A Trigger Between Worlds
The darkness that pulled Ethan under was not an absence of light but a presence of its own, heavy and absolute. It felt like falling, a swift, endless descent through a void that had no bottom. He let out a scream that was voiceless, a pure, silent cry of terror lost in the plummet. His heart beat frantically in his chest, a desperate, hammering rhythm against the crushing pressure.
Then, as abruptly as the fall began, it ended. He seemed to strike the bottom with a jolt that should have shattered bone, but instead, it was the thin mattress of the top bunk that met his back. For a few breathless moments, he lay there, his body rigid, convinced he had only experienced a nightmare. The eyes that had burned in the ceiling were gone. The cell looked much the same, a simple box of steel and concrete.
He glanced toward the front of the cell, and his breath caught. The door, heavy and solid, stood wide open, framing the empty corridor beyond. He blinked once, a slow, deliberate motion to clear his vision. When his eyes opened again, the door was closed, its wire-reinforced plexiglass window reflecting the dim light back at him. The lighting in the cell felt strange now, shifting with a subtlety that was more unnerving than any overt flicker.
Ethan remained still. He forced himself to breath slowly, to do his best not to panic, but his eyes locked on the cell door. It stood open again. Not ajar. Open. The reinforced frame cut a perfect rectangle into the dim corridor beyond. For a moment, there was no sound. No movement.
He blinked. The door was closed. Its window reflected the same soft, colorless light from before. The heavy lock was engaged.
He narrowed his eyes. The change in the lighting was surreal. It was subtle, but somehow vivid at the same time. The overhead fixture no longer gave off a steady glow. The quality of the ambience had shifted, like a filter being applied and removed. Shadows stretched at odd angles, as if the source had moved slightly to the left or right without altering its physical position.
Ethan sat up. The mattress creaked beneath him. He planted one hand on the wall and eased forward. The air felt thicker now, reminiscent of a room that had not been opened in days. He swung his legs down and climbed slowly off the top bunk.
His feet touched the floor.
He looked down.
Tom was gone. The bottom bunk sat empty. The blanket lay undisturbed, the pillow untouched. No sign of the man who had demanded rent for the top bunk. Ethan leaned closer. The sheets were hospital-tight. The kind of bed made by someone who knew how to pass inspection.
He turned away. When he looked back, the bed was different. The blanket hung loose over the edge, the pillow flattened, the sheet half-pulled from the corner. It looked slept in. Recently.
Ethan blinked again. The bed was made. He stepped back. His eyes moved deliberately now, tracing the edges of the frame, the seams of the mattress, the corners of the sheet. Every time he looked away, even for a second, something changed. He never saw it happen. The shift occurred in the space between observation and awareness.
He was alone. Not just in the cell. In the space between moments. He could feel it. The way a man feels when he steps into a room that should be familiar but also is not.
Ethan remained still. He stared at the door, not moving toward it. The urge to act warred with a mor immediate feeling. Caution. Doubt. He had seen it open. Now it was shut. That should have been impossible. Steel doors did not open and close on their own. Not without sound. Not without warning.
He glanced at the lights again. They had changed. Not in brightness, but in quality. The shadows in the corners seemed deeper, and the edges of the room blurred slightly if he did not focus on them directly. That was the part that unnerved him the most. The edges.
It felt like a dream.
He had not thought about dreams in years. Not real ones. Not the kind that left impressions instead of images. As a boy, they had come often. Vivid. Strange. Whole worlds built inside his head. He used to wake with the feeling that he had left something behind. Some part of himself still wandering a place that only existed at night. Then life had caught up. The Army. Deadlines. Divorce. Sleep had become maintenance. Dreams had thinned into fog. Blurs of memory and noise that slipped away before he finished brushing his teeth.
But this felt like one of the old ones, except he felt lucid. Thoughts formed with coherence and substance in his mind as if he were awake. He turned slowly, eyes lingering on the corners of the room. The bunk flickered in the edges of his vision. Made. Unmade. Made again.
If this was a dream, it was not the usual kind. It had weight. But not in the same way as the ones before. This felt different. Off. Slower somehow. He looked at the door again.
"If it's a dream," he muttered, "might as well see where it goes." He stepped forward.
As he neared the steel door, he braced himself. Earlier that day, pain had come with contact. The cold had surged through the mark in his hand like a brand soaked in ice. He waited for it now. Nothing happened. He placed his hand on the cold metal. There was no handle on his side of the cell, but at his touch the door swung open without resistance. Light exploded through the frame. Not fluorescent. Not artificial. Real daylight. Stark. Blinding. It poured into the cell in a flood, bouncing off steel and concrete with almost painful intensity.
