CHAPTER-1
Harrold Orion.Otherwise,known as Orion was not a normal boy.
He was an orphan who lived in the woods.
He lived with his grandfather,Alexander Orion, a man who seemed hewn from the very stone of the forest itself—gruff, stoic, yet hiding beneath his coarse exterior a kindness as real as the earth they called home. The old man was adamant about teaching Orion everything he knew about survival, his lessons delivered with an urgency that sometimes bordered on desperation.
"Weapons and skills are your friends, boy," his grandfather would say, his voice rasping like gravel being ground against iron. "Learn to wield them well, and you'll never be helpless. The Land of Dreams doesn't allow one to simply stay idle."
This "Land of Dreams" or "Dreamland" was a fantasy land all in his grandpa's head.
A place no ones ever heard of.
A strange land full of monsters.
He said time will come when people will be dragged in.
Orion didn't really believe him but he was stuck with him anyway so...
Orion's hands were shaped by those lessons. Calloused from splitting wood, fingers nicked from sharpening blades, skin toughened by countless hours of labor. The old man had him work until his muscles screamed, and even then, he'd demand more.
"Again," his grandfather would grunt, eyes like storm clouds, dark and searching. "It's not enough to be good at something. You need to be better. Dreamland will eat you alive!"
But why? Orion never understood. Never saw the point in the endless preparation, the ceaseless repetition. Their life was a quiet one, hidden away in a large, weather-beaten house buried deep in the forest, far from the world's sharp edges.
The house itself was made of wood and stone, its beams aged to a rich, dark brown from years of sun and rain. The walls were layered with clutter—tools and trinkets his grandfather had collected over a lifetime of journeys Orion was never told about. Maps faded to ghosts, knives of strange design, peculiar stones that seemed to hum faintly when held.
But more than anything, the house held silence. It was an almost sacred thing, heavy and rich, broken only by the crackle of fire or the low hum of a storm rolling through the trees. Orion had grown so accustomed to that quiet, he barely noticed it anymore.
He went to school in the nearby town, walking an hour through the woods each morning and another back each evening. The town children spoke to him, joked with him, but their words were like stones skipping across water. Brief. Fleeting. Never quite sinking in.
He never had the latest phone or computer.
Only after begging his grandfather did he get his first smartphone.
He wasn't really close friends with anybody at school.
He was a boy from the woods, after all. The strange one with the rough hands and haunted eyes who never truly belonged. He was tolerated, but never welcomed. A whisper on the edge of their lives.
His eighteenth birthday came without fanfare. He woke to the sharp chill of dawn creeping through his room,devoid of almost all modern technology.
His bed creaked as he rose, the wooden boards groaning beneath his weight. Sunlight sliced through the gaps in the curtains, turning the dust motes into golden fireflies dancing lazily in the air.
"Grandpa?" Orion called as he pulled on his clothes, his voice hoarse with sleep. "You home?"
Nothing but silence. The kind that felt hollow, like something vital had been torn away.
Orion stumbled into the kitchen, his stomach already knotting with the familiar disappointment. He found a note pinned to the table with a rusted knife.
[Harrold,
Had to leave for a bit. Be back in a few days. There's food in the cellar. Make sure you tend the garden and keep the firewood stocked.
Happy birthday, kid.
From-A.O]
His grandpa always called him Harrold.
Well,calling someone by their last name when their not even 20 yet was a bit weird.
Orion just liked to use his last name because it was cooler.
Orion's fingers tightened around the crumpled paper. His chest ached with a dull, throbbing anger. The old man had been rambling for as long as he remembered about this day, this moment when Orion would finally be an adult. And then he just... left.
"Wouldn't be Grandpa if he wasn't gone when it mattered," Orion muttered bitterly, tossing the note onto the table like it had burned him.
But he did as he always did. The anger simmered, but it did not consume him. He went about his day, channeling his frustration into the tasks his grandfather had drilled into him over the years.
He gathered firewood, the axe slamming into the logs with punishing force until his shoulders screamed. The rhythmic violence of it was almost soothing.
He checked the traps along the forest's edge, his fingers pricked by thorns and rough bark. The traps were empty.
Orion didn't really understand why they had to hunt their meat and forage for herbs in the forest and grow their own vegetables.
His grandpa would always say.
"You think I bought this giant estate to just enjoy the view?!"
Really grandpa?,hunting for survival instead of sport in this modern age?
Well,Orion couldn't do anything but sigh and move on.
He tended the garden, various types of vegetables,herps,spices were all there.
Although none of them were ripe yet.
By nightfall, he was exhausted. Alone, he settled for a dinner of dried meat and bread with a side of wild berries, the same bland taste he'd grown sick of years ago. But there was nothing else.
He stuck a candle into a thick slice of bread that had an ridiculous amount of whipped cream, lit it with a single spark from the flint, and stared at the tiny, flickering flame.
"Happy birthday to me," he whispered, his voice small and bitter. Then he blew the flame out.
The darkness that followed was a mercy.
Sleep claimed him fast, pulling him under like deep water. And for a while, the world drifted away.
Orion always loved fantasy books and novels.
He loved the idea of going on adventures and becoming a legend.
He was also always overjoyed when an author went deep into the Biology and Geography of their worlds.
Thinking about those types of thing,he fell into a deep slumber.
But when he woke, he wasn't in his bed.
The first thing Orion noticed was the heat.
