Kael sat hunched over his holo-screen in his cramped apartment, the neon glow of the city filtering through the smog-streaked windows. Outside, hovercars zipped along luminous highways, and giant billboards flashed advertisements in colors humans weren't supposed to see. Yet Kael barely noticed. His focus was on a strange anomaly in the code he had been debugging—a series of shimmering patterns that seemed to ripple independently of his inputs.
He leaned closer, fingers dancing over the translucent keys. Every time he touched the pattern, it responded—not like a normal program, but like a living organism, recoiling, twisting, then pulsing toward him again. The screen's light reflected off his glasses, and for a brief instant, the room seemed to warp. The walls flickered, shadows stretched unnaturally, and Kael swore he saw shapes—creatures with half-human limbs, wings, and serpentine tails—lurking just beyond the veil of perception.
His heart raced. Was it a virus? A glitch? Or something far stranger? He had always chased the thrill of the impossible, but this was different. It wasn't a puzzle to solve. It was a door. And the door was calling him.
Kael's apartment smelled faintly of ozone and burnt circuits—a byproduct of his countless experiments—and he rubbed his temple, trying to calm himself. A low hum began to emanate from the anomaly. It vibrated through the table, up his arms, and into his chest. The sensation was disorienting yet intoxicating. A voice, faint as wind through the wires, whispered something unintelligible.
"What… what are you?" he murmured, almost aloud.
The code flickered violently, then resolved into a symbol he recognized from an old tablet he had once found in the city archives—a triangle intertwined with a spiral, glowing like it held its own sun. Kael's pulse quickened. Somehow, impossibly, the patterns in his code and the ancient symbol were the same. A shiver ran down his spine.
Somewhere deep in his mind, Kael knew that whatever this was, it was bigger than him, bigger than the city, bigger than anything he had ever imagined. And yet, he felt an odd thrill: the first stirrings of destiny, the beginning of something that would shatter the boundaries of the world he knew. He just didn't know how far the rabbit hole went—or if he was ready to fall.