Chapter Text
The first night was always the worst.
Six children, spread across towns and villages and mountain hamlets they had no reason to share, closed their eyes on the same night and opened them in the same wrong place.
Ace Trappola woke up on a ceiling.
Not standing on it. Pinned to it, like gravity had flipped and forgotten to tell his stomach. He hung above an endless corridor of lockers his town's school, except the hallways stretched too far, and the lights were the wrong color. A sick, pulsing violet.
He screamed.
No one heard him.
Something moved at the far end of the hall. Tall. Thin. No face, just a smear of shadow where a face should have been. It turned its head toward him he felt it turn, even though it had no eyes.
Ace dropped. Gravity remembered him. He hit the floor hard, scrambled up, and ran.
Deuce Spade woke up standing in a field.
The field was fine. The field was almost normal, except the sky was black it was not night-black, black-black, like someone had spilled ink where stars should have been. And the grass under his feet was gray. And the fence at the edge of the property was made of something that looked like bone.
He was fourteen. He'd been asleep in his bedroom.
His mother was not here. His town was not here. There was nothing but the field and the bone-fence and the silence, until the silence broke.
Something howled. Close.
Deuce ran for the fence and climbed it anyway.
Sebek Zigvolt woke up in a forest he did not recognize, which was insult enough, but worse his magic didn't work.
He tried to cast. The words came out and nothing. No spark, no glyph, no surge. The mana was there, pooled behind his sternum, but the phantom world swallowed it before it could take shape. Like trying to light a match underwater.
He heard something moving through the trees.
Large
Patient
Sebek did not run. Sebek was the retainer's son, the ward of the Lightning Duo, a knight of Briar Valley. He drew himself up, bared his teeth, and prepared to fight with his bare hands if he had to.
The thing in the trees was taller than the trees.
Epel Felmier woke up underwater.
Not deep a flooded cellar, maybe waist-deep, dark and cold. He thrashed, gasped, swallowed water that tasted like rust. His feet found the floor. He pushed up, broke the surface, and grabbed the edge of something a shelf, a broken door frame.
The water was rising.
He climbed. He climbed fast, the way you climb when the thing behind you is the water itself, and the water is not alone. Something was in it. Something was under him, rising with the level, and it had too many arms.
Epel hauled himself onto a ledge and did not look down.
Jack Howl woke up in a street.
His street. His neighborhood. Except the houses had no doors, and the windows were all painted black, and the road peeled up at the edges like dead skin. His ears — his beastman ears flattened against his skull. He could smell something. Wrong. Like copper and rot and ozone, the smell right before lightning, except the lightning never came.
He howled without thinking. A pup howling for his pack.
Something answered him. From the direction of the park. It howled back in his voice.
Ortho Shroud woke up in a lab.
He knew labs. He'd grown up in them, in a manner of speaking Idia's room was half-lab, half-bunker, and Ortho had spent more of his childhood than he'd admit surrounded by cables and humming servers and his brother's anxious, sleepless muttering.
But this lab was wrong. The monitors were shattered. The lights flickered in a rhythm that sounded like breathing. And the doors were all sealed shut with something that looked like black ice.
Ortho was ** old and alone and he pressed his hands to the nearest sealed door and pushed until his palms bled.
Yuu woke up in a coffin.
Not the kind with a lid. An open stone box, set into the floor of a cathedral that stretched up and up and up into nothing. Stained glass windows depicted scenes she didn't recognize a cat with fire, a mirror that ate people, a throne made of thorns. The colors were wrong. Red where there should have been blue. Black where there should have been white.
She sat up. She had no magic. She had no weapon. She had no memory of going to sleep.
She'd been in her own bed. Her own room. Her own world.
The cathedral door was open. Beyond it, a street that looked like a city she might have known, except the sky was the color of a bruise and the shadows moved against the wind.
She stepped out. She had no choice.
They found each other by accident.
Ace, running from the faceless thing, collided with Deuce at an intersection of two streets that shouldn't have intersected. They swore at each other, scrambled apart, then heard the same footsteps coming from two directions and ran the same way without a word.
Deuce and Ace found Jack because Jack found them his nose worked even when his magic didn't, and he tracked their scent through the phantom world's rot. He appeared from a side street, ears flat, and said, "You're real, right? You're not one of them?"
"How do we know you're not one of them?" Ace shot back, and Jack bared his teeth ordinary teeth, not phantom teeth and that was enough. That was all the trust they could afford.
Epel fell into their group from a rooftop. The water had followed him up through three floors of a flooded building and he'd leaped there was no other word leaped from the top to the next building's balcony, missed, and Jack caught him by the back of his shirt at the last second.
Sebek found them because he'd stopped running. He'd fought the tall thing in the forest with his fists and a broken branch and lost, and he was dragging himself through the streets on one functioning leg when they heard him. Deuce shouldered him up. Ace complained about the weight. Sebek told Ace he was a disgrace to any future dorm he might join. Ace told Sebek to shut up and walk.
Ortho was the last.
He'd been in the lab for what felt like hours, pounding on the sealed doors, until one of them opened not because he'd broken it, but because something on the other side had opened it for him. He ran. He ran until he found a group of older kids who looked as terrified as he felt, and when he said, "Please — I don't know where I am," Deuce grabbed his hand without hesitation and said, "Neither do we. Come on."
And Yuu — Yuu found them because she heard Epel's accent. A country accent, sharp and bright, cutting through the phantom world's dead air like a signal flare. She followed the sound through a doorway that led from the cathedral district to the street where they'd all gathered, and when she stepped into view, six heads snapped toward her at once.
Seven children. Strangers. In a world that wanted to kill them.
"We survive until morning," Jack said. It wasn't a question.
"How do you know it ends at morning?" Ace demanded.
"Because I've been here three nights," Jack said. "And every time the light breaks through, I wake up in my bed."
Silence.
"You've been here three—"
"Three nights. You've all been here once. I've been here three times. The light comes. We wake up. We come back the next night."
Yuu looked at the sky. The bruise-colored nothing above them, where stars should have been.
"Then we survive," she said. Quiet. Steady. "Until morning."
They didn't know each other's names yet.
That came later.