Preview of the Past
3881 Words
Alastaire's POV
The sunrise over the metropolitan skyline did nothing to wash away the lingering coldness in Alastaire’s chest. By 7:00 AM, the vulnerability that had shaken him in the dark was entirely gone, sealed away behind layers of wealth, pride, and deliberate malice.
His penthouse bath was a sprawling expanse of Italian marble and heated glass. He stood under the pounding spray of near-scalding water, watching the steam rise around him until the mirror fogged over entirely. When he stepped out, he didn't look at his left hand. He didn't look at the phantom pinky finger that still possessed a dull, rhythmic throb. Instead, he wrapped a plush towel around his waist, walked into his walk-in closet, and selected his armor for the day.
A tailored wool coat, dark charcoal. A pristine, crisp white button-down shirt. A heavy platinum watch that cost more than an average family earned in three years. Everything about his presentation was calculated to radiate power, status, and an unapproachable chill.
He didn't bother cooking. The massive kitchen, glinting with stainless steel and minimalist design, remained untouched. He grabbed his keys from the kitchen island, his jaw tightening as the small movement sent another brief spark of phantom ache through his left hand. He scoffed, slipping his hands into the pockets of his coat. It was just a dream. A bizarre, hyper-vivid psychological glitch brought on by the stress of midterms or a stray historical documentary he must have glanced at while scrolling through his phone. That was the logical explanation. The only explanation.
Down in the subterranean garage of the luxury high-rise, his custom sports car purred to life with a low, menacing rumble. The drive to Crestview University was a blur of sweeping through morning traffic, treating the other commuters like minor obstacles in his predetermined path.
Crestview was an elite, old-money institution where the buildings were covered in historic ivy and the tuition cost a small fortune. It was a playground for the children of politicians, CEOs, and old-wealth dynasties. Alastaire Thorne sat at the absolute top of that social food chain. His family’s name was engraved on the bronze plaque of the university library; his father’s influence reached deep into the board of trustees. On this campus, Alastaire was king, and he ruled with a casual, merciless tyranny.
When he parked his car in his reserved spot, a small crowd of students naturally parted as he stepped out. He didn't look at them. He didn't acknowledge the hesitant waves or the quiet, intimidated whispers that followed his path down the stone walkway.
"Alastaire! Hey, Thorne! Wait up!"
A voice broke through the morning air. Alastaire didn't slow his pace, but his lips curved into a faint, mocking smirk as his two primary shadows caught up to him. Julian and Chad—both heirs to real estate empires, both thoroughly lacking an original thought between them. They wore their expensive varsity jackets like badges of honor, looking like predatory wolves, though they were really just scavenger dogs trailing behind a lion.
"Man, you look like you're ready to murder someone already," Julian laughed, falling into step on Alastaire's right. "Did the coffee machine break in the penthouse, or did your dad cut your black card again?"
"Neither," Alastaire replied smoothly, his tone low and utterly devoid of warmth. "Just annoyed by the noise."
"Right, right. Noise," Chad chuckled, looking around the campus quad for a target. "We can fix that. Hey, did you finish the economics syllabus? The professor said he’s grading hard today."
"I don't need to worry about how he grades," Alastaire said, his eyes scanning the courtyard with a predatory coldness. "He likes his job too much to fail me."
It wasn't a boast; it was a simple, brutal fact of his life. Money bought insulation. It bought security. It bought the right to treat the rest of the world like an ant farm. And right now, Alastaire needed a distraction to burn off the lingering, irritating remnants of that Korean dream. He needed to remind himself of who he was: the thorn that drew blood, the apex predator of Crestview University.
As they neared the grand stone steps of the humanities building, Alastaire’s eyes locked onto a familiar, pathetic figure.
Sitting on the edge of a concrete bench, completely separated from the wealthy social circles buzzing around him, was Min-woo.
