The radio static was a persistent, buzzing whisper, a soundtrack to the madness. "Alpha team. Engage. Rotation Bravo Juliet Three Three Zero." I listened as the cold, disembodied voices issued their commands, each one colder than the last. "Target is expected to rendezvous at Whiskey-17. Departure projected for Foxtrot-One-Three-Seven." The coded jargon felt like a cruel joke, a sanitized way of discussing the brutal reality of our mission.

  All of this sterile language boiled down to the same three things: more blood, more bones, more bodies. The senior officers, the "Brass" up in their climate-controlled bunkers, didn't care about the count. They saw a fallen soldier not as a person but as a liability, a single line item on a ledger. It was always cheaper to pay out a life insurance policy than to deal with the inconvenient truth of sending a man like me, a medic forced to witness the fallout of their grand plans. The profound hatred I felt for their distant, unquestioned authority was a constant ache in my chest.

  A new soldier, his face streaked with grime and fear, stumbled into the tent. He was dragging a body on a makeshift stretcher, the canvas stained a dark, rusty red. "AP Barlow. Shrapnel from grenade, left femur compromised. Ribcage fully shattered. Left eye... maybe acid damage?" He rattled off the grim list with the hollow-eyed stare of a man who had seen too much.

  I pressed my fingers to the bridge of my nose, feeling the exhaustion settle deep in my bones. "Bench 1B," I sighed, gesturing to an empty slab. Another one. The sound of the gurney wheels scraping against the dusty floor was a familiar sound of defeat.

  This war was nothing but an abattoir. And my medical tent? It was the charnel house where the remains got sorted.

  ***

  I shot upright, the sheets tangled around my legs. My body was slick with sweat, my heart hammering against my ribs as the vivid memories of the dream clung to my mind. "Calm down, Morgan. You're fine," I whispered, the words catching in my throat. I forced myself into the breathing exercise they taught me in therapy: a slow, measured rhythm to quiet the panicked thrum of my pulse. "Just another bad dream."

  I slumped against the headboard, a cold draft from the window chilling the sweat on my back. My gaze found the ceiling, my eyes scanning the familiar lines and shadows as if the plaster held the secrets I desperately sought. "Dad," I breathed, the word a small, fragile thing in the vast silence. "What the hell did you do during the war?"

  The only answer was the thrum of the house settling and the soft tremble of my hands. I was trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces, a ghost story of a war I never experienced, yet one that haunted my every sleeping moment.

  Let’s try to be rational. My name is Morgan Barlow. I am the son of a celebrated duality: Dr. Matthew Barlow, the esteemed scientist and surgeon, and Loretta Barlow, a woman who lives her life guided by the unseen forces of crystals, candles, and rituals.

  My father died years ago, but his presence still echoes through the academic world. His journals and awards are a constant reminder of the brilliant mind he was, and I still get the occasional email from an old student wondering what happened to their favorite scholarly idol. My mother, however, is a tangible, living presence. She is still very much convinced that the universe bends to her will whenever she steps into the garden to burn sage under the light of a new moon.

  My childhood home was a strange cathedral dedicated to two contradictory belief systems. On one wall, there were complex energy charts and chemical formulas scrawled in my father's meticulous hand. On every flat surface, there were geological samples of every size and shape. My father was a brilliant man: a metallurgist, a neurosurgeon, and a nephrologist. And yet, due to my mother, rocks and crystals were the true occupants of the house.

  Some of the specimens were labeled with scientific precision, their Latin names and chemical components written on small cards. Others were surrounded by intricate chalk symbols or had little handwritten notes about their spiritual properties. My mother called them vessels, conduits for unseen forces. My father would have called them data points, bits of information to be analyzed.

  Granite. Graphite. Obsidian. Diorite. Jasper. Carnelian. Jade. Opal. I learned to identify them all, not because I cared about their origin, but because they were a part of the air I breathed. They were the constant reminders of the battle for my parents’ truth.

  For me, they were never anything more than materials.

  I never believed in the mystical side of things. The talk of energy and chakras, of negativity absorbed and auras cleansed, always felt like noise. What truly fascinated me about a stone was what I could do with it. The process of cutting, polishing, and shaping. To me, a geode didn't need to be magical to be beautiful; its beauty was inherent, waiting to be revealed. The act of taking a rough, ancient piece of amethyst and slowly, meticulously, transforming it into a piece of polished art—that was my kind of magic.

