The river’s murmur faded under the weight of the demi-god’s stare, but John barely heard it. He stood very still, mind moving much faster than his body showed.

  Punishment. Imprisonment. War. Divine blood. Time itself as a crime.

  He weighed options, paths, consequences—calculating whether he could fight this being, whether he should, what kind of retaliation might fall on the tribe if he did. Each line of thought ended in too many unknowns.

  Then, cutting clean through his deliberations, a voice slid into his mind.

  Not from outside, not through the air. Inside.

  “I recommend you follow him.”

  The words were calm, dry, edged with the same understated authority John remembered. The mysterious old man—the one who had taught him to rewind his consciousness, who had nudged him toward the impossible—had spoken.

  No one else reacted. The demi-god’s expression didn’t shift. The Kanas remained tense behind him, unaware. The voice was only for John.

  He tried to reach back, even if only with a thought. Why? Where? What—

  Nothing. The presence had already receded, leaving only the echo of the brief instruction and the memory of trust.

  John exhaled slowly.

  He had trusted that old man once and gotten the power to defy fate itself. It had cost him a lot of effort, but it had also given him the chance to save everyone behind him now. In a world full of unknown authorities, that one had, at least, never lied.

  He lifted his chin and looked back at the demi-god.

  “OK,” John said. His voice was steady. “I will follow you.” He gestured sharply behind him. “But leave them out of it.”

  Both Kanas reacted instantly.

  “What? No!” the one on his right almost shouted.

  “We’re not letting you go alone,” the other protested, stepping forward. “You can’t just—”

  The grey man did not even glance at them. His gaze stayed on John, as if the words of anyone else were wind in the trees.

  “You are the temporal anomaly,” he said. “They are not my concern.” It was not comfort; it was a statement of scope.

  He lifted one hand.

  The air in front of him wavered, as if the light itself had been pinched and twisted. A vertical line appeared, hair-thin at first and then widening, cutting the world open. Within that line, something else showed—a space of muted color and shifting depth, like a corridor made of fog and distant light.

  A portal.

  The Kanas’ fear sharpened into panic.

  “John, don’t,” Kana on his left said, grabbing for his arm.

  “Think about this,” the other urged, voice breaking. “We can tell the Shaman, we can—”

  He turned to them.

  For a heartbeat, the three of them were as they had been on the rock moments before—a boy and two girls, blue eyes and silver hair and the quiet bond of shared danger. Only now, his eyes were harder.

  “Stay,” he said.

  They shook their heads in perfect sync. “No.”

  He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t plead. He just looked at them—truly looked—and let the command settle into his gaze. There was a gravity in him now, a weight born of dragons and gods and timelines broken and rewoven. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t dismissal. It was an order from someone who had decided that if there was a price to be paid, it would be his alone.

  The Kanas felt it. Their feet faltered.

  “Please,” he added, softer. “If this goes badly, I don’t want you anywhere near it.”

  That word—please—cut deeper than any shout.

  He stepped toward the portal.

  They moved too, trying to match him, but he held up a hand, palm toward them, as if pressing against invisible glass. His eyes met theirs one last time, dark and unflinching, and the look in them was clear: Trust me. Obey.

  Their bodies stopped even as their hearts screamed to go after him.

  John crossed the remaining distance and stepped into the portal. For a moment, his outline shimmered, edges blurring as the strange light wrapped around him. The demi-god followed without ceremony, passing through the tear as though walking through a door he’d used a thousand times.

  “John!” both Kanas cried.

  They lunged.

  But just as their feet struck the space where the portal opened, John turned within that thinning frame of light. The last thing they saw of him was his face, calm and resolute, eyes flashing a command that needed no words.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Stand back.

  Then the rift sealed.

  The line of light snapped shut, the air knitting itself whole as if nothing had ever been torn. The river flowed on, indifferent, only a few scattered bubbles left where a god-blooded boy and a demi-god had vanished.

  The two Kanas stumbled to a halt on the bare stones, hands reaching out to empty air. They stood there breathing hard, chests heaving, eyes wide.

  Slowly, they turned to each other.

  For the first time since their doubling, their identical faces were a perfect mirror of the same emotion: worry so sharp it edged into fear, and beneath it, a stubborn refusal to accept that this was the end of the story.

  “He left,” one whispered.

  “He’ll come back,” the other answered, though her voice trembled.

  They held each other’s gaze, two versions of the same girl, bound now not only by shared pasts, but by one more absence.

  Behind them, the river kept moving, as if holding the place where he had stood, waiting.

  John had stepped through unusual doors before.

  He knew the wrenching lurch of space folding, the brief weightlessness, the way sound cut out like someone had closed a door on reality. He braced for something similar now—stone, air, jungle, some kind of chamber.

  He did not expect the absence of everything.

  For an instant, there was nothing but a sensation of falling without motion, as if his body had forgotten which way was down. Then his feet found purchase, solid and cool, and he opened his eyes fully.

  It was like standing inside the night sky.

  All around them stretched a vast blackness, deeper than any moonless jungle, but not empty. In the distance, scattered like seeds, stars burned—some sharp pinpricks of white, others faint smears of silver light. They hung in every direction, with no ground, no horizon, no clear up or down. It felt less like a sky above and more like being suspended in the middle of space itself.