Min-woo was a scholarship student. He didn't belong at Crestview, and everyone knew it. He wore a faded, generic backpack that had a frayed strap held together by a safety pin. His shoes were cheap, worn-out sneakers, and his jacket was a thin, oversized flannel that looked like it had been bought from a thrift store. Min-woo was quiet, studious, and practically invisible—except to Alastaire. To Alastaire, Min-woo was the perfect outlet. A flawless, fragile object that existed solely to be stepped on whenever Alastaire felt bored or agitated.
Min-woo was hunched over a thick textbook, a notebook balanced on his knees, furiously scribbling down formulas. He was so focused that he didn't notice the shadows falling over his desk until Alastaire’s expensive leather boots stopped directly in front of his bench.
Slowly, the scratching of Min-woo’s mechanical pencil ceased. Alastaire watched with a cruel, detached satisfaction as the boy’s shoulders visibly tensed. Min-woo didn't look up immediately. He swallowed hard, his posture shrinking even further, as if he could somehow dissolve into the concrete bench if he wished hard enough.
"You're blocking the path," Alastaire said, his voice dropping into a quiet, dangerous register.
Min-woo finally looked up. His eyes were wide, blinking behind a pair of cheap, wire-rimmed glasses that were slightly crooked. There was no anger in his expression. There was no defiance, no spark of rebellion. There was only a profound, exhausted resignation. Min-woo had learned long ago that fighting back against Alastaire Thorne only made the cruelty last longer. He accepted his role as the campus punching bag with a heartbreaking, silent compliance.
"I'm... I'm sorry, Alastaire," Min-woo whispered, his voice trembling as he immediately began scrambling to gather his papers. "I'll move. I didn't mean to—"
Before Min-woo could grab his notebook, Alastaire casually lifted his foot and pressed the sole of his pristine leather boot down on the center of the open pages. The heavy paper crumpled under the weight, a dark, dusty footprint staining Min-woo’s meticulously handwritten notes.
Min-woo froze, his fingers stopping mere inches from Alastaire's shoe. He didn't pull away. He just stared at the ruined page, his lower lip quivering slightly.
"Did I tell you to speak?" Alastaire murmured, leaning forward slightly, placing his hands in his coat pockets. "Your voice is incredibly grating this early in the morning, Min-woo. Truly."
Behind him, Julian and Chad snickered, crossing their arms as they watched the spectacle. A few passing students slowed down to look, but no one intervened. No one ever did. To help a scholarship student was to invite the wrath of the Thorne family, and nobody at Crestview was that stupid.
"I'm sorry," Min-woo repeated, his head bowing low. He looked like a dog that had been kicked so many times it simply expected the boot as a natural part of its day. "I'm sorry."
"Look at this garbage," Chad laughed, reaching down and violently yanking Min-woo’s faded backpack off the bench, tipping it upside down.
The contents spilled out across the dirty concrete steps. A cheap plastic pencil case cracked open, sending pens and highlighters rolling into the dirt. A battered thermos leaked a small puddle of lukewarm instant coffee onto the ground. A folder of loose essays scattered in the light breeze, the white pages drifting toward the damp grass.
Min-woo didn't yell. He didn't scramble to catch them. He just kept his eyes glued to the dirt, his hands clutching his knees so tightly his knuckles turned white. He just accepted it.
Alastaire watched the boy's complete submission, waiting for the familiar rush of superiority, the comforting reminder that he was entirely in control of his reality. But today, the cruelty felt hollow. As he looked down at Min-woo’s bowed head, a strange, sickening sense of deja vu suddenly flashed through his mind.
A dirt path. A girl in a faded, rough hanbok bowing before him, her voice trembling with reverence... 'My Lord...'
Alastaire’s breath caught in his throat. The sudden, unbidden memory from his dream struck him like a physical blow. A violent, searing pain shot through his left pinky finger—a fierce, burning tug that felt so real he nearly stumbled backward. It felt as if a heavy, invisible rope tied to his hand had just been violently jerked by someone standing miles away.
