15/ Fiction: The Eternal Coin

It appears ordinary. But in its metal pulse lies a power that defies time. Those who touch it vanish from their world, thrown into lives they never lived, eras they never knew, and fates they cannot escape.

Through blood and fire, love and betrayal, the coin watches, judges, and moves on—unceasing, eternal, unstoppable.

Who will hold it next… and what will they become?

The unknown coin had been in the family for as long as anyone could remember, and various versions of its origin bounced around but always differed when retold to the point where no one had confidence in its factual base..

Mihai’s grandmother kept it in a little wooden box lined with felt, the kind old people use for earrings and prayer cards. She would take it out on feast days, polish it with a rag, and whisper, “It’s older than us, older than this city. It will outlive us all.” Mihai never quite believed her. To him, it was just a dull piece of brass, about the size of a Romanian fifty bani coin or 50 Euro cent coin measuring 24mm (almost an inch) in diameter, and weighing around 7 grams, just as the modern coins were, but worn smooth with age.

When she died, the box passed to his mother, and from her to him. He was twenty-three now, working part-time at a phone repair shop, half-Romanian from his father’s side and half-Hungarian from his mother’s. He liked to think that his mixed heritage made him native to Banat.

The coin mostly sat forgotten in a drawer with his spare keys, car wash tokens, or Jetons, as they are known, and a tangle of phone chargers. That Saturday morning, as he rushed out to do groceries, his eyes landed on it by chance.

Why not? he thought. It’s the same size as a 50 bani. Might as well use it for the supermarket trolley security tether..

At the supermarket parking lot, he slotted the coin into the trolley lock. The chain snapped free with a metallic click. Mihai smiled at the ingenuity of his trick, feeling he had ‘got one over’ on the system, as it were — generations of family heritage reduced to a shopping hack.

Inside, the busy supermarket hummed with fluorescent light and the rustle of carts. He remembered he had a store app with weekly discount vouchers, but it required an internet signal to see the latest information. Stepping close to the door to get a better internet signal for the phone app, he left his trolley further into the store. By the time had the vouchers and returned to where he left his trolley, it was gone. He kicked himself for not putting at least something, anything, into the trolley to discourage someone thinking it was abandoned. Now, his trolley was gone and it would probably be impossible to find out who had it.

Panic flared. He pushed through the crowd, looking down each row, convinced someone had simply moved it aside. Finally, he spotted it — halfway across the store, already being pushed by a tall, broad-shouldered man with thinning grey hair.

“Excuse me!” Mihai called. “but is that my trolley?”

The man glanced back with cold, flat eyes. For a moment, Mihai saw something unsettling there — a darkness, like the stare of someone who carried old sins. Then the man shrugged. “No, it’s mine.”

A few curious shoppers turned to stare, intrigued by the fact that someone spoke to another shopper, which almost always meant some type of shopper conflict, as usually people shopped in silence. Mihai hesitated, embarrassed and backed down. Was it worth making a scene over some groceries? He sighed, stepped away and sought out another abandoned trolley, and let it go.

That night, lying in bed, Mihai thought of his grandmother’s words: “The eternal coin will outlive us all.” For the first time, he wondered if the coin was ever truly theirs — or if the family had only been keeping it for a while, until it decided to move on. Little did he know its powers.

The man who had taken Mihai’s the trolley was named Victor, a life marked by petty schemes and darker impulses. In his youth, an argument over a stolen had escalated into something far worse: his younger brother had drowned in the icy currents of the Bega Canal, and Victor had watched without lifting a finger. Guilt had never touched him; only the sharp edge of fear and self-preservation guided his life, and he told his parents and the police he arrived too late to do anything.

That evening, after the supermarket debacle, Victor returned to his small apartment in Timisoara. The coin he extracted from the trolley after parking it lay in his pocket, cold and heavy for its size, against his palm, though he paid it no attention. He ate a ready meal and drank cheap wine mixed with cola, before eventually collapsing into his unmade bed, thinking about various schemes and trickery of the week, as was his habit.

But sleep did not come mildly.

When Victor’s eyes finally opened, he was no longer lying on a dirty, unmade bed in his dim apartment. Instead, he was face down in mud, the air thick with smoke and the coppery stench of blood. Around him, men’s screams shattered the night, mixed with the roar of hooves and the groans of dying men. Although he had many nightmares before, none were of this nature or time period, nor did they feel so sharp.

He realised with growing terror that he was not merely watching this scene, he was in it! He was, in fact, one of the soldiers—a young, inexperienced and petrified auxiliary in the Ottoman army, part of a campaign ravaging the lands of Wallachia. His hands gripped a spear that felt as foreign as the armoured plate on his chest. The cries of the wounded and the panicked clatter of carts overloaded with the spoils of war assaulted his senses.

Victor’s instincts, honed in a life of selfish cunning, served him not here. He ran and slithered alongside other inexperienced comrades he had never met, striking wildly at peasants and defenders alike. Every life he took left an echo in his mind despite the speed of it all, a feeling that felt strangely familiar but unfamiliar enough to confuse him.

Days—or perhaps hours- time was unrecognisable—passed in a blur of battle, plague, and hunger. He was drenched by mud and blood, fever and terror ate at him, and whispers of death called his name in every shadow.

Then came the impalement.

