Glint had stopped lurking at the edges of our camp and started acting like he’d always been part of the group. Right now, he was perched like a smug little monarch on Garrick’s shoulder, his lustrous fur catching the filtered sunlight through the trees. Garrick pretended to be annoyed, but he’d never actually removed him once. He even fed him a piece of jerky that morning.
The path to Maldon twisted through dense forest, roots thick across the trail, the air laced with the kind of pressure that made your teeth ache if you weren’t used to magic. And on the horizon, partially veiled by trees, we could finally see it—Maldon.
Even from here, the city looked massive. Its outer walls were black stone and impossibly tall, like someone had decided to build a fortress out of the night sky. It loomed like a warning. A final checkpoint between us and whatever came next.
I should’ve been focused on that.
But the orb had other plans.
It started as a faint thrum in my palm—like distant thunder. A ripple under the skin. I slowed my pace instinctively, frowning down at my hand as the heat spiked and the sensation spread, sharp and sudden, all the way to my shoulder.
[SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED]
I stopped walking.
The others moved a few steps ahead before noticing.
And that’s when I saw it.
Tucked between two gnarled trees just off the trail, half-hidden in shadow and flickering light, was a portal.
But not like the normal ones.
This one buzzed.
Visibly.
Audibly.
The edges weren’t stable—more like static being bent into the shape of a door. Purple light flickered, surged, then glitched. The surrounding grass was warped and crackling, the soil was pulsing faintly with corrupted magic.
It shouldn’t have been there.
It didn’t want to be there.
But it was.
And, as usual… no one else reacted.
Garrick kept walking.
Thorne was talking to Calla about something, half-laughing at a joke I hadn’t heard.
Glint sat completely still on Garrick’s shoulder though, ears forward, tail stiff—locked onto the portal like a predator sensing something its hunter couldn’t see.
I stared at the rift, and my stomach turned.
This wasn’t like the first one.
This felt worse.
More wrong.
And somehow, louder.
“Hold up.”
I stopped so suddenly that Glint chirped in surprise from Garrick’s shoulder, his little claws digging in for balance. My arm was already half-raised, pointing toward the shimmer wedged between the trees.
The others turned around one by one.
Calla arched an eyebrow. “What now?”
Thorne didn’t say anything at first, but the expression on her face already said enough. Suspicion. Irritation. That creeping edge of ‘not again.’
Garrick gave me a squint. “You see something?”
I gestured at the flickering distortion. “Do you guys see that?”
They followed my gaze, looked right past it, then looked back at me like I was the one glitching out.
Garrick shook his head. “See what?”
Calla let out a long-suffering breath. “Felix. Please tell me you’re not doing this again.”
“I’m not doing anything—”
Thorne cut in, arms crossed, already bracing for the spiral. “Felix, we talked about this.”
Yeah. We had. Back when I told them about the hidden dungeons, the weird loot, the system anomalies that kept stacking up like a bug report no one wanted to fix. And none of them had said I was lying.
They just didn’t believe me.
But Glint did.
His fur bristled on Garrick’s shoulder, ears flattened tight against his skull, low growl vibrating from deep in his chest. His eyes were locked on the distortion, pupils sharp slits. Not playful. Not curious. He saw it.
Same as me.
I hesitated, Hollow’s voice uncoiling in the back of my mind.
“You won’t even notice it happening… until one day, you wake up, and you’re me.”
My throat went dry. The impact of that warning sat heavy on my chest.
But I couldn’t ignore this.
Not again.
“I have to know,” I said quietly.
I stepped toward the trees.
Glint leaped from Garrick’s shoulder and landed softly beside me. I gave him a quick scratch behind the ears—more for my own nerves than his—then glanced back at the others.
“I swear, I’ll be fine. Just… let me prove it.”
They didn’t stop me.
And as I turned toward the portal, with its light flickering across my vision like a system error in real time, I stepped forward—
—and vanished.
The moment I stepped through it, the world cracked.
No dramatic shift. No blinding light. Just… nothing.
Sound vanished.
Not muffled—gone. No rustling leaves. No chirping birds. Not even the sound of my own breathing.
I stood still, waiting for something to move. For my heartbeat to catch up. For my feet to hit solid ground.
Then they did.
Sort of.
The surrounding terrain shimmered like a half-loaded memory. Textures flickered in and out of existence—patches of grass blinking between states, stone going from smooth to jagged with no transition. The air felt wrong, too thin or too thick or just off. I couldn’t even tell what time of day it was. The sky looked like static.
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And all around me?
Water.
A vast, endless ocean stretched out to every horizon, dark and unbroken—except for the one patch of ground beneath my boots. An island. Maybe a hundred feet across. Rock and dirt and a single, twisted tree in the center, its leaves frozen mid-rustle like someone had paused the animation halfway through.
The interface flickered at the edges of my vision. It struggled to stay stable, elements popping in and out like they couldn’t decide if they existed here. Even the health bar had a flicker—one second full, the next corrupted with a thin purple haze.
