Jack could not answer right away.
He stood barefoot on the cold stone, staring at the man in the shade of the arcade as if one hard blink would erase him. The same strong jaw. The same deep-set eyes. Older than the father Jack remembered from old photographs, broader through the shoulders, carrying himself with the kind of calm that made the whole courtyard seem arranged around him.
His throat tightened until it hurt.
"How are you here?" Jack asked.
The man's expression shifted, not to confusion exactly, but to sharper attention. "Here?"
Jack swallowed. His eyes burned. "I thought—" He stopped. The words would not come out straight. 'I thought you were dead. I thought the world was ending. I thought I was running down Harrow Road in sneakers and now I'm standing in a castle in a nightshirt talking to my father.'
The man glanced once toward the training yard below, then back to Jack. "There is no war," he said. "None of the neighboring kingdoms are eager to test themselves against a Tenth Rank."
Jack stared at him.
A Tenth Rank.
The phrase meant nothing and everything. Below them, a trainee loosed another silver arc from his blade, shearing through a target post. Jack felt that same impossible recognition deep in his chest.
His father watched him for a moment longer. "Why are you out here like this?"
That question struck something clearer loose.
Road. Smoke. The sky tearing open. Dead things crawling through black-rimmed wounds in the air. The stink of rot. The panic clawing up his spine as he ran.
If that world was real—and every instinct in him said it was—then confusion would not save anyone. Running had not saved anything. He needed strength. Not a weapon. Not luck. Something like the light on those blades below. Something like the stillness in the man facing him.
Jack dragged in a breath. "I want to be strong like you."
For the first time, his father smiled. It was brief, surprised, and then it broke into a low laugh. "Do you?"
"Yes."
"An ambitious declaration from a boy who has yet to put on boots." His father turned and started down the arcade. "First, you will get dressed. Then you will have breakfast. After that, if you still mean it, we will talk."
Jack hurried after him.
The castle felt unreal and painfully real at once. Servants moved with practiced silence. Sunlight spilled across polished floors. Everywhere he looked, pieces of another life pressed in around him: a hunting tapestry with hounds mid-leap, a row of practice blades on the wall, a narrow table laid with flowers that had just begun to open. He knew none of it. Some smaller, quieter part of him knew all of it.
A servant brought him clothes without being asked. Dark trousers, a cream shirt, a fitted coat he struggled into with clumsy fingers. When he emerged, his father said nothing about the delay, only led him onward.
Breakfast was worse.
A woman sat at the far end of the long table with a cup of tea in her hand, and for one unsteady second Jack forgot how to breathe again.
His mother looked up.
Not exactly his mother. The dress was wrong, the room was wrong, the easy posture of a duchess was nothing like scrubs after a hospital shift. But her eyes were the same warm brown, tired at the edges in a way that made his chest ache.
Lily sat beside her, already changed from the hall into another dress, dark hair pinned back and a book propped open against the fruit bowl. She looked up with open suspicion.
"He lives," she said.
"Barely," their mother said dryly. "Your father informed me our son has discovered modesty is optional."
Jack almost laughed. It came out too close to a broken sound.
His mother's expression softened at once. "Jack? Are you ill?"
"No," he said too quickly.
Lily narrowed her eyes. "You're acting strange."
'You have no idea,' he thought.
His father took the seat at the head of the table as if nothing were wrong. "He has informed me," he said, pouring tea, "that he intends to become strong."
Lily snorted into her cup.
Their mother blinked. "Our Jack?"
"So I was told."
Jack should have been embarrassed. Instead, the disbelief on their faces only hardened something in him. Whatever boy belonged to this body, he had not wanted this life. Jack did not want it either. He wanted his own house, his own kitchen, his own mother and sister safe in a world where the sky did not rip open. But if he could not have that yet, then he would take what this place offered.
"I mean it," he said.
His father only nodded once. "Then eat."
After breakfast, the duke brought him not to the yard but to a quiet study lined with books and maps. The windows overlooked terraced gardens. A pair of swords hung crossed over the mantel, plain and unadorned, which somehow made them more intimidating than anything gold or jeweled would have.
His father shut the door.
"Sit," he said.
Jack sat.
For a little while the duke simply looked at him, hands clasped behind his back. Not suspiciously. Measuringly.
"You asked how I became strong," he said at last. "That is not one answer. It is years of discipline, pain, correction, and repetition. But that is not the question beneath your question, is it?"
