The shrill beep of the alarm tears Aster awake like a gunshot. He bolts upright, heart hammering, body stiff. For one disoriented second, he expects the TV’s flickering glow to morph into monsters.

  Nope. Just an infomercial about knives that can cut through cans.

  Imagine the possibilities! Not this time, Capitalism.

  Time’s up. Twelve hours.

  His body groans as he shoves to his feet, but his mind’s already racing ahead. Hands moving on autopilot, he starts the coffee—rich, bitter comfort bubbling in the pot—and tries to force himself to breathe like a normal person before heading to check the tank.

  Then he’s moving. Down the hall, through the kitchen, toward the garage where the tank hums faintly through the floor. That soft vibration threads through his teeth like distant thunder.

  The second he opens the door, he knows something’s changed.

  The tank is different. The once-vivid blue solution has cleared, turned to water so transparent it looks empty. But that’s not what grabs him.

  No.

  It’s the crystal.

  Sitting dead center on the brass wire. Tiny, no bigger than his pinkie nail. A faint glow, almost not there at all, pulsing faintly like it’s breathing in slow, shallow gasps.

  Aster swallows hard, stepping closer. He doesn’t care if he’s imagining the glow. Doesn’t care if it’s a trick of the light. His hands move before his brain catches up, fingers closing around the wire, pulling it free.

  The crystal gleams in the low light. Square. Too square.

  Crystals can form like that—he knows that, intellectually. But this? This isn’t right. The pattern spirals inward, intricate steps layered like a microscopic staircase. Like someone crossed bismuth with a fractal and told it to go feral.

  Aster stares, slack-jawed, because for all his cynical brain wants to file this under “elaborate scam” or “severe psychotic break,” this thing is real. He’s holding it.

  His pulse stutters.

  This is it. This tiny, humming, alien thing. His supposed ticket to… whatever’s next.

  Magic.

  Madness.

  Death.

  All three, maybe.

  His hands shake as he turns it in the light. Every instinct he has screams that this is too much, too far. That this is the part where the person in the cautionary tale goes through with it and gets swallowed whole.

  But here he is.

  Still standing.

  Still moving.

  The instructions come back in flashes. The next step. The attic.

  He finds the latch behind an old bookshelf he hadn’t noticed before. Dust chokes the narrow stairs as he hauls himself up, heart thumping so hard it feels like it’s trying to punch its way out.

  The attic’s dim. Cold. Smells like old wood and forgotten things. But in the center of the floor—yeah, that didn’t come with the house.

  A brass circle etched deep into the boards, symbols dancing at the edges of his vision like they don’t want to be pinned down. They squirm when he looks at them too long. He hates that.

  Still, he follows the instructions like he’s on rails. Items placed in careful little piles—crystals, feathers, totems, bits of nonsense that make his skin crawl with secondhand embarrassment.

  And of course, candles.

  No magical romance with madness is complete without candles.

  Their flames gutter weakly in the still air.

  He feels the shift the second he lights the last one—the way the air goes heavy, the way his chest feels tight, like the room just got smaller without moving.

  But he shakes it off.

  Focus.

  Stay grounded.

  He drops down in the center of the circle, legs folding under him. His joints pop. His head’s buzzing.

  He closes his eyes, breathes deep. In. Out. In. Out.

  “You’re not crazy,” he mutters. “You’re desperate. There’s a difference.”

  His hand finds the glass pipe—the contraption that makes his skin crawl because yeah, it looks exactly like what it is. A junkie’s tool dressed up with some ritual flair.

  But he’s not that.

  Not yet. He hopes.

  He slides the crystal in.

  Flicks the lighter.

  Watches the flame catch and dance.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The crystal darkens, then starts to sweat.

  Then it melts.

  The first curl of smoke rises—thick, blue, electric. It smells sharp. Bitter, sweet, and wrong.

  Aster stares at it, deadpan.

  “Right. Because nothing says ‘good life choices’ like hitting a suspicious crystal pipe in a haunted attic,” he mutters, and brings the pipe to his lips anyway.

  The smoke hits like a live wire. It floods his lungs and burns like ice, sweet and sharp like grapefruit laced with battery acid. His body lurches. Muscles spasm.

  He holds it in.

  The second pull is worse. His vision starts to fuzz at the edges, static crawling in from the corners. He keeps going—because that’s what the instructions said.

  Hold.

  Hold.