  I would talk to my mom about this, a small compromise to keep the peace and normalize our strained relationship. Every child wants to connect with their parents, after all. She saw my interest in stones and hoped I would carry on her "witchy" traditions. But I never felt a connection to the world she lived in. It was a world of madness to me. My fascination was in the craftsmanship, not in cleansing energies. That was the core of what I saw in the stone. That was what mattered. I didn't need spirits or an aura to tell me that a wonderfully cut stone was pretty; I needed only my own eyes.

  My mother never stopped trying. One afternoon, just before my twelfth birthday, she called me into the den. The curtains were drawn tight, blocking out the afternoon light. It was just us, surrounded by the flickering glow of candles. The air was thick with the earthy scent of burning hickory and the floor was a maze of smooth river stones. In the center of it all sat a small silver bowl, holding rainwater and a crushed purple flower.

  "Sit with me, Morgan," she said, patting the cushions beside her. "Just for a minute."

  I sighed and sat down, already annoyed. I was halfway through a book, and this felt like an interruption. "What is this for?"

  "I had a dream last night," she explained, her voice low and serious. "When I woke up, I wrote down a chant. I think it’s for you."

  She handed me a scrap of paper. I looked at the strange letters and jagged symbols; they looked like doodles in a forgotten alphabet. "It's in a language I don't recognize," she whispered, her conviction making her seem more sincere. "But it felt... old. Important. I think you dreamed it first, and then passed it to me."

  I rolled my eyes. "Mom, that doesn't make sense."

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  "It doesn’t have to, sweetheart," she said, her voice patient. "Just humor me. Speak the words out loud. Just once."

  I stared at the paper, feeling the familiar mix of exasperation and a small, unwilling curiosity. My tongue fumbled over the sounds, a meaningless string of syllables. “Kethaal… sonari… venem… aldrak.” They felt heavy in my mouth, like I was speaking words I shouldn't know.

  When I finished, she let out a slow, satisfied breath. A beat of silence passed between us, the candle flames flickering in the quiet.

  "There," she said, a faint smile on her lips. "Did you feel that?"

  I shook my head. "Feel what?"

  Her smile grew, distant and knowing. "You won't understand yet. But that chant is meant to come back to you. Someday. And when it does... speak it without fear."

  I never forgot those words. They've always been a part of my mind, a strange little riddle from a woman who wanted me to believe in magic as much as she did. A riddle I still haven't solved.

  For me, it was never about the magic of the words. It was about the process. What did they mean? What language were they from? I threw myself into research, just as my father would have wanted. And in those early years, I didn't completely rule out magic. What kid doesn't want to believe they have a secret power to make their problems go away?

  With time, however, even that small flicker of hope faded. Years passed, and I stopped believing. My mother's incantations, her rituals, her chants—I dismissed them all as nonsense. The scientific, rational world of my father's journals was my reality, and hers was a quaint delusion.

  Until she brought THAT into the house.

  It looked like a marble at first. Smooth, perfectly rounded, and completely unassuming. Just another one of her spiritual trinkets. But the color was impossible to pin down. It shifted, shimmering with a thousand iridescent hues, as if it contained the essence of every gemstone crushed and melded together. It defied logic. It defied the laws of optics. No variety of opal I had ever studied came close. It was as if the marble itself refused to be understood, refusing to be cataloged or defined.

  That was the exact moment when everything changed, and the visions began.

  Once the marble was in the house, my life became a series of unsettling flashes. They were not hallucinations or dreams; they were memories. They were so clear and so graphic that it was impossible to dismiss them as my imagination. And the worst part was, they were not mine.

  I began to experience my father’s life. I knew things that I had no way of knowing, intimate details I doubt he ever shared with my mother. The metallic scent of his laboratory. The bone-deep ache of exhaustion in his shoulders after a marathon operation. The distinct, bitter taste of his favorite coffee, a brand I'd never even touched. I was a passenger in his life, and I couldn't get out.

  The visions didn't stop.

  Memory after memory assaulted me without warning, every time I'd so much as close my eyes. I'd be at the sink, and suddenly I would feel the taut rubber of surgical gloves being pulled over my hands. I’d close my eyes to stretch, and I'd be transported to a medical tent, the air thick with the smell of smoke, blood, and antiseptic. His life was unspooling itself inside my mind, and I had no right to be there.

  I had no explanation. I didn't know what was happening or why. The only clear fact was that it all started with that marble—that impossible, iridescent stone that now sat on the shelf.