He snatched his foot off Min-woo’s notebook, stepping back sharply. His face went pale, his breath turning shallow as he gripped his left wrist with his right hand, trying to crush the phantom agony radiating from his knuckle.
"Alastaire? You good, man?" Julian asked, his laughter dying down as he noticed the sudden, tense shift in his friend's posture.
Alastaire didn't answer. He stared at his left pinky finger, half-expecting to see a bleeding wound, but there was nothing. Just bare, unblemished skin. Yet, the ache was deafening. It pulsed in time with his racing heartbeat.
He looked down at Min-woo, who was now quietly, tragically on his hands and knees in the dirt, gathering his scattered, ruined papers without a single complaint. The sight of the boy's total submission suddenly filled Alastaire with an inexplicable, boiling rage—not at Min-woo, but at himself, at his mind, at the invisible string that felt like it was mocking him.
"Clean up your s**t and get out of my sight," Alastaire spat, his voice harsher than usual, laced with a raw irritation he couldn't hide.
Without waiting for Julian or Chad, Alastaire turned on his heel and stormed up the stone steps, pushing past the heavy oak doors of the humanities building. His heart was pounding again. The cool, calculated tyrant had been rattled by a phantom pain, and he hated it. He hated the vulnerability. He hated that a stupid, meaningless nightmare was bleeding into his perfect, controlled daylight reality.
The lecture hall for Advanced Macroeconomics was grand, tiered, and suffocatingly quiet. Alastaire sat in his usual spot in the back row, his long legs crossed, staring blankly at the massive projector screen at the front of the room.
Professor Vance was droning on about market fluctuations and wealth distribution, a lecture Alastaire could easily recite in his sleep. Normally, he would spend this hour scrolling through his investments or casually ignoring the world. Today, however, his focus was completely shattered.
Every few minutes, his left pinky finger would twitch. It wasn't a muscle spasm. It was a rhythmic, heavy pull, like something pulling a fishing line taut. If he held his hand perfectly still, he could swear he felt a microscopic vibration, a literal hum traveling through his bones.
“Why did you have to come back, my lord?”
The girl's voice from the dream echoed in his ears, completely overriding the professor’s monotonous lecture. The despair in her voice had been so heavy, so devastatingly pure, that it felt anchored to his chest like a lead weight.
Alastaire ground his teeth together, his fingers tightening around his expensive fountain pen until the metal casing creaked under the pressure. It’s an auditory hallucination, he told himself savagely. I’m sleep-deprived. I need to clear my head.
To his left, Chad was mindlessly tossing a crumpled piece of paper at the back of Min-woo’s head. Min-woo was sitting three rows ahead of them, his back perfectly straight, his stained notebook open as he tried to copy down the slides. Every time a paper ball hit his neck, Min-woo’s shoulders would twitch slightly, but he never turned around. He just kept writing. He just kept taking the hits.
"Hey, Thorne," Chad whispered, leaning over.
"Watch this. I'm going to see if I can knock his glasses off with a water bottle cap."
Normally, Alastaire would smile, or offer a cruel piece of advice on how to aim better. He liked watching people break. But right now, the petty malice felt incredibly small, incredibly irritating compared to the massive, invisible storm raging inside his own body.
"Shut up, Chad," Alastaire snapped, not looking over.
Chad blinked, stunned by the cold venom in Alastaire’s voice, and slowly dropped the bottle cap.
When the lecture finally ended, Alastaire was the first one out of his seat. He didn't wait for his sycophants. He needed space. He needed to get away from the suffocating enclosure of the lecture hall. He marched down the crowded corridors, his dark coat billowing behind him like a shadow, his aura so hostile that students actively backed away into the lockers to avoid brushing against him.
He made his way toward the university library—not because he wanted to study, but because the upper floors of the building were notoriously empty and silent during the early afternoon. He needed a place where he didn't have to maintain his public persona, a place where he could figure out why his body was betraying him.