Jack said nothing.
"Have you been having strange dreams lately?"
The room went still.
Jack's fingers tightened on the chair arms. "What kind of dreams?"
"Places you have never seen, yet somehow know. Waking exhausted. Injuries earned elsewhere. Thoughts that do not fit the life around you." The duke's gaze stayed on his face. "Dreams that do not feel like dreams."
Jack's heart thudded once, hard.
He had not meant to tell anyone. He had not meant to sound insane in a castle full of strangers wearing his family's faces. But the question had been too exact.
So he told him.
Not all at once. In pieces. Harrow Road. The blasts from the city. The tears opening in the air. The dead climbing through. The sprint into the woods. Waking here.
His father did not interrupt. He did not dismiss any of it. When Jack finished, the duke walked to the window and stood with one hand resting against the frame.
"There are bloodlines," he said quietly, "for whom sleep is not always a private thing. Men and women who cross worlds in dreams. Some inherit skills there. Some leave them. Some return changed." He turned back. "If this is what has begun for you, panic will only waste time."
"So I'm not crazy."
"I did not say that." There was the barest hint of humor under the words. Then it vanished. "But no. Not for this." He studied Jack again. "You said there were dead things where you came from. If that is true, you will need more than fear."
Jack leaned forward. "Then teach me."
The duke's face gave away nothing, but after a moment he nodded. "Very well."
Training began before dawn the next morning.
It turned out wanting strength and earning it were two very different things.
His father started with stance, breath, and balance so basic it felt insulting for almost three minutes, right up until Jack's legs began to shake so badly he thought they might fold under him. Wooden sword in hand, heels aligned on a chalk mark, shoulders square, breathing deep into the belly instead of the chest—again, again, again, until sweat ran down his back and the sun had barely cleared the eastern wall.
Every time he slouched, the duke corrected him with two fingers against the shoulder or a tap of wood against his ankle.
"Your body lies," his father said. "It wants ease. Ignore it."
By the fourth day, Jack hated those words.
By the seventh, he understood them.
There were lessons in the yard, in the study, and in a practice hall open to the mountain wind. Sword forms until his wrists burned. Footwork until he stopped crossing his feet when he turned. Breathing exercises that seemed pointless until, one afternoon, his father struck at him faster than thought and Jack somehow moved before the blow landed.
"Again," the duke said.
That single word became the shape of the month.
Again.
Again after bruised knuckles. Again after thrown shoulders. Again when his palms blistered and broke. Again when frustration made his vision sting.
His father gave him books too—thin manuals on aura channels, battlefield accounts from masters of earlier generations, dense pages marked with diagrams of the body. At first Jack barely understood half of it. Then a sentence here, a principle there, began linking together.
Aura was not just light. It was will made directional. Breath given edge. The body sharpened by intent until steel became an extension of something deeper.
When Jack told his father more about the dead—about how fast they moved, how they kept coming, how normal weapons might not be enough—the training changed.
Faster mornings. Harder sparring. Less sleep.
And elixirs.
The first one came in a thumb-sized glass vial, dark red with flecks of gold suspended inside like metal dust. It smelled of herbs and hot iron.
"Drink," the duke said.
Jack did.
It was like swallowing a coal.
Heat ripped down his throat and spread through his limbs in a savage wave that drove him to one knee. He coughed until tears ran from his eyes. Every ache in his body ignited at once, then sank inward, twisting into something stranger. Not pain exactly. Pressure. As if invisible hands were widening channels inside him with brutal care.
He looked up through watering eyes. "You could have warned me."
"I just did," his father said, and handed him a second vial. "You heal quickly. That is useful. Drink."
So Jack drank.
There were gentler ones later, green-gold tonics that knit strained muscle, bitter silver draughts that cleared his head after aura exercises left him nauseous, expensive blue elixirs his father called a disgrace to the treasury but bought anyway. By the third week Jack had stopped asking what they cost.
The first time he saw his own aura, it was barely anything.
A thin pale shimmer along the practice blade, there and gone so quickly he thought he imagined it.
His father had not imagined it.
"Again," he said.
Jack did. The shimmer returned. Faint. Trembling. Real.
He chased that feeling for days.
At supper, this world's Lily mocked the bruises on his face and demanded to know who had replaced her brother with an ambitious lunatic. Their mother touched the edge of a healing cut near his jaw and told him to stop letting his father work him like a soldier. Jack could only look at them and feel a strange, aching gratitude. He did not belong to them, not really. But while he was there, he could sit in the warmth of a family made of familiar pieces and pretend the universe was kinder than it had any right to be.
