Chapter Text
The Infinite Realms hum when they breathe. That’s one of the first things Danny learns.
At fifteen, he’s been alive—and dead—long enough to stop being startled by the green glow that seeps into everything. What still gets him, though, is how loud it is now. Every wisp, every drifting echo, every forgotten ghost hums against his core like background static. The Realm never sleeps. And neither, it seems, does its new King.
The title still doesn’t feel real.
He hadn’t wanted the crown. Clockwork said it was inevitable—“The Realm answers to balance, Daniel. It chose you because you do not crave it.”
Frostbite had congratulated him in that booming, fatherly way, handing him a ceremonial pelt so heavy it nearly crushed him.
Even Ember wrote a song about it. (“King Chill,” she called it. He pretends not to like it, but secretly thinks the riff is pretty good.)
But most days, Danny feels less like a king and more like the world’s most exhausted janitor.
It isn’t much of a throne. More like a floating platform of crystallized ectoplasm, jagged and pulsing faintly. He doesn’t sit on it often; it feels wrong, like sitting in a live socket.
Ancient ghosts drift in and out to petition him for small things—a corridor that needs sealing, a restless spirit that refuses to stay dead, a territory dispute between Walker and some banshee clan. They all bow low and call him Majesty.
Danny hates it.
He tries to make rulings that sound regal but mostly end up as,
“Okay, nobody’s allowed to eat anyone else for, like, a week. Cool? Cool.”
The court murmurs approval. Frostbite beams.
And somewhere behind the veil of time, Clockwork’s faint chuckle rolls like thunder.
He doesn’t talk about it with Tucker or Sam anymore. They still text, but it’s hard to explain “infinite time loops” and “temporal echoes” over Snapchat.
Sometimes he hovers at the border between realms, half tempted to step through and just… go home.
But the crown hums against his chest, a solid weight made of light and ice. Every time he tries to leave for too long, the Realms tug him back.
He tells himself it’s fine. He’s fine. He can be both—half boy, half king, somewhere between the living and the dead.
Except sometimes he wakes in the Citadel’s silence and thinks he hears voices.
Faint human ones.
Crying.
Praying.
Begging for something—someone—to listen.
The dead never really stop talking.
It starts as a tremor in the Far Zones. Frostbite reports it first: a tear in reality where no tear should exist. The readings mimic Ecto energy—violent, unstable, earth-born.
Danny goes alone.
The rift flickers in the ruins of some ancient temple, the kind of place that reeks of both magic and arrogance. The air smells like smoke and salt. The portal shivers when he gets close, and something inside him pulls—like a tide dragging at his core.
“Easy, easy…” he mutters, raising a hand, his aura flaring. “You’re okay. Just breathe.”
He talks to rifts the way he talks to scared ghosts. It helps. Sometimes.
Ectoplasm streams into the breach, sealing its jagged edges. For a moment, he sees flashes through it—stone walls, torches, shadows moving like soldiers. And a small voice, sharp with command, shouting orders in a language he doesn’t know.
Then the ground gives way.
He catches the kid before the boy hits the ectoplasm.
Dark hair, sharp green eyes, and a blade gripped too tightly for someone that small. The portal snaps behind him, slicing away half the boy’s cloak. For a heartbeat, Danny thinks he’s looking at one of Vlad’s clones again—same intensity, same impossible precision—but no. This kid’s alive. Barely.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Danny says quickly, lowering them both to the ground. “You’re fine. You’re safe.”
The boy glares up at him, trembling.
“You are not Ra’s.”
“Uh… definitely not.”
Blood stains the boy’s side, dark against the eerie green light. Danny presses his hand over it, letting ectoplasm pulse through the wound. The kid flinches but doesn’t fight. There’s a flash—a flicker of light that leaps between their cores—and something snaps into place.
Danny’s not sure what he’s done until it’s already done.
The kid exhales a soft sound, like relief, and his eyes flicker between green and gold.
Later, when Frostbite checks him, he’ll explain:
“You shared part of your essence with the child, Great One. You have claimed him as kin in the eyes of the Realms.”
Danny: “I what?”
Frostbite: “It is a sacred bond. He is now connected to you until your essence fades.”
Danny stares at the sleeping boy wrapped in a spare cape.
He hadn’t meant to do that.
He just didn’t want the kid to die.
When the child wakes, he doesn’t cry. He doesn’t thank him either—just stares with wary curiosity, as if memorizing the shape of Danny’s face.
“Will I die now?” he asks.
“Not if I can help it,” Danny replies softly. “l got… a lot of life left in you.”
He doesn’t tell the kid his name. Doesn’t ask for his. It feels safer that way.
He sends him back through the portal once it stabilizes, watches the shadows swallow him whole.
The bond hums faintly under Danny’s ribs afterward, like a heartbeat that isn’t his.
For weeks, he pretends not to notice.
But when he passes through certain places in the Realms, he sees ghostly echoes of the boy’s silhouette, bright and burning and alive.
And somewhere in the mortal world, a young assassin begins to dream of a glowing boy who held him in the dark.