The clock on the living room wall marked each second with a deliberate, almost theatrical tick as though time itself had grown lazy in the heat. From the kitchen came the low, gurgling exhale of the coffee maker finishing its pour, the rich dark scent bleeding through the air and settling over everything like a slow fog. A single drop of water fell from the faucet and struck the porcelain sink with a sharp, crystalline ping that rang out and then dissolved into the silence.
Outside, Miami was doing what Miami did best burning beautifully. The sun had begun its descent toward the horizon, dragging long ribbons of amber and copper across the surface of the water below. The bay shimmered, almost obscenely luxurious, each wave catching the dying light as sailboats and yachts carved their lazy paths through it. Down on the streets, the city hummed and breathed pedestrians drifting along sun-warmed sidewalks, the steady river of traffic punctuated every so often by the sharp, mechanical shriek of a supercar tearing down the boulevard like it had somewhere better to be.
High above all of it, in the penthouse that sat at the top of the world, the stillness finally broke.
A door swung open with enough force to slam against the wall and rattle the frame a sound like a gunshot in the quiet. Damien emerged, wearing nothing but black boxer briefs, his jaw cracking open into a long, graceless yawn as his fingers dragged slowly across the nape of his neck. He moved through the hallway the way water moves downhill unhurried. His feet barely lifting from the floor as he drifted through the living room and into the kitchen, following the scent of coffee like it was the only compass he needed.
Soren was already there.
He stood at the counter in a plain white t-shirt and loosely fitted joggers, looking as though he'd been awake for hours which he had. He held a simple white mug close to his lips, and when his silver-gray eyes slid sideways toward Damien, the amusement in them was quiet but unmistakable, the kind that didn't need to announce itself.
"Good morning to you too," he said, his voice smooth and dry.
Damien's only response was a flat, "Shut up, man," as he shouldered past toward the refrigerator. He gripped the handle, pulled it open, and stood there blinking slowly, eyes narrowing as they swept across the shelves with the energy of a man who had been deeply wronged by what he was seeing.
Soren leaned over slightly, peering into the same fridge. "That looks empty," he muttered.
Damien turned his head and met Soren's gaze with the gravity of someone delivering a verdict. "Nah. It is incredibly full."
Soren's brow arched. "I must need glasses, then. Because I'm genuinely seeing nothing in there."
The corner of his mouth pulled into the ghost of a smile. Damien stared at him for a beat longer than necessary, then exhaled through his nose and swung the fridge shut. "Did anyone go shopping?" he asked, his fingers trailing absently across his abdomen, tracing the ridges of muscle with the idle habit of someone who barely noticed he was doing it.
"Renji and Jiwon left about thirty minutes ago," Soren replied, raising his mug. "They should be—"
The elevator chimed.
"—back," Damien finished, already turning.
The doors parted slowly, and Renji stepped out first black sports jacket, his name printed across the back in bold lettering above the number 9, shorts, slides, a heavy grocery bag hanging from each hand. His face, as always, gave nothing away. Behind him, Jiwon spilled into the living room with considerably more energy.
"We're home!" he announced to no one and everyone, his voice filling the space as he moved toward the kitchen wearing a slightly oversized gray shirt with intricate patterning across the chest, loose sweatpants, slides slapping softly against the marble floor. He arrived just ahead of Renji, who followed in silence, setting the bags down onto the counter with a muted thud.
Damien had relocated to one of the kitchen stools, arms folded across his chest, watching them with the expression of a man who had appointed himself supervisor of an operation he had no part in.
Renji's eyes found him immediately.
"What exactly are you doing with those noodle arms of yours?" he said with no inflection and no shift in expression, the words delivered with the same energy as a weather report.
Damien blinked. He looked down at his arms. Then back up at Renji. Then, slowly and deliberately, he unfolded them and curled his biceps in a full flex, holding the pose with absolute conviction. "I'm sorry you don't see these?"