He raised an arm to shield his eyes. The light stung, sharp and dry, like high-altitude sun over snow. For a heartbeat, he saw nothing but white. Then the world resolved as he stepped through.
He stood at the edge of a cliff. A narrow scrap of stone dropped away to nothing on all sides save for the door behind him. Far ahead, dominating the horizon, a mountain rose. It forced a massive river to split itself in half to continue on its way. The mountain was massive. Newborn. Still bubbling, with lava but also with tension and energy, its flanks venting smoke in long, trembling plumes. Its summit glowed redly.
Ethan took a step forward. The stone beneath his shoes was blackened, rough, and real. The wind struck his face with the dry sharpness of high rock. There were no sounds of cities. No hum of electric lines. Only wind, and the soft, distant growl of this mountain still deciding what it wanted to become.
He looked out across the landscape and felt something ancient stir beneath the surface of thought. Not memory. Recognition.
The wind carried the scent of scorched minerals and distant fire. Ahead, the mountain dominated in absolute silence, its slopes veined with cooling lava and streaked with blackened smoke. Steam hissed from fresh vents. The air shimmered where the heat met sky.
Then the mountain began to vanish. It did not collapse. It rewound. Stone drew inward. The summit sank. Canyons closed like healing wounds. Smoke and lava reversed course and funneled downward into vents that had not yet formed. In less than a breath, the towering mass had flattened into open land. A broad plain stretched across the horizon, barren and raw. A river meandered lazily through it, glinting under an empty blue sky.
At the center stood a man.
He was small at this distance, but Ethan recognized the outline. A tattered red coat, stained and sun-bleached, hung from his shoulders. The man stood motionless, then slowly raised his head.
"Ilyena!"
The scream shattered the quiet. Ethan flinched. The name struck something in him. Recognition and memory, and something deeper. A note held too long in the gut.
The figure raised both arms and from the heavens fell one bolt of lightning
It did not flicker. It did not branch. It descended in a single, flawless stroke. The light was blinding. It only existed for a heartbeat, but it seemed to slice a tear through the very fabric of the world. Ethan cried out and threw up an arm, but not fast enough. White filled his vision. He stumbled backward, struck the ground hard, and blinked furiously. Had he not been dreaming, the light would have taken his sight. He felt that with absolute certainty. The world shook.
The point of impact erupted outward. The plain split in a jagged circle, as if the ground had been cracked by a hammer the size of the sky. A groan followed, a deep, low vibration that came from everywhere at once. The river twisted violently, forced aside by the shifting land. Its current broke in two, racing around either side of the widening crater.
Then came the fire.
From the center of the rupture, molten stone exploded upward. Lava burst in wide arcs, each stream glowing with intense shades of orange and gold, splattering across the forming slopes of the rising cone. The mountain did not climb slowly like a hill. It surged with violent speed, like a wave arrested at the height of its crash. Layers of black rock spiraled upward, each one stacking upon the next with relentless force. Ash billowed outward, thick and dark, spreading through the air like a funeral veil.
The heat reached him. Even at this distance, it washed over Ethan in pulses. Not searing, but close. It pressed against his skin with a weight that should have scorched. He told himself again that this was a dream. That only in a dream could he stand so near and not be boiled alive by the energies radiating from that impossible eruption. Since he was still breathing, he figured it had to be true, but the heat was real enough to make him flinch. Real enough to make him wonder how long that illusion would hold.
Dragonmount rose into the sky, higher than anything in sight, terrible in its force and flawless in its shape. Ethan had never seen it in person, but he knew it instantly. The descriptions from the stories had been precise. He was dreaming. That much was certain. Somehow, though, he was dreaming of the prologue to The Eye of the World.
This time it really is just a dream, he thought somewhat reluctantly. What he had just witnessed—the lightning, the scream, the mountain's birth—matched the tale almost perfectly. His presence earlier today had not changed anything. Not the outcome. Not the path. That settled unpleasantly, a meal that disagreed with the stomach.
He wondered if the dream was showing him what should have happened or what had happened, after he had fled through the collapsing door and back into the real world. There was no answer.
Lava continued to pour from the mountain's peak, flowing in slow, gleaming streams. Below, the river thundered through fresh-cut gorges, its paths forced aside, the land reshaped beyond repair.
Ethan remained on the ground. He did not try to stand. His breath came short. His hands were pressed flat to the stone beneath him, anchoring him to a dream.