I swallowed.
It didn’t echo.
This wasn’t a dungeon.
It was a mistake.
Something unfinished.
A question the system hadn’t answered properly.
I took one slow step forward, the ground beneath my boot glitching from dirt to stone to water and back again.
Whatever this place was—it wasn’t meant to be here.
And neither was I.
At first, I thought it was just another glitch.
The air shimmered near the edge of the island, like heat rising from a road—and then he stepped out.
Barefoot. Thin. Awkward.
Fourteen, maybe.
And very, very familiar.
My breath caught.
The kid wasn’t just a lookalike. He was me. Back when my voice cracked every other word, and I still thought anger could protect me from everything else. His posture, his eyes—tight with something like defiance and hurt all mixed up together. I knew that version of myself too well.
He looked at me.
And then he charged.
Instinct kicked in. I dodged left, pivoted, and brought a dagger up—but didn’t strike. Not at first.
“What the hell—”
He came at me again. Wild. Untrained. But fast.
I moved without thinking—blade scraping across his side in a shallow line. He staggered, and the wound flickered, like reality itself didn’t know whether to bleed or break. But I felt it on my side too.
I didn’t have time to breathe before the second one appeared.
Older this time.
Broad-shouldered. Confident. Jaw tight. A version of me I hadn’t reached yet—but maybe one I could’ve, if the world had gone differently.
He didn’t hesitate.
He came in hard, every strike calculated. Precise. Like a version of me who’d stopped hoping and started surviving.
I blocked. Parried. Ducked a slash that would’ve taken my head off.
“What are you?” I hissed, backpedaling.
They didn’t speak.
The third one came last.
Older. Much older. Not ancient—but worn down. Lines under the eyes. Scars across the arms. His expression was… tired. Not weak—just like he’d seen too much. Lost too much. Eyes full of things I didn’t want to understand.
He didn’t rush.
He just stood there.
Watching me.
Judging me.
Like he was deciding whether or not I was worth the trouble.
My hands trembled on the hilts of my daggers.
This wasn’t just a fight. It was a mirror. And every time I struck, some part of me screamed that I was carving away pieces of what I might become. Or what I’d tried to leave behind.
What if killing them erased something important? What if this was the future?
What if one of them was who I was meant to be?
I gritted my teeth, backing away slowly, pulse thundering in my ears.
I didn’t want to kill them.
But I wasn’t sure I could survive if I didn’t.
I slashed again—just enough to create space—and the younger me crumpled, flickering like a skipped frame in a broken reel. Not bleeding. Not even screaming. Just… glitching. Like reality couldn’t decide whether he should still exist.
The air around us groaned.
Like the world itself had a hairline crack that was starting to spread.
[UNSTABLE INSTANCE]
The notification flashed across my vision, red and pulsing, like a warning sign built into the bones of the system.
The ground buckled beneath my feet. The edge of the island shimmered—fractured, like glass under pressure. I staggered, looked around—and froze.
They were crawling out of the jungle now.
Not monsters.
Not beasts.
Me.
Over and over again. A parade of shadows. Some younger. Some older. One wore a cloak like mine, only darker—ripped and charred. One limped, dragging a broken leg behind him. Another had no eyes at all, just two static-filled pits where his gaze should’ve been.
They didn’t roar.
They didn’t cry.
They just came.
Silent.
Endless.
And my lungs seized in my chest as the question took hold again—what happens if I kill them? What happens if I kill… me?
The orb throbbed like a second heartbeat in my pocket.
My feet moved before I even made the decision.
I just ran.
Hard.
Shadow Step—flash. I blinked across the fractured ground, skipping over broken terrain like a stone on water. The world twisted around me—trees with no roots, sky with no sun, ocean with no horizon.
More doppelg?ngers emerged from the edges, reaching. Failing. Whispering things I couldn’t hear but felt in my bones.
Glyphs burned across the jungle trees, shifting and stuttering like they were alive.
They watched me.
They knew me.
[UNSTABLE INSTANCE]
[CORRUPTED PATH DETECTED]
I skidded down a slope of broken stone, vaulted over a collapsed memory of a bridge, and saw it—the exit portal. Glitching. Twitching. Waiting.
A breath caught in my throat.
Then, right as I reached for it—
[DO NOT LOOK BEHIND YOU]
The message burned across my vision. White text. Black background. Not like the usual system interface.
Something else wrote that.
I didn’t argue.
I didn’t look.
I Shadow Stepped—
And the world vanished behind me in a burst of static and silence.
I landed hard on my ass.
No grace. No style. Just a messy sprawl of limbs and panic as I tumbled out of the glitch and slammed into the dirt with enough force to knock the wind from my lungs.
Everything rushed back at once—the scent of leaves, the brush of wind on my skin, the warmth of sunlight on my face. But none of it felt real. Not after what I’d just seen.
I stayed on the ground for a second, gasping, hands clutching at the grass like it might anchor me to something that made sense.
A shadow passed over me.
