'Is This Time Travel?'
One moment, Christian was in a dim editing suite in 2017, knee-deep in post-production hell.
The next, he was lying in a hospital bed in the United States—bandages wrapped around his head, a dull ache pulsing through his skull, and "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" playing faintly from a distant radio.
Was it really 1997?
If the newscast flickering on the hospital room's TV wasn't some elaborate prank, then yes—it was.
Time travel? Somehow, impossibly, it seemed so.
No flashing lights. No wormholes. Just a nauseating jolt, and then… this. The date on the wall calendar lined up.
The world outside his window looked like a time capsule: boxy cars, no smartphones, and a nurse with a beehive hairdo.
He sighed. If this was a dream, it was an absurdly detailed one.
He wasn't just a few time zones away from home—he was two decades and an ocean apart. Welcome to the nineties.
No fanfare. No dramatic soundtrack. If anything, the only music appropriate now would be something ominous.
The Imperial March, maybe. This was America, just before the Internet boom.
The age of dial-up modems and unchecked ambition.
So what now?
The time traveler's handbook would suggest stockpiling Apple shares, scooping up Google before it even had a logo, maybe manipulating the dot-com bubble from the inside.
Too easy. Too clean.
He could rewrite the future. Recreate Avatar, rip Game of Thrones from Martin's fingers before it ever reached a publisher. Launch YouTube, or hell, ruin it before it even starts.
But Christian wasn't that kind of traveler.
He wasn't a Silicon Valley shark. He wasn't some naive dreamer with a messiah complex. What he really wanted—the only thing he truly ached for—was buried deeper than all of that.
Magic.
Not the cheap parlor kind. Not sleight-of-hand. The real stuff.
The old, grim stuff. The kind whispered about in back alleys and written in blood under moonlight. The kind he'd been chasing since the day he met the man he called the "old ghost."
He closed his eyes and pinched his fingers together. Muscle memory. A habit from years of ritual and failure.
The old ghost's words echoed in his mind—bitter, tired, full of smoke and regret:
"Don't follow me, kid. You're too late. This is the Age of Domination. The light's gone out. There's nothing left for people like us."
Even now, Christian couldn't forget. He'd tried. God, how he'd tried.
The things he'd seen, the fragments the ghost had shown him—they didn't fade. They festered.
He remembered climbing cold hills in search of haunted ruins, slipping into hospital morgues to catch a glimpse of departing souls.
Nothing. Just empty corridors and bored security guards. He scoured "haunted" houses for signs of real spirits and found only cigarette butts and broken beer bottles.
Was it all a lie?
He was like a man trained to slay dragons in a world where dragons no longer existed.
But the ghost had told him once: "Even in this era, even when magic is buried, there are moments—tiny fractures in time—where the veil lifts. Where something ancient seeps through."
Christian had missed every one of those moments. He'd been too late. Always too late.
By the time he understood, the world had moved on. The last of the lights had dimmed.
Now, he had started to doubt. Doubt the magic. Doubt the ghost. Doubt himself.
Was the ghost even real?
Or just another broken piece of Christian's mind?
Then—
"Are you awake?"
The voice was cold. Crisp. Unapologetically blunt.
Christian opened his eyes, startled.
A young woman stood at the foot of his bed. Blonde. Pale. Eyes like static. She looked unreal—surrounded by a strange shimmer, like dust caught in sunlight.
"You're possessed"
Flecks of color danced around her, shifting like oil on water.
He blinked.
Tears welled up without warning.
And then, a smile crept across his face.
Because the shimmer wasn't just in his head.
He saw her aura.
Magic.
Real magic.