Renji exhaled once through his nose. With the same mechanical calm, he reached up, gripped his right sleeve, and pushed it back to reveal his own bicep, flexing it with the efficiency of a man making a point. "How about these?" The faintest smirk ghosted across his mouth.
Across the counter, Soren raised the mug to his face and held it there as if it were a shield, his expression almost collapsing into one of profound and genuine suffering. His brows drew together, mouth parting slightly in the quiet anguish of a man watching something he had already watched too many times.
Jiwon drifted beside him, scratching the back of his head as his eyes bounced between the two flexing men and Soren's deteriorating composure. He leaned in and dropped his voice. "For an entire month. Every single day since we got back. Those two have found a reason to do this."
Soren set the mug down on the counter with a soft, deliberate click. "That reminds me." His voice carried across the kitchen, calm and even but there was an edge beneath it, quiet and certain, that cut through the moment like a blade.
Renji's arm dropped. Damien's followed.
Both of them looked at him.
"It has been too peaceful," Soren continued, his silver eyes steady. "And that worries me far more than the alternative." He paused, letting the weight of it settle. "The news hasn't stopped missing persons reports, people reappearing with no explanation, and those sinkholes. The ones scattered across the earth. They aren't staying the same size." His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "They're growing."
The kitchen went still.
"Maybe it's over for us, though?" Jiwon offered carefully, gesturing with one hand as though testing the idea's structural integrity before committing to it. "I mean, not that anyone's complaining. We haven't seen blood or death in a while. That's not nothing."
"It isn't," Soren agreed. He lifted his mug, took a slow sip, then set it down again. "But this feels like a pause. Not an ending."
Damien leaned forward, crossing his arms over the counter's surface. "What are we supposed to do about it, though? If something's coming, it's coming. We've had a month. We're sharper than we were before. That's got to count for something."
The silence that followed moved through the kitchen like a draft. It was there, then gone. It was broken by the rustle of Damien's hand reaching into one of the grocery bags.
Renji's hand came down on it like a judge's gavel.
Damien yanked back. Said nothing. Renji said nothing. The matter was closed.
Time, after that, moved the way it tends to when nothing is demanding it slow down. Days bled into other days. Weeks stacked quietly on top of one another. The city outside the penthouse windows continued its indifferent rotation of heat and noise and light, and the four of them moved through it resting, adjusting, recalibrating in the ways that men do when the world has briefly agreed to leave them alone.
Then the calendar turned to June 19th, 2026 — 13:32.
The living room held the particular quality of a Sunday afternoon that had no intention of becoming anything else. Renji was reclined in his chair with the composed stillness of someone who had made a deliberate study of relaxation, thumb moving slowly across his phone screen. Soren sat upright on the couch, posture impeccable even in leisure, watching the television with focused, analytical eyes as the news anchor spoke over footage of another anomaly the world hadn't found a name for yet. On the floor, Damien lay sprawled on his back, phone raised above his face, scrolling through something that almost certainly didn't matter. And Jiwon, Jiwon sat beside the floor-to-ceiling window, one knee drawn up, staring down at the city spread beneath them with an expression carved from stone.
The first tremor was subtle. A low, resonant vibration that climbed through the floor and into the bones the kind of feeling that arrived a half second before the mind caught up to what it meant.
Then the portals opened.
Four of them, white and sudden and absolute blooming open directly beneath each of them without ceremony or warning, like the floor had simply decided to become something else. Renji's phone left his hand in an instant. Damien followed, already tumbling upward as gravity reversed its claim on him. Soren closed his eyes for exactly one second for a single, measured exhale then opened them again and let himself fall. Jiwon's shriek tore through the room, sharp and unrestrained, as the window and the city and the afternoon light all disappeared at once.
The void swallowed them whole.
It was the same as before vast and neither dark nor truly light, scattered through with drifting motes of white and black like static frozen mid-motion, like the negative space between one world and the next. The silence here wasn't empty. It pressed.
Renji descended with his arms folded across his chest, legs crossed beneath him, spine straight falling through nothing as though he were seated in a chair that no longer existed and had chosen not to acknowledge its absence.
