24 September, 2045

The day everything changed.

It started small. People across the world began seeing strangers dressed in ways that didn’t belong... not costume-strangely, but wrong-era strangely. Heavy clothes. Swords. Boots that had never touched pavement.

At first it was only a few. Then more. Then too many to ignore.

The world tried anyway.

Until a blast tore open the middle of a road in Japan twenty meters wide, no warning, no explanation. After that, people started going missing. Always near the blasts. Always without a trace.

The world stopped ignoring it after that.

***

A man with dark circles under his eyes sat in his office chair, cradling a cup of coffee in both hands.

His name was Ren.

He hadn’t slept in two days.

The animation studio he worked for had been holding its staff like prisoners, chasing a deadline that kept moving. Someone in legal had even floated the word "contractual obligation" when three people tried to leave early. That was a week ago. Nobody had left early since.

He raised the cup and breathed in the smell.

Then took a sip.

"Ah..."

It burned his tongue.

He drank it anyway.

His shift wasn’t over.

"Labour abuse," he muttered, to no one in particular. "That’s what this is."

He was starting to doze off when something hit him across the face.

A hand. Open palm. Not hard, but enough.

He turned.

June stood there with the expression of someone who had done this before and would do it again without apology. They had joined the studio together, two years ago, following the same stupid dream about making something worth watching. She was better at pretending the dream was still worth it.

"Why are you dozing off already?"

"Already." He stared at her. "I haven’t slept this entire week."

"Finish the project and you get a two-week holiday and a bonus. The directors announced it this morning."

"They’ll cut the holiday. They always cut the holiday short. They just want the work."

He didn’t wait for her response. There wasn’t much to say after that.

He finished his coffee, tossed the cup toward the bin across the room, and went back to his screen.

"Hey." June hadn’t moved. "Do you believe what’s been happening out there? In the world?"

"I don’t have time to know what’s happening in the world." He didn’t look up. "Can you go?"

"You’re no fun."

"I know."

She left.

He finished the work sometime past midnight, shut his computer, and headed for the hospital.

The hospital room was quiet in a way that made it hard to breathe.

He pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat down.

The girl lying there looked younger than her age. Pale skin. Dark lashes. Somewhere between sixteen and eighteen if you didn’t know her. He knew her better than anyone.

Her name was Rin. His twin sister.

He patted her hand and talked about the day. June slapping him awake, the directors and their fake holiday package. He talked until the hour ran out, the way he always did.

Then he left.

If not for her, he would have quit the job long ago. Would have quit a lot of things.

He got home, threw his clothes on the bed, and collapsed on top of them.

Morning came at six.

He made coffee, sat down, and opened a novel someone online had recommended. Something about a broken world and a hero who was losing.

He started reading.

***

"Change one moment, and the future forgets how it was supposed to exist."

Descendant from Heaven

That was the first line of the novel someone had recommended to me online. Good enough to win an award, probably. Except it was on hiatus. The author had simply stopped updating and walked away without a word.

I went to leave a review and found there were none. Not a single one.

So I wrote one... asking why it was on hiatus, criticizing the author a little. Half out of annoyance, half because I had nothing better to do at six in the morning.

***

It started three days later.

Same route to the gym. Same time. Same everything until I noticed a man standing at the corner of the street.

He was dressed strangely. Not like a performer, but like someone from the wrong time. Heavy clothes, sword at his hip, boots that had never seen pavement. Perfectly still in the middle of the morning crowd.

Nobody looked at him.

Not once.

I thought he was cosplaying.

I looked away. Looked back.

He was gone.

Tired. Just tired.

The second day, there were more of them.

A woman in a merchant’s dress haggling at a fruit stall that hadn’t existed yesterday. Two men in armor walking side by side down the sidewalk, completely ignored by the salarymen and students flowing around them like water around stone.

I stopped walking.

By the fourth day, it wasn’t just people.

The convenience store on the corner of my street, the one I had been buying coffee from for three years, was gone. In its place stood a building made of dark stone, torches flickering at the entrance, a carved wooden sign hanging above the door.

It was a guild hall.

I tried to approach it on the fifth day.

Three steps from the entrance, the pain hit suddenly, total, radiating from somewhere behind my eyes and spreading outward until my legs stopped working entirely. I hit the pavement before I could catch myself.

People helped me up. Asked if I was okay. Walked me to a bench.

Behind them, the guild hall stood exactly where the convenience store wasn’t.

I sat there for a long time, watching people walk in and out of a building they couldn’t see.

Something is wrong with me, I thought.

Then I heard it... people nearby murmuring, voices dropping. Someone said the word "case." Someone else moved away quickly, like proximity was a risk.

Did I miss something?

I told June about it that evening.

She came and picked me up from home without asking twice. We went to the police station together, and she did most of the talking, gave them the full account, start to finish, two weeks of it. Apparently there was already a name for it.

They called it Lucid Dreaming.

People who could see things others couldn’t. Buildings that weren’t there. Figures from another era walking through modern streets. The authorities had been tracking cases for weeks. Nobody had a good explanation yet.

I sat across from an officer who looked like he was about to doze off any second, that makes two of us.

We were leaving the station when it happened.

The air itself felt strange and thick, dizzying, like alcohol seeping into my senses.

The fluorescent lights were gone. The tiled floor was gone. Around me voices rose and shadows moved and somewhere close a man was running, boots on cobblestone, guards behind him.

Then I realized where I was.

A brothel.

Some guards were chasing someone through the street.

A man ran past me.

Then a massive circle appeared.

"Red alert Lucid Dreamer"

The whole place erupted. People scattering, shouting, knocking into each other. June was still beside me, her face tight, somewhere between panic and not wanting to show it.

A barrier flickered into existence around me.

She reached for my arm.

My vision began to blur. The world faded in and out like a broken screen.

And then—

A woman stood before me. A smirk curled on her lips, amusement dancing in her eyes. Black wings stretched from her back. Red horns curved from her head.

Her eyes looked like an abyss.

She looked like a devil. A terrifyingly beautiful one.

The same kind of wrong-and-impossible as everything else I had been seeing for a week.

Except this time, she looked directly at me.

And smiled like she had been waiting.

For a moment, I couldn’t look away.

Then every one of my senses went dark.

The next thing I heard was...

"...Young Master."