The world felt fake.
So incredibly, painfully ordinary.
Dante Carter stood by the window of his study, one hand resting on the cool glass as he looked down at the city far below. His mansion perched at the top of the hill, an old, ivy-covered estate set apart from the chaos of modern life. From up here, the city was a sea of lights and motion, thousands of light blinking in rhythmic silence, cars moving like blood through steel veins, a distant hum of functionality.
It was beautiful, in the way a well-made lie could be.
Behind him, the fire in the hearth had dimmed to a red glow. The walls were lined with bookshelves, many of them filled with texts no longer in print—or remembered. The air smelled of old paper and burnt cedar.
He turned away from the window and slumped into his chair. The silence wrapped around him like a heavy coat.
Dante wasn't just tired. He was drained.
Years. He'd spent years chasing threads—frayed myths, forgotten rituals, online conspiracy forums. He'd scoured half the world—walked through forgotten temples, joined underground gathering, studied rituals in languages no one remembered how to speak. All in search of proof. A sign that there was something more. Something real. Something that didn't play by the rules of gravity, time, and polite society.
And every time, he came up empty.
No magical secret societies. No hidden pantheon. No dragons slumbering beneath the crust. Just cold, self-repeating reality.
But he knew that something existed.
He was the proof.
It started small.
A toy he had desperately wanted—but had been too timid to ask for—was gifted to him by his parents one day. No explanation, just warm smiles and a casual, "We thought you'd like it."
Coincidence. Nothing strange.
His parents were attentive. That's all.
Except that wasn't all.
Because it kept happening.
He would want something. Not idly—but deeply, with quiet conviction. A day off school. A lost object returned. A wrong made right.
And reality… adjusted.
The world never said yes. It simply responded as if his belief had been built into its bones all along.
It became a game, his secret.
He began to believe he could do more. Cast lightning, summon wind, shape water, telekinesis, levitation, invisibility... and so on.
At first, it was comical.
A zap of static from a doorknob. A light flickering with no heat or capability to burn. Gusts of wind that tousled hair but never knocked anything over.
It was harmless.
But it got stronger. As his belief sharpened and became quietly woven into the fabric of his daily life, those little tricks turned into real manifestations.
By the time he was nine, he could spark fires that burned. Crack glass with thunder that left his lungs dry. Summon cold that hung in the air like mist.
And by ten... Dante could pass as an ancient wizard reborn.
"I think, therefore it is," a godlike power.
But the gift came with isolation.
His parents died not long after, a sudden, tragic accident that no amount of belief could undo. He was still just a boy, too young to truly understand loss, yet old enough to feel its hollow permanence settle into his chest.
Orphaned and alone, Dante Carter was left with a sizable inheritance: an old mansion too big for silence, bank accounts that only highlighted his lack of direction, and the echo of two loving voices forever gone.
As time passed, Dante never met anyone else who could do what he did. The deeper he explored—both inward and outward—the more he realized just how alone he was.
The rest of the world operated on routine and disbelief. Every year that passed, people seemed to grow more cynical. More grounded. The algorithms ran tighter. The margins of imagination shrank.
Dante knew he didn't belong among them.
Not anymore.
He was something else.
A quiet anomaly in a world that refused to believe in its own wonder.
And he used it.
He could tilt the stock market—never enough to draw attention, just enough to subtly grow his already considerable wealth. A quiet suggestion here, a chance news article there, and numbers would rise or fall exactly when he needed them to. He could plant the seed of a scandal in just the right place, and watch a politician's carefully constructed career unravel like old thread. The timing of events, the way moments aligned and spiraled forward, was like clay in his hands
He moved in the background, unseen. An invisible hand nudging outcomes, orchestrating chains of coincidence so perfectly spaced they never looked unnatural. A missed flight here. An overheard conversation there. A spilled coffee delaying someone just long enough to change everything.
But there were limits.
Push too hard, and the world pushed back. Subtly, at first—plans misfiring, results slipping through cracks that shouldn't exist. And if he kept pressing, the backlash grew sharper, stranger. Reality itself, it seemed, had an immune system—an instinct to correct anomalies it couldn't explain.
So he learned restraint.
He worked behind the curtain, not as a god, but as a rumor. A phantom pulling threads, always careful, always precise. Not because he couldn't do more—but because he understood the price of doing too much.
Tonight, something stirred in Dante Carter.
A thought.
He stood at the window again, the city sprawled below him like circuitry—lit up and humming, lifeless in its mechanical precision. Buildings stacked against one another, steel and glass monoliths blinking with artificial rhythm. Lights in windows, headlights on roads. Millions of people, each living in their own narrow frames of certainty.
He had spent years trying to find the supernatural in the world. Trying to prove—to himself more than anyone—that the veil could be pulled back. That something greater waited beneath the static surface of ordinary life. But all he'd found were dead ends, denied of the hope of stumbling upon some hidden crack in the surface where the impossible had slipped through.
But the world was airtight.
Tidy. Logical. Smothered by reason.
So maybe it wasn't about finding it.
Maybe it was about creating it.
Not with brute force. Not with showy miracles or desperate rituals.
With belief.
Stories. Incidents. Hints.
Seeded impossibilities. Unexplained moments. A picture that moved when no one was looking. A child healed from an illness without cause. A forest where no compass worked.
Let them doubt. Let them grasp for explanations.
Because humans were suggestible. They didn't need certainty—they just needed repetition. Subtle cues. Patterns that felt too consistent to dismiss. Whispers they couldn't shake. Once the seed of belief took root, it would grow in the shadows of their minds.
Reality wouldn't resist. It never had. It simply mirroed what other perceived- the collective agreement of what humanity believed to be true. History wasn't a record—it was a negotiation; a collective hallucination dressed in authority.
So, Dante would reshape it.
He'd craft false pasts that felt truer than the truth. Add flourishes to ancient events. Reframe old myths as lost facts. Make the world question if it had forgotten something vital.
If done right, they wouldn't even remember or question what used to be.
And as they rewrote their memories, their perception of reality would follow like a well-trained dog.
And humanity, in all its need for wonder, would shape it alongside him—unknowingly, eagerly. Not because they were weak, but because they wanted to. Because deep down, they were tired of this sterile world, too. They were aching for mystery.
It just needed someone to show them how to see it.
So Dante wouldn't force it.
He would whisper. Nudge. Plant impossibilities like landmines across the map. Create pressure points that twisted expectation. Rewire causality just enough to make people question. Just enough to open the door.
Not a god.
Not a prophet.
A conspirator in something greater.
He didn't know if it would work. He wasn't certain. Some days, he still wondered if the world would snap back and crush him like a cell rejecting a foreign gene. Maybe he was insane. Maybe he was alone.
But maybe…
Maybe he wasn't.
And if he was right—if ten, then a hundred, then a thousand minds shifted… then millions, then billions—what kind of world would that become?
A world where the line between history and myth no longer existed.
A world where magic wasn't hidden but normalized.
Not spectacle.
Memory.
Not fantasy.
Reality.
And all of it would begin here, tonight, in the quiet mind of a man too tired to wait for wonder.