It began not with a cannon blast or a royal decree, but with a glitch.

Then the stream did something impossible. It showed Osman's dreams as overlays—ghostly, translucent visions bleeding into the real landscape. Aras saw a great silver moon rising from the chest of a sleeping saint. He saw a tree whose roots drank from four seas—the Black, the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Caspian. He saw a sword that turned into a minaret.

Through Osman’s eyes, Aras watched the man scan the plain. A Byzantine patrol, twelve horsemen, rode toward a Christian village. They were taxing the Greek farmers into dust. Osman’s hand drifted to his gurz—the iron mace at his belt. Not yet. He waited.

Then the stream ended.

That night, exhausted, Aras stumbled upon a deep-web forum for "unlicensed historical streaming." One thread, buried under layers of dead links, had a title in archaic Ottoman Turkish: