Chapter 1: The Witch Who Fell Through the World
The air in the Gogashō Lecture Hall tasted of dust and disciplined thought. High above the rows of polished mahogany desks, sunlight strained through ancient stained-glass windows, casting fractured saints and scholars in lozenges of colored light onto the floor. Hiroshi’s pen moved in lazy circles at the edge of his notes, catching the droning cadence of Professor Inoue’s lecture on foundational portal mechanics. The theory was solid, centuries old, and about as exciting as watching ink dry.
A low hum, wrong and electrical, cut through the monotony.
It started as a vibration in the fillings of Hiroshi’s teeth. Then the air in the center of the demonstration dais shimmered, like heat rising from asphalt. Professor Inoue paused, her pointer stick hovering over a diagram. The shimmer contorted, pulsed once, twice, with a sound like a thunderclap trapped in a jar.
A jagged seam of violent violet light tore through reality itself.
It wasn’t a clean, academic aperture. It was a wound. From it spat splinters of dark wood, a puff of pine-scented air utterly alien to the lecture hall, and a single, shocking crack of musket fire.
Then she fell.
She landed on the polished marble with a gasp that was more impact than sound, followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting solid ground. All the air left the room, sucked into the vacuum of the event. The portal snapped shut with a sound like a breaking spine, leaving only a faint smell of ozone and cordite.
Hiroshi stared.
She was on her hands and knees, a long, platinum braid—dusty and tangled with what looked like tiny twigs—swept over one shoulder. She wore fitted leathers, scuffed and stained, not robes. A long, elegant rifle was strapped across her back, and a curved blade hung at her hip. As she pushed herself up, wincing, her crystal-blue eyes scanned the room. They weren’t wide with shock; they were sharp, calculating, assessing threats and exits in one swift, paralyzing sweep. The sheer, practiced intensity of that look pinned Hiroshi to his seat.
A student in the front row screamed. The spell broke.
Chairs screeched backwards. A cacophony of shouts and questions erupted, drowning the last echoes of the portal. Professor Inoue stood frozen, her mouth a perfect ‘O’ of academic dismay.
The woman—Liliana—was on her feet in one fluid motion, her hand going to the hilt of her blade. “Where is this?” Her voice was low, roughened by smoke and command, cutting through the panic.
“You—you’re in the Tanlashi Imperial University,” Professor Inoue stammered, finding her voice. “By what magic do you intrude here?”
“I didn’t intrude. Your world tore a hole in mine and I fell through it.” Liliana’s gaze flicked to the high windows, the doors. “Five years. Five damn years on the run, and I get portal-napped by a classroom.”
Hiroshi found himself standing, moving toward the dais while everyone else shrank back. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was the ridiculous contrast, or the pure, undiluted reality of her in this temple of theory. “Your rifle,” he blurted out. “That’s a flintlock design, but the etching… it’s not from any recognized era. And the wood is Whistle-Pine. That only grows in the northern shattered realms.”
She turned that disarming blue gaze on him. For a second, he felt like a specimen. “You know your woods.”
“Hiroshi. Second-year applied arcane engineering.” He swallowed. “You’re hurt.” A dark stain was spreading on the leather over her left ribs.
She glanced down as if noticing it for the first time. “It’s a scratch. The tree I was hiding behind took the worst of it.” She took a step, and a faint grimace twisted her lips. “I need to leave. Now. Before they triangulate the rift residue.”
“Before who triangulates?” Professor Inoue asked, regaining some authority. “You will explain yourself!”
Liliana ignored her, her eyes locking back on Hiroshi. There was a desperate clarity there. “You. Arcanist. Is there a way out of this room that isn’t through a main corridor? A service stair? A window that doesn’t overlook a quad?”
He thought of the janitor’s ladder behind the old organ, leading to the roof access. He’d used it once to retrieve a lost grav-globe. He nodded.
“Show me.”
“Absolutely not!” Professor Inoue moved to block the aisle. “University guards are already on their way. You will submit for questioning!”
Liliana’s expression didn’t change, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop. “Lady, I have been hunted by border-wolves, mercenaries with tracking spells, and my father’s own Huntsmen for five years. Your university guards with their polished buttons and procedural manuals aren’t going to slow me down. Get out of my way, or I’ll move you.” Her hand didn’t leave her blade, but the promise in her stance was clear.
Hiroshi saw it then—not just the leather and the weapon, but the exhaustion etched into the fine lines around her eyes, the way she held herself ready to spring despite the pain. This wasn’t an invasion. It was a refugee’s crash landing.
“Professor,” he said, his voice surprisingly steady. “The rift was unstable, an accident. If she stays, the energy feedback might… destabilize the hall’s foundational wards.” It was a lie, but a technically plausible one.
While the professor hesitated, wrestling with protocol versus potential structural collapse, Hiroshi gestured with his head toward the side archway behind the dais. “This way. Quick.”
Liliana didn’t thank him. She moved, a shadow with a platinum braid, past the stunned professor and through the arch. Hiroshi followed, his heart hammering against his ribs. He led her past dust-covered storage cabinets, their footsteps muffled on the old stone, to a narrow, iron-rung ladder bolted to the wall.
“Up there. Roof access. You can cross to the Clock Tower, then down the fire escape to the south alley.”
She eyed the ladder, then him. “Why are you helping?”