  Originally, I told myself it was just stress. Grief, I reasoned, does strange things to the mind. Perhaps I'd read too many of my dad's old journals, and my subconscious was simply trying to fill in the gaps.

  But the visions didn’t stop. They happened every night.

  When I closed my eyes, I ceased to be myself. I wasn't Morgan Barlow, a sophomore in university. I was my father: Dr. Matthew Barlow, the triple-doctorate academician, the renowned scientist, and the veteran. My body was his, my hands were his, and my memories were no longer my own.

  Sleep offered no rest. The moment I fell asleep, I was a prisoner in my father's skin, a silent witness to a life of horrors. Just like tonight, I'd wake up gasping for air, my hands shaking, my heart pounding with someone else's terror.

  The most frequent vision was that of a medical triage tent. I knew every detail more intimately than I knew my own bedroom: the buzzing of the floodlights, the shrill whine of the medical machinery, and the overwhelming scent of thick, hot blood that filled my nose until I could taste nothing but iron. The air was a cacophony of screams, of men crying out for their loved ones, for their children, or just for it all to stop.

  But the worst memory—the one that always woke me—was a young soldier named Patrick. I knew his entire story even though I had never met him. He had a sister back home named Caitlyn, whose photo he carried in his pocket. He was mortally wounded, and I watched through my father's eyes as he offered Patrick a choice, tears streaming down his face. He could attempt a surgery on his destroyed liver, kidney, and lower intestine, or he could ensure Patrick’s body was sent home in a way Caitlyn would remember him. Patrick's pained smile and simple, "Thanks, Doc. I'd appreciate that," was the last thing I saw before my father gave him the injection. I woke up choking on my own saliva, unable to stop the tears that streamed down my face. I cried for a man I had never known, for a choice I could never fathom, and for a pain that was never meant to be mine.

  I stopped pretending it was stress. Who could I possibly talk to about this? My mother would only suggest some spirit-warding ritual. I knew, with a certainty that settled in my bones, that something was fundamentally and deeply wrong.

  The marble sat untouched on my shelf, but I could feel it whenever I walked past. It was no longer just an object. It was watching. Listening. Waiting. Worse, could it be remembering?

  I refused to go back to sleep. I tried everything to stay awake. Coffee, which tasted terrible. Cold showers, which were a shock to my system and my mother’s patience at three in the morning. Music blasting through my headphones helped for a while, but exhaustion always caught up.

  I sighed, closing my eyes for just a moment. I could still hear the music, but another sound bled through: the crackle of balefire, the rattle of gunfire, the ringing of explosions. I hadn't even fallen asleep, but I was somewhere else.

  The marble wasn't letting me have an escape. Not from him. Not from his past.

  The worst memories weren't even from that triage tent. The most terrifying ones were from before, dark things my father never wrote about in his journals. I knew him in a way I never had when he was alive—a man who chewed the inside of his cheek when he was focused, who hummed under his breath while stitching lacerations, who almost married a woman named Elizabeth before he met my mother. None of this was mine to know.

  The marble sat on my workbench, unmoving since my mother brought it home, claiming it was "attuned to our family line." She had cradled it like a sacred artifact, saying it felt like it had been waiting to come home.

  I stepped closer to it. The room felt colder. My breath came slow, shallow. My muscles tightened as if my body understood a danger my brain hadn’t yet registered. I stared at the marble. It stared back.

  My hand moved without my permission. I reached out and the tips of my fingers grazed its surface. A jolt shot through my wrist, a pressure like sideways gravity. The moment my palm closed around it, the world tilted. The marble warmed, pulsing faintly. My fingers refused to open. It had become a part of me.

  A soft glow began to rise from it, climbing my arm and weaving threads of light into my skin. The room began to twist, the walls stretching and bending. The posters on my walls smeared as if underwater. A humming sound pressed against my ears, a frequency that bypassed hearing and went straight to my skull. My thoughts scattered. I saw flashes of my father again, but this time, it was different. I was in his skin, breathing through his lungs. He was screaming in a foreign tongue, holding a flare, covered in someone else's blood.

  I tried to move. I tried to speak. Then the marble flared, the light blinding. It flooded my senses. I felt weightless, the ground vanishing beneath me.

  I was falling. Or rising. I didn’t know.

  All at once, the silence returned. When I opened my eyes, the room was gone. And so was I.