Damien, several feet away, had already made himself at home. He drifted horizontally through the void on his back, hands laced behind his head, and somewhere in the in-between space that connected one reality to another, he began to whistle.
Soren turned slowly in the air, eyes methodical, cataloguing the texture of the void around them the way the motes moved, the way the light behaved, the particular quality of a space that shouldn't exist but kept insisting that it did. His fingers found his chin.
And through it all, cutting clean through Renji's silence and Damien's whistling and Soren's quiet contemplation, Jiwon spun. Over and over, arms pinwheeling, voice echoing into the formless dark between worlds.
The void simply ceased with no transition, no warning, no dramatic unraveling of the space between worlds. One moment there was nothing, and the next there was everything: solid earth rising up to meet them as though it had been waiting patiently, absorbing the impact with an almost courteous gentleness. The pain that should have come never did.
The sky above them was wide and unhurried, the sun hanging low and heavy in its arc. It was a warm, burnished gold that cast long shadows across unfamiliar ground and painted everything it touched in the colors of late afternoon.
Renji was the first upright. He sat up slowly, rolled his jaw open into a long, quiet yawn that he made no effort to conceal, then unfolded himself from the ground and rose to his full height the kind of height that caused people to recalibrate their surroundings. He drew his arms across his chest in a measured stretch, the joints settling with a soft series of pops, and then he was still, eyes already moving across the landscape with quiet precision.
That was when he heard it. The rhythmic percussion of hooves against packed earth, growing steadily closer and beneath it, the low creak of old wood under weight.
A carriage.
"This gives me nostalgia," Renji murmured, almost to himself, as his arms folded back across his chest. "From the first time."
Beside him, Damien had pulled himself upright and, in the same fluid motion, draped an arm over Renji's shoulder and leaned against him with the casual ease of someone resting against a wall. Neither of them acknowledged it. Soren stood slightly apart, eyes fixed on the approaching carriage, cataloguing it with the focused quiet of someone reading a language they recognized. It was weathered with the wood dulled and roughened by use and time, the paneling bearing the particular character of something that had traveled far and asked no sympathy for it. The horses that drew it were enormous, their musculature carved and deliberate, their breath releasing in slow, humid plumes as they slowed to a halt.
Jiwon had not yet gotten up from the ground. He sat where he'd landed, watching the carriage come to a stop with the wide, careful attention of someone who had learned through repeated and occasionally painful experience to wait and see.
The door swung open.
A man stepped out.
The four went still.
It was not the apparel that stopped them, though it was striking. It was white with accents of gold threading through the fabric, clean and deliberate in its composition, a roaring lion crowned in gold embroidered above his left breast. It was not the way he carried himself, though he descended from the carriage with the unhurried ease of someone accustomed to being exactly where he was supposed to be.
It was his face.
Jiwon's gaze moved. From the man, to Soren. Back to the man. Back to Soren. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "Y— you guys..." he started, the words arriving before the sentence was ready for them. "You guys look alike."
He was not wrong. He was not even close to wrong. He was, in fact, so precisely correct that the observation barely covered it.
The man stood at nearly the same height as Soren, built with the same proportions, the same quiet architecture of the shoulders and jaw. His hair was ash-blonde, it was not similar to Soren's, not reminiscent of it, but identical in shade and texture. His eyes, when they found the group, carried the same distinctive silver-gray that Soren's did the kind of color that shifted depending on the light, that looked like winter water in certain angles. The same sharp line of the nose. The same arrangement of features, composed into the same geometry. And there, sitting just beneath the outer corner of his right eye was a mole, small and precise.
A carbon copy. A reflection pulled forward through time and asked to stand in the grass and breathe.
Soren stared. The man stared back.
Then something moved behind the man's expression a subtle shift, the brow lifting in a single, perfectly arched line, the kind that came not from surprise but from the arrival of a question that genuinely demanded asking.
"If I may," he began, his voice pitched a register higher than Soren's, clear and measured. "Are you related to me in any way?" He tilted his head slightly, studying Soren the way Soren had been studying him with the focused patience of someone who already suspected the answer would be complicated.
