Twenty-one-year-old Christopher takes a night walk through a deserted district and finds a glowing passage under the old station gate that opens into an impossible world.
Christopher kept to the empty side streets, where the tenements leaned over the pavement like they were eavesdropping. At this hour the city had stripped itself bare: no traffic, no voices, only the drag of his shoes on wet asphalt and the wind worrying at dead leaves.
He liked walking alone after midnight. It was the only time his phone stopped ruling the shape of his thoughts, the only time his life felt like something he could set down for a few blocks and breathe without. That night, though, the silence felt less like relief than a warning that he had not yet understood.
When he reached the old railway station, he almost passed it by. Then he saw it: a pulse of light spilling from beneath the arched gate where freight trains had once rumbled through. The glow was thin at first, then steady, as if something on the other side had noticed him and was taking its time.
Christopher slowed. The neighbourhood had a reputation, and not the kind that encouraged curiosity. But the light kept beating, soft and insistent, and before he could tell himself to turn back, he was already at the gate.
Beyond it was no square, no road, no city edge. The arch opened onto a vast expanse of violet grass and trees that shone like poured glass. Farther off, dark towers rose in shapes that made no architectural sense at all, like castles remembered by someone half asleep. A road curved into that impossible distance, vanishing between the shadows.
Christopher stood frozen on the threshold. Then a figure stepped out of the light beside him, cloaked head to foot, her face hidden beneath the hood. An old pocket watch hung at her shoulder on a frayed chain, and the hands were moving backward.
She lifted one hand toward him.
Before he could react, a violent crash echoed from deep inside the portal. The ground shuddered. Something moved in the violet grass, then another shape, and another, rising where there should have been nothing at all. Christopher felt the air tighten around him as the light flickered once, hard and white, and the woman’s outstretched hand waited in the dark.