Then another.
I looked up—dizzy, unsteady—and saw them.
Thorne. Garrick. Calla. Glint too, perched on Garrick’s shoulder, ears pinned back, eyes wide.
They were all staring at me.
Like I’d vanished into thin air and just reappeared out of nowhere.
Which, to be fair… I had.
Calla kneeled down beside me, her voice calm but tight. “Felix… are you okay?”
I blinked up at her. My mouth opened. Closed. Words tried to form but got stuck somewhere between my lungs and my spine.
Thorne took a slow step forward, her arms crossed, but her usual scowl was gone. She wasn’t angry. She looked…. concerned.
“That portal,” she said quietly. “You went in.”
I nodded, swallowing hard. “Yeah.”
Garrick’s brow furrowed. “You were gone for less than a minute. But one second you were here, and the next—poof. Gone.”
Calla glanced at the trees, then back at me. “What did you see?”
I sat up slowly. My limbs felt heavier than they should have. My thoughts, too.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” I said. “The dungeon was… broken. Like it wasn’t fully real. A loop that kept folding in on itself.”
They didn’t interrupt.
I met their eyes, one by one.
“I wasn’t alone in there,” I said softly. “But it wasn’t other people.”
Garrick tilted his head. “Then what?”
I paused. The memory of those other me’s flickered behind my eyes.
“It was… me,” I said. “Different versions. Younger. Older. Some I didn’t recognize. Like paths I could’ve taken—or maybe still will.”
Silence settled like a weight.
No one laughed.
No one rolled their eyes.
Even Thorne stayed quiet.
Calla sat back on her heels, arms crossed loosely, eyes distant. “That’s not normal.”
“No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”
Glint hopped down from Garrick’s shoulder and padded over and sat beside me. Just like before.
The others were still watching. Still processing.
But something had shifted.
Not fear. Not disbelief.
Recognition.
I wasn’t just telling stories anymore.
They were starting to see it, too.
I sat on a flat rock just off the trail, half-slouched, chewing slowly on a strip of dried meat that tasted more like shoe leather than a tasty treat.
Water sloshed in my canteen as I took a long drink. It helped a little. The tremble in my hands, not so much.
The others hadn’t said much since I stumbled back through the portal—less than a minute gone by their count, but for me, it had been longer. Too long. Glitched geometry, twisted doppelg?ngers, warnings that sounded more like threats than system prompts… yeah. I wasn’t exactly in a chatty mood.
Still, they were all watching me now.
Calla sat nearby, legs crossed, eyes locked on me with that piercing, analytical stare she did when she was trying to figure out what kind of puzzle she’d just been handed. Thorne leaned against a tree trunk with her arms folded and one eyebrow arched, like she still wasn’t sure if I’d stepped out of a dungeon or a psychotic episode. Garrick just stood off to the side, helmet tucked under one arm, chewing his lip like he didn’t like where this was heading.
Even Glint was staring at me from beside my pack, ears perked, tail flicking side to side.
Finally, Calla broke the silence. “Okay. I’ll say it.”
She looked at the others, then back to me.
“I believe you.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You said you could see portals no one else could. That dungeon… whatever it was—it wasn’t normal. You vanished in front of us, came back rattled to hell, and we couldn’t see it.” She nodded at my arm. “Not to mention that shimmer.”
Thorne let out a slow breath. “Yeah. I didn’t see a portal. Still don’t. But you disappeared. No stealth skill I’ve seen works like that.” She gave me a long, searching look. “I’m not calling you a liar anymore.”
Garrick grunted. “Same. Whatever that was, it wasn’t nothing. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Or twelve.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank us yet,” Thorne muttered. “We still have no idea what any of this means.”
“True,” I said. “But I think I do have something that’ll make things even more real.”
I pulled up my interface, slid the orb from my bag, and held it out.
Its surface shimmered brighter than usual, that odd starlight glow pulsing with quiet energy.
“Check it.”
One by one, they leaned in.
Thorne squinted. “Wait. Wasn’t it level twenty-one earlier?”
“Yep,” I said, voice low. “And so was I.”
I flicked open my status window.
Felix Ravensburg. Shadowborn. Level: 22.
Then I rotated the orb, letting them see the hovering tag above its surface.
????? — Level 22
The silence that followed felt different than before. Not skeptical—just stunned.
Calla looked between the orb and me. “So it really is syncing to your level.”
Garrick let out a slow whistle. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“I do,” Thorne said. “That’s impossible.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.”
They all just stared at the orb for a few more seconds as the firelight danced across their expressions—curious, cautious, just a little awed.
No one laughed.
No one called it a trick.
And for the first time since this all started?
I think they believed me.
?? Death Dealer ??
by AG Graham
Kieran was getting bored with death. Until he met him.
care about the lives of those around him.
Thanks to death, Kieran’s life just got a lot more complicated.
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What to Expect:
+ Strategic, detached MC
+ Reluctant found family
What NOT to Expect:
+ Romance
+ Strong Language