The library was a massive, gothic structure with towering stained-glass windows and endless labyrinths of towering wooden bookshelves.
Alastaire bypassed the main floors where students clustered around laptops and coffee cups, taking the winding stone staircase up to the fourth floor—the historical archives section.
The air up here was completely different. It was thick with the scent of old paper, leather bindings, and dust motes dancing in the dim shafts of sunlight filtering through the narrow windows. It was dead silent, save for the distant hum of the building's ventilation system.
Alastaire walked down the narrow aisles, his boots clicking softly against the hardwood floor. He ran a hand along the spines of the heavy, ancient volumes, his mind spinning in chaotic circles. He stopped in a secluded corner, leaning his back against a massive bookshelf, and finally pulled his left hand out of his pocket.
He held it up to his face, staring intensely at his pinky finger.
"There's nothing there," he whispered aloud, his voice sounding hollow in the empty aisle. "It’s a glitch. A neurological trick."
But the moment the words left his lips, his finger violently twitched again. This time, the pull was so distinct that his entire hand was dragged an inch to the right.
Alastaire’s breath hitched. A cold sweat broke out across the back of his neck. He didn't move. He watched in absolute, horrified fascination as his hand was subtly, persistently guided by an invisible force. The throb in his knuckle grew warmer, transforming from a dull ache into a gentle, pulsating heat.
His hand was being pulled toward the bookshelf directly in front of him.
Every logical fiber of his being screamed at him to drop his arm, to walk away, to drive straight to a luxury medical clinic and demand a brain scan. But his stubbornness—the deep, unyielding pride that defined Alastaire Thorne—refused to let him run away from a challenge, even if that challenge was a supernatural anomaly. He wanted to prove to himself that this was nonsense.
Slowly, deliberately, Alastaire allowed his hand to follow the pull.
His fingers drifted over the spines of the books on the third shelf. They passed text after text on European history, Roman architecture, and ancient warfare. The heat in his finger grew more intense, shifting from a gentle warmth to a sharp, prickling burn as his hand hovered over a specific, weathered volume tucked deep into the corner.
The pull stopped. The invisible string went perfectly slack.
Alastaire stared at the book. The spine was wrapped in a faded, dark blue cloth that was frayed at the edges. There was no gold lettering, no title printed on the side—only a small, handwritten archive sticker with a series of numbers.
With a trembling hand, Alastaire reached out, gripped the top of the spine, and pulled the book from the shelf.
A heavy layer of dust drifted into the air, making him cough softly. He walked over to a small, secluded study wooden table tucked under a stained-glass window, setting the heavy volume down on the dark wood. The cover was completely blank, rough and coarse under his fingertips.
He opened the book. The pages were thick, yellowed with age, and gave off the distinct, earthy scent of ancient parchment—the exact same scent that had lingered in his nostrils during his dream.
Alastaire’s heart began to hammer against his ribs again. He flipped through the early pages, realizing it wasn't a standard textbook. It was a printed collection of translated historical records, journals, and legal documents from East Asia, specifically focused on the mid-Joseon dynasty of Korea.
"Nonsense," he muttered, his voice shaking slightly as he forced himself to flip the pages. "A complete coincidence."
He flipped through records of tax collection, royal decrees, and descriptions of ancient structural fires. He was about to slam the book shut, furious at himself for indulging in such stupidity, when his eyes caught a translated excerpt from a diary of a royal court scribe, dated several centuries ago.
His breath caught. The text read:
...The tragedy of the Northern Estate remains an unspoken stain upon the district. The Lord of the estate, known for his cold and unyielding arrogance, ruled his lands with a fist of iron, showing mercy to none. Yet, it was whispered among the servants that his heart was bound entirely to a lowly maid of the outermost courts—a bond that defied the laws of status and blood...
