Matthew slips into a hidden city between waking and dreaming, where people from different eras converge and a strange choice waits for him on a bridge under three moons.
Matthew had always trusted his imagination more than his sleep, but on the night after his eighteenth birthday, it carried him farther than he ever meant to go. He had been bent over his final exam notes until the words blurred into one another. Then, somewhere between one exhausted blink and the next, his head dropped to the desk and the room dissolved.
When he opened his eyes, he was standing in his hometown street.
Or something close to it. The pavement gleamed as if it had just been washed by moonlight, though the sky above him was neither night nor day. The colours were too sharp, too alive. Shopfronts leaned subtly toward the road, their windows lit from within by a dim, breathing gold. The town hall tower rose ahead of him, but its clock hands were turning backwards.
Matthew stared, then looked down at his own hands as if they might explain what was happening. Around him, people moved past in blurred trails of light, each step leaving a faint pulse in the air. Their faces were clear only when they turned toward him, and even then they looked briefly unreal, as if he were seeing them through several decades at once.
At the first crossing, a woman in a high-collared nineteenth-century dress swept past him with a courteous nod, her skirts whispering over the stones. A few paces later, a boy no older than sixteen slid by with headphones over his ears and a device in his hand that looked like a smartphone fused with an antique Walkman. Neither of them seemed surprised to be here. Matthew was the only one who stood still.
A restless pull drew him toward the river.
The nearer he came to the bridge, the stronger the light grew, a pale glow gathering beneath the archway like mist caught in a net. The water below moved too slowly, as if it were resisting the current. Matthew crossed the bridge and found an old man waiting on the far side, perfectly still, one hand resting on the back of a pocket watch that was ticking in no clear direction at all.
The man lifted his head. His eyes were sharp, almost amused.
"Hello, Matthew," he said.
Matthew froze. He had not told anyone his name.
"You’re standing at the threshold," the man went on, as if they were discussing the weather. "This is where waking and dreaming meet, and not everyone returns the same."
Before Matthew could speak, other figures began to appear along the bridge and the riverbank: men in tailored coats from another century, women in modern clothes carrying objects he could not identify, children with lanterns that glowed from inside with no flame at all. They gathered without sound, watching him with the patient attention of an audience that already knew the end of the play.
Then the sky shifted.
Three moons rose above the rooftops, one silver, one amber, one white as bone, and their light spilled across the bridge until the stones seemed to shimmer beneath his feet. The old man raised a hand. In the air before them, under the archway, three doors began to form out of the light itself: one of shining glass, one of corrugated steel, and one woven from living hedge leaves still trembling on their stems.
"Each one leads somewhere different," the man said. "You may choose only one."
Matthew took a step forward, but the old man was already fading, as though he had never been there at all.
The crowd fell silent.
A whisper slid through the air, close enough to touch his skin.
"Are you ready to see what waits behind your choice?"
Matthew’s heart hammered once, hard, and the door of shining glass began to pulse, bright and inviting, as if it recognised him.