1 The End –

"Hello world." – speech in English.

'Hello world.' – thoughts.

[Hello world.] – writing.

"{Hello world.}" – speech in another language.

-=-=-=-=-=-

The sun shone from the sky on the streets of Moscow, heating the asphalt almost to the boiling point. People walked lazily in the shade of houses and trees, cars flashed along the roads, stray animals tried to get into the basements of houses to find at least some cold air. It was the hottest day of the year and everyone could feel it.

It was on this day that a brother and sister couple went to the park next to their house for a walk. The girl dragged the guy by the hand so that he walked faster, but he barely moved his legs.

"{Come on! You can't spend the whole summer staring at the monitor,}" the girl giggled.

The boy rubbed his eyes, trying in vain to get rid of the black circles around them, and sighed heavily. "{Some of us have to work, Kat.}" Katya turned, opening her mouth to protest, but he beat her to it. "{And I won't let you work until you finish school, runt.}"

"{Hypocrite,}" she huffed.

These two are Katya and Danil Khromov, a sister and brother who lost their parents at a young age. After their death, the children were looked after by their grandfather, a strict but kind man under thick skin. Kurt took care of an eight-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl as well as his old age would allow. But three years ago, he lost his leg in an accident and since then his health has gone downhill.

Dan was only eleven years old at the time and he saw the truth in their situation. They were in a tight place. If their grandfather dies, what will happen to them? Will they be sent to an orphanage? Will they get lost in a sea of ​​paperwork? Can they be left to deal with themselves?

An uncertain future made Dan think and mature much earlier than everyone else. He wondered for a long time what exactly he could do to help and settled on getting money to the house. There was a little problem, because who in their right mind would hire a child? Excluding the illegal parts of the world and the good Samaritans.

After a few weeks of thinking, he turned to the one thing in the world that had the most answers to his questions: the internet. It had mixed results, but he found something that could give him a steady income so they at least had some money. Digital art.

It was a difficult thing to learn, but his options were this or becoming a drug runner. Well, or a programmer, but he decided that learning programming languages ​​​​is better left for later. Over the course of three years, he learned to juggle his studies, painting – where he discovered an amazing talent within himself, both in physical painting and online – with a nearly non-existent personal life and trying to keep his body in shape. In some things he was more successful than in others.

Now Dan was fourteen, and Katya was twelve. Dan has become quite good at art and has recently started selling his works. Small influencers who wanted fanart, random people who found his page and asked him to draw something, his clientele was small, but the money started coming in.

Katya didn't do anything so grand, but she chose to start seriously studying marketing and psychology. She was so good that she earned the title of "little manipulator" from Dan. To be precise, he started calling her that after she broke the nose of one of her classmates and HE got suspended after that. Of course, it only worked because the asshole was… well, an asshole to everyone around him and didn't have many friends in class, but it still counted.

"{Why today? TV couldn't wait until tomorrow?}" Dan asked, wiping sweat from his face. "{I swear this heat will kill me.}"

"{We're going to the edge of the forest that I found a couple of days ago. You need to get out of the house more, or you'll start looking like a vampire.}" She replied with confidence, but Dan just chuckled.

"{More than I am now?}"

To tell the truth, Dan wasn't the palest person in the world, but it was pretty close. Days spent in the dark of a room in front of a computer did not help his life. Combined with his ice-blue eyes and black hair, he actually looked like a vampire.

"{Yes. Now stop dragging your feet and walk like a man.}"

Rolling his eyes, Dan took her advice – more like an order – and now they just walked hand in hand.

"{How's school been for you?}" Dan asked, looking at the trees around. He never got to draw them just right.

"{Meh, 's alright. Some dude smashed the bathroom on the third floor, did you hear? Painted fake blood on the walls too."}

"{Yeah, it was Marat. Yulievna checked the cameras.}"

The siblings continued to chat about various things going on in their lives. But Katya felt that something was wrong with her brother. He staggered more and more with each step, his pupils were much larger than they should have been under the sun. Dan was breathing heavily and sweating like a pig.

"{Danil? You need to get into the shade. Now.}"

He didn't even protest and let her lead him into the shadows. Not that he could, his head was killing him.