It pressed down on him like a living thing, smothering, relentless. The air was thick and stank of sulfur, making every breath feel like swallowing ash. His fingers dug into scorching red sand that seared his palms, the pain a vicious jolt that yanked him fully awake.
He scrambled to his feet, sand clinging to his skin like a parasite. His heart hammered against his ribs, each frantic beat slamming through his chest with painful clarity.
An endless stretch of blood-red dunes rolled out before him, undulating like the backs of great beasts buried beneath the earth. Jagged black rocks clawed skyward, their edges sharp and gleaming with some unnatural sheen,they looked as if they had erupted from the ground up.
Each atleast 5-7 times as tall and wide as him.
Red mountains loomed in the distance as the sun casted a crimson shadow over them.
He looked up and saw the faintest image of the moon.
Actually,'moons' would be a better way to describe it.
One was smaller than the other and the smaller one was fractured at one side. Giant portions frozen in space orbited the remaining celestial bodies like the rings of Saturn.
There was a thin ring made out of the asteroids that circled the bigger moon.
The two ringed Moons shined dimly in the sky.
The sky was a seething mass of purples and scarlets with the slightest existence of blue, churning clouds spiraling with a wrathful intensity. Lightning cracked across the sky, forked and twisted like the veins of a wounded god.
"What... what the hell?" Orion's voice was swallowed by the suffocating heat, his words lost to the ceaseless moan of the wind.
The chaos of the environment was suffocating.
Such a strange land made him feel like the stranger.
He looked down at himself, the same worn shirt and pants he'd slept in now drenched in sweat. His feet were bare, the sand beneath them scorching his skin until he had to dance from foot to foot to keep from crying out.
"Alright, think." He spoke just to hear something other than his own ragged breathing. "This is a dream. Has to be."
But the pain was real. The heat was real. The stench of sulfur and rot clung to him like a second skin.
"Grandpa?" His voice cracked, his throat raw. "Grandpa!"
"Am I...in Dreamland?"
But there was only silence.
And then the growl.
The growl rumbled through the air like thunder swallowed by the earth, low and vicious, a sound made for the purpose of fear. Orion's entire body went rigid, every muscle frozen under the weight of pure, undiluted terror. His gaze whipped around, searching for the source.
And then he saw it.
A creature prowling over the crest of a nearby dune, its steps slow, deliberate, and brimming with the cruel confidence of a predator that knew it was the apex of all things.
A tiger. But not just any tiger.
Its body was enormous, towering over him even from a distance, easily the size of an elephant but built like something forged from muscle and nightmares. Its fur was blood-red, the same blistering shade as the sand, as if the earth itself had bled to create it. Jagged black stripes slashed across its body in harsh, violent patterns, like wounds that had healed wrong.
Its eyes were molten gold, burning with intelligence far sharper than any beast Orion had ever known. As if the thing's very gaze could peel the flesh from his bones.
Orion stumbled backward, his feet sinking into the scorching sand, his mind screaming at him to run. To hide. To do anything but stand there like a cornered animal.
"What the hell is that?!," he choked out, his voice barely more than a shudder.
The tiger's lips peeled back in a snarl, its fangs long and serrated, each one glistening like sharpened steel.
Orion's mind tumbled over itself, a chaotic swirl of terror and disbelief. This couldn't be real. He was still in his bed. Still in the house. Still—
The tiger lunged.
It happened with a swiftness that defied its size, its massive paws crushing the sand beneath it, each step thundering through the earth.
Orion ran.
His feet pounded against the sand, his legs churning through the thick, burning grains that dragged at him like living things. His breath tore through his throat, ragged and shallow, each inhale a struggle against the heat clinging to his lungs.
The beast roared behind him, the sound so powerful it vibrated through his very bones. He dared a glance over his shoulder and saw the creature closing in, its body moving with a terrible, fluid grace.
"No, no, no!" he gasped, his voice swallowed by the wind, by the beast's growls, by the madness of it all.
His foot caught on something—an outcropping of twisted roots that shouldn't have been there, not in a desert of blood and fire. But it was there, and his body went pitching forward, arms flailing uselessly before he crashed face-first into the scorching sand.
Pain exploded through his skull, his vision blurring as the world spun and tilted. Everything was heat and agony and the sickening realization that this was where he died.
The tiger's breath washed over him, hot and rancid. Its snarl vibrated through the air, a sound of hunger and hatred intertwined.
Orion squeezed his eyes shut, bracing himself for the tearing of flesh, for the brutal, merciless end.
But instead, something else happened.
A strange, burning sensation flooded through him, erupting from his chest and pouring into every vein, every nerve, every trembling muscle. It was as if some torrent of energy had ignited within him, a force that wasn't his but felt somehow... familiar.
His arms felt the weight of something solid, something real and cold against his skin. His fingers curled around it instinctively, the grip foreign and yet perfect, as if shaped to his hands.
He opened his eyes.
What he saw made the world seem to lurch and twist.
A weapon. Long, sleek, and forged from a dark, crude metal,it looked as if it was charred. A spear, black as midnight and razor-sharp, its blade tapering to a wicked, gleaming point.
"My spear!"
This was his spear,the one that his grandpa made for him when he was little.
Using it along with the other weapons and tools so much from a young age had given him a conditioned body.
But if this was another world the spear should be back home.
Yet somehow, impossibly, he was holding it.