The first thing he felt was the rattle. A low, metallic groan beneath his skull, like the sound of distant thunder wrapped in rusted gears. Then came the weight—a softness that shouldn't have felt so heavy. Velvet, perhaps. Damp. The man opened his eyes.
The world around him was smeared in slow, dragging motion. The ceiling above was a pale beige, cracked from age, with a flickering brass light swaying in rhythm to some distant turn.
The smell in the air was a musty blend of copper and old wood, like a museum left to rot. He sat up slowly, his fingers brushing against green cushions with gold-trimmed seams. The seat was unfamiliar, yet worn in a way that suggested countless lives had rested here before him.
He blinked hard. Once. Twice.
He was on a train.
Not a modern one. No steel and plastic, no glowing safety signs or cheerful conductors. This was a carriage pulled from forgotten history—wood-paneled walls, oil lamps casting shadows that danced far too slowly, and windows with thin curtains that swayed even though there was no wind.
His name—what was his name? It stumbled on the tip of his tongue. Claine. That felt right. Claine?.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, as a deep and disquieting silence filled the space around him. No chatter. No conductor's voice. No passengers. Just the hum of motion and the clatter of tracks he couldn't see.
Drawn like a moth to a question, Claine turned to the window.
The landscape outside bled past in unnatural slow motion.
At first, it was simply… odd. A valley where the trees bent toward the ground as if wilting from a forgotten sun. Then, the ground became liquid—an ocean, but wrong. The waves rose upward, gravity-defiant, falling into the sky instead of crashing down.
Deep beneath the translucent surface, he swore he saw fish swimming in perfect reverse, their tails pulling them forward. The sea itself climbed like a waterfall in reverse, breaching over the sky and folding into itself like a looped film.
Claine's breath caught. He blinked. The sea was gone.
Now there is a frozen cityscape. Skyscrapers mid-collapse, each one tilted at unnatural angles, fragments of glass and steel suspended in air. A chunk of building hovered inches above a broken street. A car was frozen in mid-air, its wheels no longer spinning. A person—or the shadow of one—was trapped mid-fall, arms outstretched, mouth open in silent scream.
The scene was silent. Not quiet. Silent. As if even sound had been pinned in place.
He couldn't look away.
The next moment, it shifted again. The train slid past a desert—a world washed in pure white, featureless, blinding. No sky. No horizon. Just white. And then, far above—suspended like a hole punched through the void—was a dot. Crimson. Not a sun, not truly. It had no warmth, no light. Just color. A red eye staring down. Watching.
Claine pressed his hand to the window. The glass felt warm.
And then the children appeared.
They walked in a line along a crooked path beside the rails. All of them moved backwards. Not just their steps—their clothes fluttered in reverse, hair flowed the wrong way, even the dust they kicked up returned to their shoes. No sound. Just silent, looping retreat. Their faces were empty—not blank, but… absent. Like they'd been drawn and then erased halfway.
Claine's heart thundered.
He staggered back from the window, chest rising in sharp bursts. His breath fogged the cold glass as he backed into his seat, eyes fixed forward now. He didn't want to look again. He didn't want to know what came next.
The carriage didn't react. The train pressed on.
He looked up at the ceiling again. That light—the swaying bulb—it no longer flickered. It pulsed. In time with his heartbeat. Faster when he panicked. Slower when he breathed. He tried to test it, closing his eyes and slowing his breath. The light dimmed.
What the hell was this place?
Claine pressed his palms together. They felt real. Too real. His skin prickled with cold sweat. His nails dug into his palm. It hurt. It had to be real.
But then—if this was real, why didn't it feel like anything he remembered? Why couldn't he remember boarding? Or… where he was going? Did trains even have destinations anymore?
He turned back toward the hallway connecting the carriages. It stretched too long. The doors at the end were distant—too distant. As if the car had stretched. He leaned into the aisle, squinting. The walls pulsed slightly, almost as if breathing.
And outside—another change.
A forest now. But the trees were upside down, roots stretching toward a sky made of cracked glass. The moon hung beneath them, swinging like a pendulum from the earth's belly. Birds moved like stuttering frames in an old projector, heads twitching at impossible angles.
Claine whispered aloud to himself: "This isn't real."
But no one corrected him.
The silence answered instead.
Behind him, the window glass trembled faintly. A sound, barely perceptible, tapped on the edge of hearing—like whispers in water. He turned sharply, but saw only his reflection. Dim. Pale. Eyes wide.
And behind his reflection…
No. Nothing. Just empty seats.
The light above him dimmed again.
Somewhere down the carriage, something creaked. A footstep?
He wasn't alone.
And yet… he was.
As the train slipped onward through impossible worlds, Claine sat rigid, spine tense, hands gripping the armrests with white-knuckled force. His thoughts spiraled. Dreams couldn't hurt, right? Hallucinations had limits. But this? This was layered, patterned, a world with rules he hadn't learned yet.
The door at the end of the carriage groaned.
He stood up slowly. The hum beneath his feet changed pitch—subtle, but unmistakable.
The train wasn't just moving through space.
It was moving through… something else.
And he wasn't sure he wanted to know where it stopped.