As the river carved its furious paths around the newborn peak, the land between them twisted into a rough island—jagged, steaming, and raw. From his vantage point on the cliff, Ethan watched the air above that island begin to distort. It shimmered faintly, like heat rising off asphalt. Then the shimmer thickened. Lines formed. Edges sharpened.
A figure stepped into view.
The man, the Betrayer, still wore black. The fabric still did not reflect light. It seemed to consume it. He stood motionless, hands at his sides, his head tilted upward toward the mountain's crown. His posture did not suggest awe. It radiated contempt.
Ethan knew rage when he saw it. The man was filled with it. But there was no tremor in his stance, no wild gesture. It was a cold, precise fury, the kind that burned slowly and never went out.
Though the distance between them was impossible, Ethan heard the words as clearly as if they had been spoken beside him.
"You cannot escape so easily, Dragon. It is not done between us. It will not be done until the end of time."
The man did not look up toward Ethan. He only stared at the mountain, as if willing it to fall.
Ethan remained where he had fallen, breath steadying, the memory of the mountain's birth still echoing in his limbs. The black-clad man stood far below on the island the Ethan's cliff overlooked, framed against the molten silhouette of Dragonmount, his presence as deliberate as it was corrosive. Ethan narrowed his eyes.
He had run before. That first encounter, Elan Morin, or whatever name he truly bore, had torn through his mind like a thunderclap. But this was different. This was his dream. It might not follow his rules, but it still began in his head.
Screw this guy, Ethan thought. I'm here and I can change things. I'll change this.
He turned slowly onto his stomach. The rock beneath him scratched at his arms as he began to crawl forward, elbows tight, shoes dragging in practiced rhythm. It was instinctive. Muscle memory from another life. He reached the edge of the cliff and froze.
Something had changed.
His body felt heavier. The texture of his shirt was wrong. He looked down.
His civilian clothes were gone. In its place were the drab, sharp lines of an Army combat uniform. Not a costume. Not a dream's impression. It was real to the touch. The weight of the armor, the rigidity of the plating, the familiar press of the Kevlar against his shoulders; all of it exactly as he remembered.
His hand reached back. He felt the bulk of a rucksack. Mag pouches. A canteen. Even the scratch of the name tape above his chest confirmed what he already knew.
Then he looked forward.
A Barrett M107 sniper rifle stood low-mounted on a bipod at the cliff's edge. The weapon gleamed faintly in the dream light, long and black and precise. Ethan's breath caught. He had trained with this gun, over and over, in the desert sun and the freezing wind. Its recoil, its weight, the way it sang when the bolt slid home; it all returned with exacting clarity.
His hands twitched. Not from nerves. From purpose. He knew what he intended to do.
Ethan's fingers traced the rifle's grip as he crawled forward. Every movement felt deliberate, even second nature. He reached the bipod and made sure it was fixed on solid ground. The Barrett M107, chambered in .50 BMG, was not a toy. He knew it well. It was the same platform he had loaded a thousand times in training.
He pressed the bolt release and ejected an empty magazine. He racked the bolt with a sharp click and inserted a loaded 10-round steel magazine. He heard the metallic snap as it locked into place. The magazine capacity was ten rounds—enough for a quick sustained engagement before reloading.
He pulled back the charging handle until it locked and let it forward. The crisp thunk confirmed the chamber was full. He thumbed the selector switch from safe to semi and watched his lane.
He knew what sort of round he had just set up for the fire. Match-grade armor-piercing .50 BMG rounds, each capable of penetrating over one inch of steel plate at range. These rounds could reach targets at over 1,800 meters with full accuracy and a maximum distance of roughly 4,000 meters.
Ethan lined up the sight. The optics were clear, calibrated to his eye. He knew the recoil would kick like an angry mule. He worked through the checks automatically: bolt locked home, safety fire-arm, magazine seated, bipod canted level.
He thought of his target—the black-clad man below, burning with contempt. He felt a tightness in his chest as he set the range mentally: fifteen hundred meters, maybe more. A hard shot, but not impossible, especially not in a dream.
He angled the rifle down. The crosshair centered on the man's chest. Even through his dream-logic, he understood the lethal potential of the round. A .50 BMG armor-piercing bullet slammed into bone and tissue with brutal force. It would perforate ribs, spiral through organs, and exit at supersonic speed, leaving devastation in its wake. He accounted for possible bullet drop at this distance and set the aim slightly higher, just above Elan Morin's head. With luck a head shot that would turn the Betrayer's skull into pudding, but Ethan would settle for a center mass hit if he could get it.
Ethan exhaled. His heartbeat steadied.
He placed his finger slowly on the trigger.