  Hold.

  His chest feels like it’s going to split open. His fingers tingle. His scalp crawls. The candle flames flicker wildly even though there’s no wind.

  He exhales violently, coughing so hard his ribs ache.

  The room tilts. The symbols on the floor shiver like they’re laughing.

  And then—

  Blackness.

  Not sleep.

  Not fainting.

  Just gone.

  The world melts away at the edges, and Aster falls forward into nothingness like a thread cut clean through.

  Aster’s eyelids crack open like faulty shutters, his brain rebooting one error message at a time. He’s distantly aware of someone shaking him—gently, annoyingly. His limbs feel like they’re filled with wet sand, heavy and useless, and his skull has all the clarity of a kicked beehive.

  But through the fog, there they are—those stupidly bright cyan eyes blinking down at him, wide with concern.

  “You made it!” the man blurts, breathless, like he’s not entirely convinced Aster would survive his little homebrew spirit walk. “I wasn’t sure you’d go through with it!”

  The robed man throws his head back and lets out a loud, relieved laugh. Aster blinks up at him, dazed, watching as the man practically sheds his anxiety like a bad coat right there in front of him.

  Great. At least one of them is having a cathartic moment.

  Aster, meanwhile, feels like someone’s wrung out his soul and hung it up to dry.

  His vision wobbles, but he catches it anyway—that flicker of something in the man’s face. A look that, if Aster’s not completely losing it, feels… warm. Familiar. Like he’s not just another pity case or a doomed stray.

  Weirdly, that unsettles him more.

  “Sorry,” the man says, schooling his grin into something resembling normalcy. “Haven’t been around people in a while. Guess I’m rusty.”

  He sticks out a hand. “Matter.”

  Aster stares at the hand like it might bite him. His brain’s still catching up. But some broken part of his social reflexes reaches out automatically and shakes it.

  “Aster,” he croaks, his own name tasting foreign, like he’s trying on someone else’s teeth.

  Matter’s grin twitches wider, cyan eyes sparking with something between amusement and some deeper, unreadable thing. He pumps Aster’s hand once, firmly, and lets go.

  “I’m guessing you’ve got questions,” Matter says, brisk now, like they’re about to compare tax returns. “And I’ll answer what I can.”

  That cracks it.

  Aster barks out a laugh, sharp and dry. His thoughts are a tangled rat’s nest, his chest still tight, but his mouth moves faster. “Yeah. First question: what in the hell is this? What is the Astral Realm? Why does it feel like I huffed paint thinner and woke up inside a Pink Floyd album?”

  Matter doesn’t flinch. No eye-roll, no sigh. He just tilts his head like he’s weighing his answer on some invisible scale.

  “The Astral Realm,” he says, tone level, “is simple to answer on the surface. But if you go deeper, the answer… becomes an impossibly complex one.”

  Aster groans. “Of course it is. God forbid anything in my life be simple.”

  Matter jerks his chin toward an open window. “Come on. Easier to show you.”

  Aster’s body obeys before his brain does; he stands, legs weirdly light, floaty, like someone’s turned down gravity just for him. But mid-step, something prickles at the back of his neck.

  He turns—and nearly chokes on his own breath.

  There he is.

  His own body. The golden dome around it shimmering faintly, like a force field out of a cheap sci-fi flick.

  His body’s perfectly still, slumped in the lotus position like a junkie Buddha halfway through enlightenment, folded at the waist with the crackpipe still clutched in one hand—stone-dead in appearance, or at least auditioning for it.

  His body looks so still. Too still. Like a corpse no one’s bothered to call in yet.

  Aster’s throat goes dry.

  “Am I dead?” he rasps. “Am I a ghost now? Or is this some next-level fever dream where my unpaid taxes literally come to haunt me? Because honestly, I wouldn’t put it past the government.”

  Matter doesn’t answer, already halfway out the window, casual as you please.

  “Keep up,” he calls.

  Aster’s heart stutters as he tears his gaze from his own abandoned skin suit and scrambles after him. Lucky he’s an orphan. No tearful parents to stumble in and find their only son face-down in a ritual circle, looking like he’s tried to overdose on both meth and occult bullshit.

  His thoughts are a mess. Is he spiralling?

  Ghost. Spirit. Whatever this is, it’s too real to dismiss—too vivid. His hands look solid, feel solid, but that corpse in the attic begs to differ.

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