  Under his feet, a platform of light floated in the void.

  It was a broad, flat shape—its edges soft, its surface smooth and faintly luminous, as if condensed from moonlight. It didn’t cast shadows; instead, it seemed to be the source of a gentle glow that outlined John and the grey demi-god in pale radiance.

  Beyond their platform, others drifted.

  Dozens, maybe hundreds, hung at different heights and distances—discs, bridges, fragments of glowing geometry, some close enough to make out their contours, others reduced to distant halos. They shifted slowly, almost imperceptibly, gliding through the dark as though following some invisible pattern. Between them, the stars shone, giving the whole place the feeling of an impossible city without walls or buildings—just paths and islands of light scattered through infinity.

  John turned in a slow circle, taking it in.

  There was no air movement, but he could breathe easily. No sound but his own heartbeat and the faint hum of whatever power held the platforms aloft. He felt neither hot nor cold. It was as if the usual rules of being somewhere had been suspended.

  He walked toward the edge.

  The demi-god watched him but did not intervene. His red eyes reflected the distant stars, his grey skin taking on a faint glow from the platform beneath them.

  As John reached the rim, he saw that the light did not end abruptly; it faded into a soft edge, like mist thinning into darkness. Beyond that, there was nothing—just the void, and far below, other platforms glimmering like fallen fragments of a shattered constellation.

  He looked around him and saw other grey-skinned people walking around other platforms. When they reached the edge, they continued somehow.

  John was curious and he tested it.

  He set his foot down carefully, as if he meant to step off into empty space.

  Before his toes could pass the edge, light surged.

  A line of radiance shot out from the platform’s rim directly beneath his foot, solidifying into a step just as his weight came down. Another step formed under where the next footfall would land, then another, cascading downward in a gentle curve, each one appearing a split-second before he would have fallen through nothing.

  A stair of light, born in response to his intent, unfurled from the platform’s edge to carry him safely downward.

  He pulled his foot back, and the steps dimmed, then dissolved, fading seamlessly back into the void. Only the original platform remained, steady and unmoved beneath him.

  John looked down at his hands, then up at the scattered platforms again. A place between places, he thought. Built so no one ever truly falls.

  He glanced once at the demi-god, the question unspoken—for now—and then back at the endless dark, stars watching like distant, patient eyes.

  John watched another stair of light fade beneath his foot, then turned to the demi-god.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  The grey-skinned man surveyed the drifting platforms and distant stars as if seeing something entirely ordinary. “This is where we gather,” he said. “A place of our own, neither mortal nor divine. Our mastery over space allowed us to construct a world outside the more physical realm.” His red gaze returned to John. “But this does not matter right now. Follow me.”

  He stepped forward.

  Where his foot moved, a bridge of light grew in anticipation—lines of pale radiance stretching out to meet his stride, forming a narrow path that arched toward a nearby platform. John followed, boots meeting each new segment just as it solidified. Behind them, the bridges and stairs slowly dissolved, the platforms drifting on in their silent dance.

  They walked.

  Sometimes they descended on spiraling stairs that wrote themselves into existence beneath their feet, curving toward lower, wider discs. Sometimes they crossed thin, straight beams that reached across yawning gaps, stars spinning lazily far below. The void remained soundless, their steps making no echo, only the faint hum of the light itself accompanying them.

  Finally, they approached a larger platform.

  It dwarfed the others, a broad circle of concentrated luminance, its surface etched with faint geometric patterns that pulsed softly, like a heartbeat. At its center stood an imposingly carved chair—part throne, part anchor, rising from the platform as if grown out of the light itself.

  Seated upon it was another being.

  He was similar to the grey demi-god in form—tall, balanced, radiating that same contained stillness—but his skin was a deep, cool blue, like twilight caught in flesh. His eyes were a vivid yellow, bright as twin moons, and when they turned toward John, they seemed to cut through the darkness and the distance at once.

  As they stepped onto the platform, the blue-skinned entity rose from the chair in one smooth motion.

  “New blood,” he said, studying John with open interest.

  The grey demi-god stopped a respectful distance behind John. “He is the one who exterminated the black tigers,” he reported. “And he played with time.”

  A faint smile touched the blue one’s mouth, something between approval and appraisal. “Good,” he said, voice edged with a confidence that assumed authority. “He has some bases. He might be useful.”

  His yellow eyes brightened.

  The light in them flared, not outward like an attack, but inward, collapsing space around himself and John. The platform, the throne, the grey demi-god—all dropped away in an instant. There was no sensation of moving; the world simply blinked from one state to another.

  John stood in a small room.

  The vastness of the starfield was gone. Walls enclosed him now—smooth, pale surfaces with no visible seams, curving gently so the corners softened into the suggestion of a rounded chamber. The light was even and sourceless, neither too bright nor dim, casting no harsh shadows.

  Across from him stood the blue-skinned man, as composed as if he had merely taken a step to the side instead of shifting them both through space.

  The silence in the little room felt different from the silence outside—it was close, intimate, with nowhere for words to drift away.