"{I think I have a heatstroke.}" Dan said with difficulty.

Katya put him under the shade of a tree and took the phone out of her pocket. "{Well done Sherlock, you figured out what was wrong with you. Why didn't you say something sooner?}"

"{Everything was alright.}"

Katya was saying something about an ambulance, but Dan couldn't listen to her. His thoughts tangled with each other, intertwined in a strange web of colors and sentences. For some reason, his thoughts always returned to the trees, which was one thing right in front of his eyes, so he closed him. Usually drawing leaves was not so easy for Dan, but now everything seemed so right.

A fast stoke of a brush, starting firm but going lighter. All the leaves that he painted were not natural. Too thick, too long, too big or too small. Leaves were the easiest part of a tree to draw, trees were very simple, to tell the truth, Bob Ross proved it with no problem. But with the detailed drawings, everything was different.

"{Son? Hey? Can you tell me your full name?}" An unfamiliar male voice asked him.

"{Danil Grigorievich Khromov,}" he said.

"{Do you know where you live?}"

Dan chuckled. Of course, he knew where he lived.

"{Why do you need to know? Mom said not to give my address to strangers.}" He slurred out.

Strong arms lifted him up and placed him on the stretcher, but that didn't matter right now. Where does he live? For some reason, his memory refused to work with him. Dan was sure he knew where he lived, who doesn't know where they live? Little children, he'd imagine.

"{Do you know who you're studying to be?}" Another question was heard.

"{Huh? No, I'm still in school, it's too early for me to choose a spealizion,}" he stopped, that word didn't sound right. "{Specalizion. Secialization. How do people pronounce this word?}"

No one answered him.

The world became blurry over time. Dan sometimes saw his sister's face, the faces of unfamiliar masked nurses, the ceiling of an uncomfortable ambulance, sometimes he saw something... different. Strange. Unnatural.

A creature made of pure blackness hovered only at the edges of his vision. It didn't do anything, was just… watching.

"{I think I'm hallucinating.}" Dan said and in the next moment the world lost colors.

He was confused. Everything around was black or shades of gray, sounds disappeared and time seemed to stop. Dan couldn't move, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't hear his own heartbeat, but he was still alright.

The world just refused to move.

"You can see me." The faint voice felt like it was scratching at his eardrums was coming from above.

The black creature creeped towards him, crawling across the ceiling. The movements were not quite correct, reminding Dan about his leaves. Something that the artist couldn't draw correctly and just left the work as it is.

"You're weird," the creature continued. "Many people with a will stronger than yours trembled before me. Soldiers, poets, rulers and even gods knelt before me. The madmen gained enough sanity to fear me, the sane ones lost their minds from fear. You are not afraid of me." It didn't speak the language Dan knew, but the teen could still understand it.

Dan wanted to answer, but his mouth refused to move. 'What should I be afraid of?' he thought.

The creature craned its neck, most likely to get a better look at Dan, but it didn't have eyes. "Death at my hands. Unexplainable things going on around you. Even my appearance is enough to frighten mortals."

If Dan could move, he would nod. 'It's logical. People are afraid of death, whoever they are, but that's just not for me. I realized long ago that my time is not infinite and that sooner or later I will die and only memories will remain behind me. Right now, I can die and I don't feel fear, only regret that I'll leave my family.' The fog in his mind dissipated a little, but didn't completely leave him. 'I've never been afraid of the unknown, if I don't know something, it just means that I just have to learn or remain ignorant forever.'

The creature made a sound, like an echo of a scratched vinyl recording. "And my looks?"

'I drew worse.' The thought flashed through his head before he could stop it.

"Not only are you weird, you're also funny." An emotionless voice sounded and a long silence reigned in the ambulance.

'What are you?' Dan thought after a while. It was strange to think that time had passed when the world didn't move.

"I don't know," the creature replied. "I have been around for a long time, but no one can tell what I am, who I am. Most call me The Wanderer." The black body fell off the top of the car and landed on Dan's left. "I look at things. At people and their lives. Change a couple of things sometimes. Always the curious kid, they say."

'Sounds interesting, are you looking at my life?'