Toward the end of the month, his father took him alone to a cliffside terrace above the lower fields.
Wind tore at their coats. Far below, river water flashed in the sun.
The duke drew his sword.
There was no flourish to it. No warning. One moment the blade was at his side; the next it moved.
A line of silver crossed the air a hundred yards out.
The face of the cliff split.
Stone screamed. A slab the size of a house sheared free and plunged into the valley. Jack stared after it, every hair on his arms lifted.
His father resheathed the sword.
"That," he said, "is why men prefer peace."
Jack looked at him with something very close to awe.
The duke's expression stayed unreadable. "If you are truly seeing another world, then do not romanticize strength. It exists to protect what would otherwise be broken. Remember that before you chase it for its own sake."
Jack nodded.
That night he could barely lift his arms. He ate in a daze, listened without really hearing as Lily complained about court tutors, and drifted half-asleep before he even reached the bed.
His father paused in the doorway before leaving him. "If you dream again," he said, "do not waste the chance."
Jack frowned up at him through exhaustion. "What chance?"
But the duke only gave him that same measuring look and extinguished the candle.
When Jack opened his eyes again, he was on a sagging couch in a dark living room that smelled of dust, bleach, and old wood.
For a second the ceiling looked wrong. Too low. Too familiar.
Then the boards over the windows snapped everything into place.
He sat up so fast the blanket fell to the floor.
Their house.
Not the castle. Not the terraced gardens and mountain wind. Their actual house, boarded and dim, with furniture shoved against the doors and a half-burned candle stuck in a mug on the coffee table.
Voices came from the kitchen.
Jack got to his feet, swaying. His body felt different—not larger, but denser somehow, worked through with the soreness of a month's training. He followed the voices and found his mother and Lily at the kitchen table portioning crackers into neat little piles.
Both of them looked up at once.
"Finally," Lily said. "You scared us."
His mother rose so fast her chair scraped tile. "Jack, sit down. You nearly collapsed last night."
"Last night?" he said.
They traded a look.
"Honey," Elena said carefully, "how much do you remember?"
Not enough, he almost said. Instead: "How did I get home?"
Lily frowned. "You got us home."
Jack stared.
His mother stepped closer. "We were trapped in that tree off Harrow Road. Those things were circling below. You came with the shotgun. You killed them and brought us back here. Then you boarded the windows, moved the furniture, checked every room twice, and passed out on the couch." She searched his face. "I thought you were just exhausted."
Lily nodded. "You were kind of a maniac, actually. Effective, but still."
Jack's skin went cold.
He remembered Harrow Road. He remembered running. He remembered waking in the castle.
He did not remember finding them.
In his mind, a quiet lesson from the duke rose back up. 'Some visit. Some are visited.'
Jack looked at his own hands. Callused now in places they had not been before. Bruises across the knuckles he had earned in another world. Real. All of it real.
Someone had worn his face last night.
Someone had saved his family.
A Dream Traverser, he realized. Another version. Another him, maybe. The thought should have terrified him more than it did. Instead it settled into place with a strange, grim logic.
His mother touched his arm. "Jack?"
He looked up. There was fear in her face, and exhaustion, and trust she was trying very hard not to admit she was placing on him.
He thought of the cliff splitting. Of silver light on steel. Of the dead coming through torn air.
"I'm okay," he said, though that wasn't true at all. "I just need to sleep again."
"Sleep?" Lily said. "Now?"
"Yes."
Their mother stared at him. "We need a watch."
"Then wake me if anything gets through the boards," Jack said. He was already thinking faster than the fear. One day here. A month there. Food was low. Ammunition probably lower. They could not outlast the dead by hiding. But if sleep meant training, then sleep was not escape anymore. It was preparation.
He met his mother's eyes. "If I'm right, it's how I get stronger. Fast."
Lily opened her mouth, then stopped. Something in his expression must have convinced her, because she leaned back and folded her arms. "That is the weirdest plan you've ever had."
"Probably," Jack said.
He went back to the couch, lay down fully dressed, and listened to the muffled sounds of his family in the kitchen. The house creaked. Something thudded far outside, followed by a thin, distant moan.
He closed his eyes anyway.
If a day could buy him a month, then he would pay it.