Soren blinked. The stasis broke. He drew a short breath and cleared his throat. "I was going to ask you the same thing."
"Hm." The man let the sound settle between them for a moment. "In that case — may I have your name? And your family name, if you'd be so kind."
Soren's voice, when it came, was not entirely steady. "I am Soren." A beat. "Soren Valenhardt."
The name landed.
"Valenhardt?"
The man repeated it not as a question but as a contradiction the word pushed out of him by something that hadn't had time to become a composed response yet. The measured calm cracked, just slightly, around the edges. His eyes widened by a fraction. "That's impossible." He steadied himself, something behind his expression realigning. "My name is Léopold Valenhardt."
Before the kitchen had gone quiet. Now the hillside did the same.
Renji's composure that immovable, architectural stillness he wore as naturally as other men wore expressions fractured visibly. His eyes widened. His mouth parted a fraction of an inch. It was, by his standards, the equivalent of a shout.
Damien let out a slow exhale through his nose, the sound carrying the weight of something he hadn't finished processing yet, one eyebrow climbing as his eyes moved to Soren. He was watching, measuring, reading whatever was happening behind that carefully maintained exterior.
Jiwon's jaw dropped. Not metaphorically. His mouth fell open and stayed there, unattended, doing nothing useful.
The wind moved through the space between all of them, unhurried and indifferent, pulling gently at fabric and hair. The trees at the edge of the road bowed slightly and returned. Soren did not move. His expression cycled through several things at once none of them completing, none of them resolving into something clean and then his mouth opened.
"L—" His voice cracked clean in half on the single letter. He stopped. Pressed his lips together. Began again with deliberate care.
"Léopold." The name came out steadier this time. "Aren't you — aren't you the founder of the Valenhardt house?"
Léopold blinked. Something flickered across his face that might have been amusement, or bewilderment, or some precise mixture of both and for a moment he seemed to be fighting a response that wanted to arrive as a laugh. He pressed it back, mostly successfully, a brief and involuntary curve at the corner of his mouth betraying the effort. "Forgive me," he said. "I don't mean to be dismissive of what you've said. It is only that I have been considering, for some time now, the founding of a family name." He paused, something like wonder settling into his features as he studied Soren's face. His own face, rearranged by decades he hadn't lived yet. "And you are the first person to have ever spoken it to me as though it already exists." A quiet exhale. "Perhaps that is the sign I have been waiting for."
The silence that followed had a different quality than the ones before it. Heavier. More considered.
"...Right." Soren absorbed this and set it aside to be processed later, in the way that a man in the middle of something enormous sometimes has to. He steadied himself, and then asked the question that had been building since the moment they'd landed: "If I could ask — what year is it?"
Léopold answered without hesitation, with the light confusion of a man who found the question mildly odd but saw no reason not to answer it. "The year 1796." He tilted his head again. "Why do you ask?"
Renji and Damien turned to look at each other. Between them passed something that required no words. It was a long, silent exchange conducted entirely through the particular quality of eye contact that develops between people who have survived enough together to have built their own language.
Jiwon produced a laugh. It was not a joyful sound. It was the kind of laugh that emerged when the alternative was something less manageable, it was thin and sharp and slightly frantic at the edges.
Soren exhaled slowly. Long and deliberate, the breath of a man setting something down so he could pick up whatever came next. "Well," he said at last, his voice quiet and almost contemplative. "This is going to be an interesting journey."
The wind moved again sweeping in from the open valley to the east, rolling through the long grass in visible waves, bending everything briefly in one direction before releasing it. The trees whispered. The horses exhaled. The sun continued its slow, sovereign descent toward the horizon, indifferent to the year, indifferent to the impossible reunion unfolding beneath it.
It carried no comment. But it did not disagree.
For the four of them, time had become a different kind of country.
And for Soren Valenhardt, standing in the year 1796 before the face that would one day become the origin of his own name. It was a country he had no map for.
Welcome To France