The Wanderer raised a clawed hand, brushing a few stray hairs from Dan's face. "No. You're just a lucky find. Few mortals can see me, let alone understand me." It stopped, thinking about something. "Do you want to live?"

'Yes.' Dan answered right away. 'I can't leave Katya and Kurt alone.'

It made that strange sound again. "Interesting, but impossible. Your lifestyle isn't the healthiest, the heat didn't help it. Death is now just a matter of seconds or hours for you. Your heart is ready to fail at any moment. You won't get a replacement."

The Wanderer's words were brutally honest, cold and completely devoted of empathy. Dan was grateful for that, too many people in his life were trying to sugar-coat things.

'Can't you let me live?'

"I can. I just don't want to."

Dan's thoughts flashed through a couple of not quite censorship words addressed to the Wanderer. "If you can save my life, why not?! You can make the gods 'kneel,' so why the hell can't you save me?!" Dan stopped abruptly, the sound of his voice resounding in the complete silence of the world. His heart was beating again and his lungs took in air, but his head was melting.

The Wanderer didn't even twitch from his unexpected movements, only leaned even closer. "Even more interesting. Your brain is ready to explode, like it's the price you paid for being able to move in this space. Your life is so ordinary it's ridiculous, but you're capable of breaking into my realm, if not unharmed. So much talent in a world without anything supernatural. It's so… boring."

Dan was breathing heavily, not even feeling the pain that was trying to take over his body. He just felt under incredible pressure. "You're a cruel bastard, you know that?" He muttered, looking for his sister. Tears streamed down the girl's cheeks and she clutched the phone in her hands – most likely she was talking to Kurt.

"That's what they called me too, yes." The Wanderer nodded. "But no one can call a child's interest cruel. After all, that's who I am, at least in the words of others. I think you'll do better in the world with magic."

The nurses took out cold packs of the boxes and placed them around his body. His clothes were either taken off or torn to make it easier for him to breathe. "Why do I feel better and worse at the same time?"

"Ah. It's because your previous traumas affect your physical body, not your astral projection." The Wanderer answered.

Astral projection was a rather strange use of magic. The soul left the body to explore the non-material world, leaving the body almost defenseless. Despite this, many have used astral projection for a variety of different reasons.

Dan blinked, raising his hand in front of his face. He wasn't too surprised when he found it translucent. "A world without the supernatural, where can I do something like that? Where you can do something like that?"

The Wanderer's clawed arms again reached out to Dan's face, but it stopped himself a couple of centimeters from the target.

"I never said that what you're doing now is impossible to do."

Dan pushed himself up on his elbows and sat up on the bed, leaving his body behind. "Why are you here, other than because I'm interesting? What are you looking for here?"

The Wanderer crouched in front of Dan, and he only now noticed how tall this creature was. "I think you'll do better in the world with magic," it said again. "Maybe with a few changes it would be even better."

Taking a deep breath, Dan decided to try his luck. "Will you tell me what these changes are?"

"No."

Dan didn't blink, trying to find any hint of emotion in the Wanderer's pose. If what the creature was saying was true, he had no choice in the matter. "Can I leave a message for my family before you send me to a new world?"

Dan's soul was torn at the knowledge that he would leave his family behind. That he would just die from something as stupid as heatstroke. That he would hurt his sister again, even if it wasn't his fault. He just knew that Katya would blame herself for his death – or disappearance, he did not know what would happen in this world.

The Wanderer shook his head. "No, you won't need it. I will create an exact copy of you and leave it in this world. He will survive this heat stroke and live a happy life, forgetting about meeting me."

It already sounded much better than a simple death, but Dan had a question.

"... Why can't you send my copy to the new world? Just leave me here," he pleaded, but was denied.

"No. The talent of the soul is not something that can be simply copied." The Wanderer's claws dug into Dan's chest and a black hand squeezed his heart. He gaped at how his astral projection began to acquire the same black color as the Wanderer. "I will watch over you, mortal."

And like that, the world started moving again. This time without one Danil Grigorievich Khromov. His place taken by another.

The final thoughts of the original were that The Wanderer hadn't asked a single question, but had come to the conclusion that it didn't need to. It already knew all the answers.