Alastaire’s hands began to shake. He leaned closer, his eyes flying down the page, his vision tunneling until the rest of the library faded into complete darkness.
...When the fires tore through the estate during the winter uprising, the Lord did not flee to save his titles or his wealth. He ran into the flames to find her. The scribes record that he was found on his knees, cradling her lifeless form in his arms as the smoke consumed the sky. Before the shadows took him, the servants heard her final, devastating cry to her master: 'Why did you have to come back, my lord?'
The book slipped from Alastaire’s fingers, slamming shut with a heavy, echoing thud that broken the silence of the library.
He stumbled backward, his chair scraping violently against the hardwood floor. His face was entirely bloodless, his skin stark white against the dark fabric of his tailored coat. His breath came in ragged, terrified gasps as he stared at the closed blue book on the table like it was a venomous snake ready to strike.
The words were identical. The setting, the tragedy, the final dialogue—it was an exact mirror of the nightmare that had torn him from his sleep.
"No," Alastaire whispered, his voice cracking. He gripped his head with both hands, his fingers digging into his dark hair. "No, no, no. This isn't possible. I've never read this book. I've never studied this era. I don't care about this garbage!"
He looked down at his left hand. The phantom ache had returned, but it wasn't just a twitch anymore. The base of his pinky finger was burning, a fierce, searing heat that felt like a brand melting into his flesh. It felt alive. It felt like an anchor pulling tight, reminding him that no matter how much money he had, no matter how much power he wielded over the weak students of Crestview University, he was utterly helpless against the thread tied to his soul.
He wasn't just dreaming. He was remembering.
Alastaire didn't stay for the rest of his classes. He couldn't. The elite world of Crestview, with its petty dramas and predictable routines, suddenly felt incredibly small, artificial, and suffocating.
He practically fled the library, storming down the stairs and out into the bright afternoon sun. He didn't care that Julian called his name from across the courtyard; he didn't care that he ran directly past Min-woo, who was still sitting on a distant bench, meticulously taping the broken strap of his cheap backpack together. Alastaire got into his car, slammed the door, and drove back to his penthouse like the devils of the past were chasing him down the highway.
When he locked the door of his apartment behind him, the silence of the luxury space offered no comfort. He threw his expensive wool coat onto the floor, unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt, and began pacing the length of his living room.
The floor-to-ceiling windows showed a beautiful view of the city, a testament to his modern wealth and dominance. But Alastaire felt trapped. He looked at his hands—the hands of a rich, spoiled brat who had never known a day of real hardship, hands that had ruined Min-woo’s notes just because he was bored.
Yet, according to that ancient text, these same hands had once held a dying girl in a burning kingdom centuries ago.
"Why me?" he yelled into the empty penthouse, his voice echoing off the minimalist concrete walls. "Why the f**k me?!"
He slammed his right fist against the glass window, the heavy pane vibrating slightly under the impact. He was furious. He was terrified. He was a man who prided himself on being the thorn—the one who caused pain, the one who controlled the narrative. But now, he was being handled like a puppet by an invisible red thread that stretched backward into the dark abyss of history.
He threw himself onto his massive Italian leather sofa, burying his face in his hands. The heat in his pinky finger slowly subsided, returning to that familiar, dull, rhythmic throb. A constant, unyielding reminder.
He didn't know how to untie the knot. He didn't know how to break the connection, or if traveling along the string was even possible without losing his mind entirely. All he knew was that his perfect, cruel, golden life was a lie. The thorn on the rose hadn't just drawn blood from others; it had finally turned inward, piercing his own heart with the sharp, agonizing weight of a love he hadn't yet earned, and a tragedy he was entirely doomed to repeat.
Alastaire lay there in the darkening room as the afternoon dissolved into twilight, staring at his bare hand in the shadows. The modern king of Crestview University was completely alone, utterly terrified, and hopelessly tangled in a thread made of time, blood, and embers.
- Writer
