Prologue

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Shirou was getting really tired, but at Rin's insistence, he tried again. He couldn't really complain either, after all, she had "donated" the prana to him for the experimentation they were doing.

Judging the concept of creation.

Hypothesizing the basic structure.

Duplication the composition material.

Imitating the hypothesized skill of its making.

Excelling every manufacturing process.

With a tired sigh, Shirou looked down at the latest attempt at reproducing the Jeweled Sword of Zelretch. Using only Rin's genius, Shirou's Projection abilities, and a very old set of blueprints, which were a powerful combination, they unfortunately did not promise instant success.

There was no actual rush or imminent threat anyway, so they were taking their time to get everything right.

The Grail War had ended years ago, after he had unlocked Unlimited Blade Works and used it to defeat Gilgamesh.

He and Rin had long since been living in London and studying at the Clock Tower when something happened that had caused Rin no end of excitement.

Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg, The Old Man of the Jewels had returned to the Clock Tower, and declared that he would be taking on three apprentices, regardless of background, so long as they could impress him.

Rin had jumped at the opportunity, and immediately flown herself and Shirou back to Fuyuki to dig through her house for the blueprints for the Jeweled Sword, which Zelretch had given to her family six generations ago.

"Well?" Rin said, looking over his shoulder. "It looks correct, and it feels like it should be functioning. How is it?"

Shirou narrowed his eyes in concentration as he began to use Structural Grasping on the Projected sword.

Information about the sword flooded through his mind as he examined it with his magic. The material was correct. The crystal structure of the sword was correct. The spellwork that Rin had shown him days before was correctly projected onto the blade.

Pushing a bit of prana into the spellwork should have activated the sword and caused it to pull vast amounts of magical energy from other dimensions. Instead, it just sat, inert.

Shirou was ready to call it a failure and dismiss it, but felt something with his Structural Grasping that caught his attention.

There was now a gap in the main crystal of the sword where there hadn't been one before. The gap quickly grew until it stretched almost the length of the blade and widened enough to become visible to the naked eye. The main jewel of the sword now vaguely resembled a reptilian eye, with the strange gap forming the elongated pupil. There was a strange sensation from looking at the sword, as if it was looking back.

Behind him, Rin gasped, then gasped again as a thin trickle of mana began to flow out from the blade.

When the foreign mana touched his still Grasping prana, even more information began to flow through his mind. From the influx of data, he caught the picture of another place. The same place as where he sat, but different. The conflicting information in his head made him grimace as he tried to make sense of it.

Then, something went wrong. The sword began to pour out mana erratically, and Shirou had to grasp his head from the sheer volume of information being poured into it. Images began to flash through his head at an increasing rate until he couldn't process them anymore.

A desert, with huge mountains in the background.

A lush grassland with children playing while adults watched on.

Two men standing at a fork in a road.

Himself, standing in a cave…. What was wrong with his arm?!

A lush tree, standing despite-

Deep water, something moved-

Standing stones, and-

Grass-

Rocks-

Tree-Blood-Water-Fire-Clouds-Stars

An infinite reflection of colors and shapes assaulted his mind.

Suddenly it stopped, and in his mind he saw the image of a castle, standing over a lake and forest. He got the impression of… children, but he didn't see any. There was more, but his mind couldn't focus enough to discern it.

Then it stopped. The flow of mana, the influx of information and images halted completely, and Shirou took the opportunity to pull his prana away from the sword. He stared at it a moment more, noting that the eye-like gap that he now assumed was the opening to another dimension hadn't actually closed. Finally he dismissed it, letting the sword shatter into pranna particles.

After a moment, his brain recovered enough for him to realize that Rin was shouting his name.

"What's up, Rin?" He asked.

"'What's up'!?" She shouted back at him. "That replica started spitting out mana and you suddenly looked like you were in extreme pain! You dismissed it two minutes ago and you've been staring at the wall despite me shouting your name!"

He leaned back in his chair to try and prevent her from shouting directly into his face, but she had already stopped shouting. She stayed close though, and stared at his face, before leaning back and looking over the rest of him.

"Are you alright?" She asked, in a tone that indicated that if he didn't give the full answer, he soon wouldn't be.

Shirou gathered the scattered parts of his mind and began to compose his response.