“Because you didn’t choose to come here,” he said simply. “And because Whistle-Pine reacts to chaotic mana. That rifle of yours would have blown up in your face if a standard rift had brought you through. Whatever that was… it was something else.”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched her lips. It transformed her face, making her look her age for just a second. “Smart kid.” She grabbed a rung and began to climb, favoring her left side. She was fast, even injured.
From above, the sound of heavy boots and shouted orders echoed into the lecture hall. The guards were here.
She paused at the top, looking down at him from the dim hatchway. “Hiroshi, was it?”
“Yeah.”
“Forget you saw me. It’s safer.”
“What are they? The ones hunting you?”
Her eyes hardened again, the moment of softness gone. “My past.” Then she was gone, the hatch swinging shut with a soft, final thud.
Hiroshi stood in the silent, dusty dark, the sounds of confusion and authority bubbling from the hall behind him. The scent of pine and gunpowder still hung in the air. On the floor where she had landed, a single, perfect pine needle lay on the polished marble. He picked it up. It was real.
The lecture on foundational portal mechanics was ruined. And Hiroshi, for the first time in his academic life, had finally seen some actual magic.
The pine needle was cool and sharp between his fingers. The commotion in the lecture hall was building into a solid wall of sound—shouted orders, panicked questions, the heavy tread of boots. Hiroshi slipped the needle into his pocket and turned, walking briskly back through the archway just as four university guards in deep blue uniforms pushed past Professor Inoue.
“Which way?” the lead guard barked, his eyes scanning the empty dais.
Hiroshi kept his face neutral, a mask of bewildered concern. “She just… vanished. Like smoke.” He gestured vaguely toward the main doors. The guard’s gaze lingered on him for a half-second too long before he signaled his team to fan out.
Cold iron bit into Liliana’s palms as she scaled down the external fire escape. The metal shrieked a protest with every step, echoing against the university’s stone spires. Below, the cobblestoned service alley swam in and out of focus. The scratch on her ribs was a hot, insistent throb, a stark counter-rhythm to the pounding in her head from the portal jump.
She hit the ground running, her boots slapping the wet cobbles. The air here was different—thick, humid, and stinking of coal smoke and something sweetly floral she couldn’t name. Wrong. All of it was wrong.
A whistle pierced the air from high above. They were on the roof.
She ducked into a narrower alley, then a wider lane bustling with students in identical robes. She moved through them like a ghost, hugging the stone walls, her leathers and blade making her a sudden shadow in a world of soft, scholarly wool. Shouts began to coalesce behind her, morphing from confusion into a coordinated hunt. “Perimeter! Secure the south gates!”
Liliana broke into a flat sprint, abandoning stealth for speed. A manicured lawn sprawled ahead, then a line of strange, broad-leafed trees with smooth, grey bark. The tree line. She plunged into the cool, dappled shadows, the shouts fading slightly, muffled by the dense foliage.
Her breath sawed in her lungs. Each stride sent a jolt of fire up her side. And then another heat, a new one, began to bleed through the leather strap on her back.
It started as a warmth, then quickly escalated to a searing, uncomfortable burn against her shoulder blades. Her Whistle-Pine rifle. Fuck.
The student’s words echoed in her mind. Whistle-Pine reacts to chaotic mana.
This entire world was chaos. The portal’s afterbirth was clinging to it, to her, cooking the rifle’s stock from the inside out. It wasn’t just hot; it was vibrating with a low, lethal hum. This thing was gonna explode.
Gritting her teeth, she didn’t break stride. She slid the strap over her head, holding the sleek, overheated weapon in her hands for one final, poignant second. She loved this gun. It had pulled a Huntsman from his saddle at two hundred paces. It had kept her alive.
Now it was a bomb.
She spun, planting her feet, and hurled it back the way she’d come, aiming for a thicket of ferns just off her path. It sailed, end over end, and disappeared into the green.
Two heartbeats later, the world tore apart.
The sound was less a bang and more a brutal crack, like the sky splitting. A flash of actinic blue light, then a concussive wave of force that shredded ferns and sent a hail of wood splinters and dirt peppering the trees around her. A moment of perfect, ringing silence was swallowed by fresh, frantic shouting from the campus edge. “Over there! By the old wall!”
Distraction served.
She was already moving, a raw instinct taking over. Ducking under a low branch. Weaving between trunks. She wasn’t running to anything anymore, just away. Away from the shouts, the wrong-ness, the searing pain in her side. She followed a blind, desperate thread, pulled by a base need for distance and dark.
The woods deepened, the civilized sounds of the university dying away, replaced by the chatter of unfamiliar birds and the rustle of creatures in the undergrowth. Her vision started to tunnel, the edges tinged with gray. She stumbled over a root, caught herself on a tree, bark grinding into her palm. Just keep moving.
She burst into a clearing and her legs finally gave out.
She collapsed to her knees, breath ripping from her throat in ragged gasps. The silence here was absolute, heavy. Slowly, she raised her head.
Massive, ancient trees surrounded her, their canopies weaving a roof far above. The light was soft, green, and filtered. Moss-covered stones lay tumbled around a small, still pool of black water. There was no sign of pursuit. No sound of anything human.
She looked at the strange flora, the alien stillness. She listened to the unknown birdsong. The reality of it, vast and absolute, crashed down on her.
The rifle was gone. She was bleeding. She was lost.
Liliana Tremaine, battle witch, daughter of a Duke, veteran of a hundred skirmishes on the run, looked around at the primordial, untouched forest and let out a shaky, hopeless breath.
“Where in the fucking Five Empires am I?”