossible storm massing above them. It doesn’t look like weather. It looks like a nervous breakdown made meteorological.
“The Storm forms the boundary between the Cradle,” Matter says, sweeping a hand over the city below, “and the Astral Archipelago beyond it. The Cradle is saturated with Psychic Aether—energy generated by the Material Plane’s collective consciousness. Fear. Desire. Violence. Grief. Hope. All of it leaks into this layer and accumulates in a substance referred to as Myst.”
Aster stares at him.
Matter continues, voice steady. “That psychic runoff, drifts, gathers, and sometimes—if enough of it coheres around a strong enough pattern—it forms life. Predators. Parasites. Scavengers. Your feathered friend over there is an amalgamation of survival instinct, hunger, aggression, and accumulated psychic residue that managed to become self-sustaining.”
Aster looks back at the bird-thing, now grooming itself with insect gore still on its beak.
His brain stalls.
“You’re telling me that thing is made from people’s feelings.”
“In part.”
“So that’s what—someone’s panic attack that grew feathers?”
Matter’s mouth twitches. Not quite a smile.
“More or less.”
Aster lets out a strangled laugh. “Fantastic. Humanity’s emotional runoff becomes bird-demons. Could’ve been butterflies. Could’ve been rabbits. But no. Apparently our subconscious really committed to the apocalypse aesthetic.”
Matter folds his arms. “The Astral Plane is as vast and varied as human thought itself. These creatures feed on what leaks through. They evolve through exposure and consumption. Everything here is trying to climb.”
“To what?”
Matter looks back to the storm.
“Beyond the Storm, to the Astral Archipelago. Floating island chains stretching around the globe, nearly ten times the landmass of the Material Plane. That’s where Elemental Aether becomes abundant. Where cultivation accelerates. Where most of the Aware live.”
Aster’s head tilts. “The Aware.”
“Mhm. People like me and you. Cities, schools, kingdoms, factions. Entire civilisations layered above your world. Hidden, but not absent. Their influence has shaped more of the material plane’s history than you realise.”
Aster’s mind reaches instinctively for maps, politics, economics—some rational framework to slot this into—and finds only static and a rapidly worsening headache.
Matter keeps going.
“Above the Archipelago, the Aether becomes even purer in the Astral Caverns—vast tunnel systems carved through dense Astral Stone, mapped over generations. Beyond those lies the Astral Wilds. The deepest and most hostile region of the plane. That’s where cultivation reaches its peak.”
Aster drags a hand through his hair.
“So it’s not all one overlapping dimension,” he says slowly. “Parts of it sit on top of Earth. Parts don’t.”
“Yes.”
“And all of this”—he gestures at the city, the bird-thing, the storm, the glowing trees, the living architecture—“is basically one giant ecosystem built out of psychic runoff and things eating each other on the way up.”
For the first time, Matter looks genuinely pleased.
“That’s exactly it,” he says.
His gaze fixes on Aster.
“Everything in the Astral feeds, absorbs, and grows through Aether. That process is called cultivation. It’s not optional. It’s the fundamental law of this plane. Every creature, every plant, every being either cultivates or gets consumed by something that does.”
Aster pictures it all at once—this entire reality as a vertical food chain, everything clawing its way upward through violence, hunger, and sheer refusal to die.
A pyramid built out of teeth.
His mouth feels dry.
“So,” he says after a moment, “you dragged me into a nightmare ecosystem powered by humanity’s collective breakdowns because…?”
Matter watches him for a beat, unreadable.
“Because something inside you has been feeding on your Bio-Field,” he says. “Thinning it. Wearing it down. Pushing it toward collapse.”
Aster stills.
Oh.
Right.
That.
Matter’s voice softens, and somehow that’s worse than if he’d shouted.
“I’ve been holding it together for twenty years. Stabilising it where I could. Buying time. But I can’t do that anymore.”
Aster doesn’t answer.
Somewhere beneath the panic, a colder instinct kick in—the one that kept him functional in every catastrophe his life had previously coughed up.
Not now, it says.
File the panic away.
Get the rules first. Fall apart later.
He exhales slowly through his nose.
“Who are the Aware, exactly?” he asks, deliberately stepping around the parasite-shaped landmine for now.
Matter’s mouth twitches, but he lets the redirection happen.
“The Aware,” he says, “aren’t a species. They’re a continuity. A hidden lineage of humans who learned to perceive, survive, and eventually manipulate the Astral. Every age has had them—shamans, mystics, prophets, scientists, heretics. People who refused to stop at the surface of reality.”
His gaze drifts skyward, as if he’s reading something old written in the clouds.
“In the beginning there were only the Forgotten. Humanity’s earliest ancestors. Roughly fifty thousand years ago, they began crossing into the Astral involuntarily in their sleep.”
Aster grimaces. “That sounds deeply inconvenient.”
“It was fatal for many of them,” Matter says. “The Astral then was less stable than it is now—raw, predatory, chaotic. They had no protections and no understanding of what was happening to them. But over generations they adapted. They learned to navigate it. To survive it. Eventually, they developed the first elixirs and methods of permanent crossing.”
He looks back at Aster.
“Once they did, they brought others in. Those who came after them became what we now call the Aware.”
Aster folds his arms.
“Fine. Mystical hidden society. Got it. Now let’s skip to the useful part. How do you know my father?”
His voice catches on the word father, traitorously soft.
“And what the hell is this parasite you keep dangling over my head?”
For the first time, Matter’s composure slips.
Only a little. But enough.
His gaze goes distant, shadowed by something old and ugly.
“I met your father in Galamad,” he says.
Aster frowns. “Galamad?”
“An Astral school. South African branch. One of hundreds. It trains initiates—people like you—to survive here.” Matter pauses. “If things go well, it’ll be your next destination.”
Aster opens his mouth.
Matter cuts him off with a look.
“That’s if you live long enough to get there.”
Right.
Fantastic.
“Your father and I…” He exhales through his nose, a bitter sound. “We didn’t get along at first. Too alike. Too stubborn. Always butting heads. Until your mother…”
Something softens in his face at the mention of her.
“She brought balance. Forced us to put aside our pride. Taught us to work together. For her.”
“We studied together. Fought together. Rose through the ranks—all three of us. In the Caverns, we made names for ourselves. And when your parents’ families arranged their marriage…”
His eyes flick back to Aster.
“…they planned to fully unite two powerful South African bloodlines under one name, threatening the fragile balance of power held there up until that time.”
Matter looks away now, shoulders heavy.
“And that’s when certain Legacy families made their move.”
His voice drops, turning colder.
“They despised the union. Feared what the power imbalance would mean for their family. So they cursed the unborn child—they cursed you.”
His hands curl into fists at his sides.
“They sent something from beyond the Astral borders. A parasite. A creature of vast destruction. A Void Wyrm.”
Aster stares at him.
“A what?”