Hospitals smell the same in every world. Sharp. Bleached. Hollow.
Earth. Four years ago.
I lay in a hospital bed, twenty stories up in a building that looked more like a prison than a place for healing. My ribs were cracked, my lungs full of dust, and my hands still trembling from the fire that had taken everything.
My family. My home. My future.
The news called it an accident. A gas leak. But I knew better. There were things in the flames. Voices. Things no one else heard when the ceiling caved in and the walls turned to smoke.
They told me I wasn't meant to survive.
But I did.
A nurse entered my room once every hour, always with the same fake smile. "You're lucky," she said, the day I stopped screaming at night. "Not many make it out of a collapse like that."
Lucky.
The last thing I remembered was my sister's hand reaching for mine as the floor split. Her scream was still stuck in my ears when the world went white.
That night, the lights in the hospital flickered. Machines beeped wildly. And then… silence.
He stood at the foot of my bed.
Not a doctor. Not a nurse.
Tall. Robed in woven light. Skin like glass etched with stars. No face—just eyes, ancient and endless.
"Jason Talem," he said, voice like wind on broken glass. "You do not belong here."
I didn't scream. Didn't move. My body was paralyzed—but my mind knew.
"You should have died."
I swallowed. "Then why didn't I?"
"Because I broke the law to save you."
He extended his hand.
And in it burned a fragment of something I couldn't comprehend. A piece of power so pure it hurt to look at.
"I am Elion. Arbiter of Realms. And you are mine now."
That was the first moment I died.
Not in body. Not in soul. But in fate.
And the next time I opened my eyes… I was no longer in a hospital bed.
I was lying in a circle of scorched earth, under a sky with two suns. Birds with iron feathers screamed above me. The shard burned in my chest.
And Elion was gone.