"I think it worked." He said, causing Rin to raise an eyebrow. "When the mana that was leaking out came in contact with my Structural Grasping, I received information about where the mana was coming from. At first it was a little painful due to how strange the information was. I felt like the location we were getting mana from was the same as where I was. The source and the destination were the same, but different." Rin smiled at this piece of information, seeing it as a sign that they were close to completing their task. "But then it became erratic. The source was no longer the same, and it kept changing, faster than I could keep up with it. It overwhelmed my senses. Finally it seemed to settle on the image of a castle. Then… it felt like the sword locked. After that, both information and mana stopped flowing through. It took me a minute to get myself back together after having all that information pumped through my head."

Rin still looked worried for him, but relieved that he was well enough to explain what had happened. She shook her head at how easily he passed off the experience of having a train full of information smashed through his head.

"Let's call it a day." She said, noting the relieved look on his face. "I think we're close enough that we can try projecting it onto a spare Azoth Blade tomorrow." She smiled as she saw his face fall. "Your magic seems a little low though. Why don't we go see what I can do to top you off before tomorrow."

She could see the moment when Shirou's overloaded brain finally caught on to her meaning by the blush spreading across his face.

Smirking, she tilted her head towards the door leading out of her lab, and into the rest of her house.

Nodding, Shirou got up to follow her. Regardless of how tired he was, that wasn't an offer he was going to turn down.

Unbeknownst to either of them. In a pocket reality known as Unlimited Blade Works, a copy of the Jeweled Sword stood. The eye-like line within the jewel opened even wider, and a crack formed in the jewel. If anyone had been around to view it, they would have seem space around the sword begin to distort.

-o-o-o-o-

Something was wrong.

He was being pushedpulled updownleftrightcenterfrontback.

It was something inside of him.

Something was wrong….

The castle filled his vision, and he was blind to everything else.

-o-o-o-o-

Shirou awoke with a gasp and sat up.

For a moment, he was assailed with such a strong feeling of vertigo that he thought he was going to vomit.

The vertigo passed after a moment, but he was left with a strong feeling that something was wrong. Something inside of him.

He opened Unlimited Blade Works inside of him, and was shocked by what he found. The final copy of the Jeweled Sword was on the verge of cracking, and even inside his Reality Marble, it was causing disturbances in the air around it.

While he watched, the sword shattered. The black gate at the center of the blade opened unrestrained in every direction, swallowing Shirou's internal reality, and him with it.

-o-o-o-o-

He wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn't. Or perhaps they were already closed, but it didn't matter.

Information assaulted his every sense to the point of overload.

For a moment he felt like he stopped, even as the chaos continued to swirl around him. For a moment, he saw the face of an older man, eyes keen and focused on him. Then he lost it, the man's visage carried off into the swirl of colors around him.

From all directions, he heard vibrant laughter followed by a loud voice.

"An impressive attempt there, boy. The Jeweled Sword was meant to draw energy from other dimensions. Even I've never considered what would happen if it interacted with a Reality Marble like yours.

"I'll see what I can do to prevent you from being lost to the Kaleidoscope, but there will be side effects."

Inside of him, his magic mixed with strange other magics that he didn't recognize.

Then the laughter returned, followed again by the mysterious voice.

"Well, this is quite an interesting effect! Good luck out there, boy, and I hope puberty wasn't too hard on you the first time!"

Laughter echoed around him again before cutting out, and then the insanity and chaos of earlier returned.

Shirou felt like he should have lost consciousness due to the overload he was experiencing. Hell, he would have appreciated being unconscious from the first moment.

When the overload stopped, he had the sensation of falling, but wasn't even conscious long enough to feel himself hit the ground.

-o-o-o-o-

Shirou awoke to a sterile white ceiling. He had a strange feeling of deja vu when he saw the ceiling and realized that he must be in the Fuyuki hospital. He hadn't been there since the fire, and belatedly realized that it was probably the influence of Avalon that allowed him to avoid any interactions with health professionals for his whole life.

His whole body felt strange, and he wondered if he was on some sort of painkiller, causing it to feel weird.

He moved his head jerkily, and looked down on himself. What he saw shocked him. His body was tiny. No, that wasn't right, it wasn't as though he had shrunk to scale, it looked like he was in a much younger body.

With a lot of jerky movements, Shirou managed to sit up in bed and look down at himself. Perhaps the feeling of deja vu was more accurate than he had earlier thought. He thought that he might have looked like this at age 10, and suddenly the words he had heard in the chaotic place made sense.