The bells tolled midnight in Eldrath, the capital of the Velarian Empire, and the silver moon bathed the obsidian towers of the royal citadel in pale light. Crown Prince Alexis III sat alone in the eastern observatory, his sharp blue eyes fixed on the star-strewn sky, not in wonder, but in dread.
Tonight marked his eighteenth birthday. But in the palace, no celebration echoed—only silence, heavy and loaded like the calm before a storm.
His father, the Emperor, had refused to even look at him. His older brothers had gifted him thinly veiled threats. Only his sickly mother, bedridden and wasting away from a curse no healer could undo, had offered a weak smile and a trembling hand. His little brother, barely five, clung to his leg as he left her chamber.
He was nothing but a liability, a 'waste of lineage' as the court whispered. And yet, Alexis felt something stir in his bones that night—some whisper of fate.
At exactly 23:59, the stars above bent. He saw it—the sky cracking. A shriek rang in his skull. His body froze, seized by a force beyond his comprehension. His last thought before the darkness consumed him was not of the court… but of his mother.
Thousands of years into the future, a teenager named Julius hunched over a cracked holographic tablet, the screen flickering in their dim, box-sized apartment. The AI network was glitching again—a common occurrence in Sector-9, where low-tier citizens lived without neural augmentations.
His baby sister coughed weakly in her sleep, her breath raspy from the synthetic spores in the recycled air. He pulled the blanket over her and stared at the newsfeed: another gang raid, another "malfunctioning" citizen executed by the overseer units.
He was tired. Tired of hiding, scraping, and surviving.
Then the lights went out. Not the usual flicker—everything went black. Time on the wall showed 23:59. Julius turned in confusion, only to find the room warping. His body felt like it was being unraveled molecule by molecule.
Then—nothing.