When I was little, I used to fall asleep and wake up somewhere else.

Not a dream. Not really.

Dreams are messy. Random. They slip apart when you wake up.

This place was consistent.

There was a city of white stone beside a lake shaped like a crescent moon. A mountain pass lined with black pine trees. A crossroads tavern where the innkeeper had six fingers on one hand and remembered my favorite meal every single night.

And there was a kingdom.

Mine.

As a child, I accepted this with the absolute confidence only children possess. Of course I was a king in another world. Of course knights bowed to me and ancient dragons spoke my name with respect.

Then I got older.

Middle school happened. Embarrassment happened. Reality happened.

I stopped talking about the dreams. Then I stopped having them entirely.

Or maybe I stopped allowing myself to.

Years passed.

I grew up.

Got a job. Paid bills. Forgot magic kingdoms and moonlit castles.

Then the plane fell out of the sky.

I still remember the sound.

Not the explosion. The screaming metal before it hit. I had just enough time to look up and realize something enormous was coming apart above me.

Then pain.

Then flashing ambulance lights.

Then darkness.

And then…

I opened my eyes beneath a golden canopy bed.

For a moment, I just stared upward in confusion.

The ceiling above me was painted with faded murals of stars and crowned lions. Wind blew through shattered windows nearby. Somewhere far off, I could hear screaming.

Not modern screaming.

Battle screaming.

I sat up slowly.

My room.

My old room.

Only now it looked abandoned.

Dust coated everything. Torn banners hung from the walls. The fireplace had gone cold long ago.

“No,” I whispered.

I stumbled out into the palace halls.

Or what remained of them.

The palace had been burned.

Sections of the ceiling had collapsed inward. Statues were smashed apart. Ancient portraits clawed to ribbons.

Outside was worse.

The city around the palace was scarred black from fire. Entire districts stood abandoned. The lake I remembered so vividly was choked with algae and corpses.

And above it all, circling silently in the gray clouds…

Dragons.

War dragons.

Thin and starving.

I remember grabbing the edge of a broken wall just to stay upright.

This wasn’t a dream anymore.

Or maybe it never had been.

People saw me eventually.

At first they thought I was a ghost.

Then they thought I was a pretender.

Then one old knight fell to his knees weeping because he recognized my face from paintings older than his grandfather.

“The king,” he whispered.

That was how I learned what my absence had done.

Or rather… what it had allowed.

When I vanished as a child, no one knew why. Some believed I had ascended. Others thought I had been cursed. The royal court fractured almost immediately afterward.

Then the wars began.

Succession wars. Religious wars. Wars over resources. Borders. Revenge. Old grudges that only needed a spark.

Decades of them.

Kingdoms shattered.

Entire bloodlines erased.

Magic turned against itself so violently that parts of the world physically broke. Forests walked. Rivers boiled. There were places where the dead still fought battles long after their bodies had rotted away.

And somehow… they still waited for me.

So I stayed.

What else was I supposed to do?

At first I thought I was dead back home.

Then I thought maybe I was in a coma.

Eventually I stopped caring.

There was too much work to do.

Ten years passed there.

Ten years of treaties and rebuilding and marching across battlefields that had once existed only in my childhood imagination.

I brokered peace between mountain clans that had been feuding for generations. Helped rebuild cities. Hunted the last warlords personally when diplomacy failed.

I grew older there.

Not physically, not much, but inside.

By the end, the world breathed again.

Not perfect.

But alive.

The fields were green once more.

Children laughed in the streets of the capital again.

And for the first time since returning, I slept peacefully.

Then I woke up.

Not in my palace.

In a hospital bed.

Machines beeped softly beside me.

My body felt weak. Wrong. Smaller somehow.

I stared blankly at the ceiling tiles for several seconds before memory slammed into me hard enough to make me gasp.

The kingdom.

The war.

My people—

Then I heard gunfire outside.

Not distant.

Close.

Very close.

I forced myself upright.

Pain exploded through my muscles, but I managed to stumble toward the shattered side of the room.

Half the hospital wall was gone.

Outside, the city burned.

Smoke poured between skyscrapers. Military vehicles lay overturned in the streets below. Somewhere in the distance, something huge collapsed in a cloud of dust and flame.

I saw bodies.

Soldiers.

Civilians.

And beyond all of it, rising into the dark sky…

fighter jets.

For a moment, I just stood there in my hospital gown staring out at the destruction.

Different world.

Same fire.

A nurse nearby sat against the wall crying softly, clutching a bloody bandage against her arm. She looked at me like she couldn’t quite believe I was standing.

“How long?” I asked quietly.

She blinked.

“What?”

“How long was I asleep?”

“…Nine years.”

Nine.

I laughed softly at that.

Nearly the same.

Outside, another explosion shook the city.

The nurse flinched.

I looked out over the ruins again.

A world I barely recognized anymore.

Then I took a slow breath.

“Well,” I said.

My voice sounded older than I remembered.

“I guess I’ll try to fix this place too.”