In a small clearing, surrounded by the remnants of his unit, Victor was captured. The Wallachian defenders had taken him, and he felt the unimaginable pain of the stake driven through his body, the coarse wood pressing against his chest, his limbs, his very soul. His screams ripped from him, echoing across centuries, mingling with the wind and the screams of a world not yet his own. He turned to see who had shouted the command to drop him into the waiting stake, in his fading consciousness, and he saw his brother's face, but older, on the body of a hefty commander looking angrily at him, as his life slipped away.

And then… nothing.

The coin lay in his pocket, slick with mud from his dirty hands. After the soldiers pressed on in battle, a peasant, gaunt and weak, emerged from the smoke, scavenging the pockets of the bodies for anything of value. His eyes fell upon the small, round object, glinting faintly in the dying light. Without question, he pocketed it, unaware that the coin would demand more lives and more journeys before its story ended.

Victor was gone, his life a cautionary whisper to the ages. Yet the coin endured, patient and inexorable, seeking the next hand willing—or destined—to bear it.

Decades passed. The coin disappeared into the shadows of history, its previous bearer long forgotten, its legend buried beneath the rubble of time. Then, in a bustling flea market somewhere in Communist-era Bucharest, it reappeared.

Mariana was a nurse, kind-eyed and steady-handed, worn down by long shifts at a crowded state hospital. She had little money, yet she found herself drawn to the small, glinting coin nestled among a pile of trinkets on a vendor’s table. Something about it whispered of curiosity, of stories untold. She bought it cheaply, thinking it a charm, a lucky token she could carry in her pocket during night shifts.

That evening, Mariana carried her usual loaf of bread home. Outside her apartment, a small gypsy boy sat shivering in the doorway, clutching a worn blanket. Without hesitation, she broke in two and handed him half of the bread, smiling softly despite her own limited resources.

When sleep finally claimed her, the world shifted.

She awoke not in her modest apartment, but in a city of impossible beauty, soaring towers of glass and steel, streets alive with soft luminescence. The air was warm, clear, and filled with the hum of a world at peace, with the sound of birds singing in the cherry blossom trees, and small animals running free or lounging peacefully in the green spaces. The year read on a hovering holographic display: 2225.

Humankind had spread beyond the ice wall surrounding the world she had previously learned about. Mariana wandered through gardens that floated above oceans, walked streets where technology served, not enslaved. She felt a joy so deep it made her eyes water. Knowledge was revered, compassion was law, and she herself was celebrated as a healer of considerable skill.

Mariana felt immediately: she would never return. The coin in her hand had chosen her for this, perhaps to reward her selflessness? Or the courage to give even when she had nothing? She could not be sure. Outside observers—her co-workers, neighbours—would wake to find her gone, vanished in the night without explanation, the bed she had slept in empty and cold.

And the coin?

It had thrown it into the fountain in the city’s main square. Vaguely, it resembled Piata Unirii, but much more beautiful. A curious boy, in the fading light, spotted the round object in the shallow water of the fountain, which by now was silent. He waded into the water to collect, what turned out to be the single coin thrown there. Its metal gleamed softly in the dim dusk. He bent down to pick it up, dried it and slipped it into his pocket, unaware of its history or the destinies it carried.

The coin waited. Patient. Eternal.

Bucharest, 1933. The city hummed with life between the wars—tram bells clanging, marketplaces bustling, and the scent of fresh bread mingling with the smoke of coal fires. Among the crowded streets moved an old thief named Ionuț, nimble-fingered and quick-witted. He survived by stealing from those too distracted to notice, never staying long enough to be caught.

One misty morning, his sharp eyes caught something glinting in the tin cup beside a sleeping beggar: a small, round coin, unlike anything he had seen. Its metal shimmered, not with the dullness of ordinary money, but as though it held a secret light within. At first, he thought it might be gold. Without hesitation, Ionuț snatched the cup, upturned it and slipped the coin into his pocket.

That night, exhausted after a day of narrow escapes, he fell asleep in an abandoned shoe factory. But his sleep was anything but ordinary. When he opened his eyes, he no longer saw the dim gas lamps of Bucharest. The air was thick with dust. Around him, the cries of battle rang out, strange words echoing across the valley.

Ionuț realised, with impending dread, that he was no longer himself. His body was younger, sturdier, and clothed in the rough tunic of a Dacian youth. The year was long before his time, and Roman soldiers marched through the lands of his ancestors, their armour gleaming under a harsh sun.

He joined the defenders instinctively, feeling a surge of pride and fear. He watched as the Dacians fought bravely to protect their golden treasures, their villages, their very ancestral homes. He touched the glint of gold in the hands of his comrades and understood, in a way he never could as a petty thief, the value of loyalty, courage, and heritage.

But fate was merciless. The legionaries advanced with relentless iron discipline, cutting down the Dacians one by one with incredible ferocity. Ionuț fell among them, struck by swords and spears. As darkness crept over his vision, he felt the strange weight of the coin slip from his hand, rolling into the mud.

A Roman soldier, intrigued by its unusual shine, picked it up and tucked it into his pouch. To him, it was merely a curious keepsake, a glimmering bauble from a conquered land. He had no inkling of its power, nor of the lives it would claim in the millennia to come.

The coin, patient as always, waited. It had survived empires, wars, and the greed of men. And now, it would move again, to the next hand destined to carry it across time.

Romania, 1944. The air was thick with the acrid stench of gunpowder, and the streets were littered with the by-products of war. Young men and women joined partisan units, risking everything to resist the encroaching chaos. Among them was Andrei, a wiry, determined fighter who had learned early that survival required cunning, courage, and sometimes, ruthless decisiveness.

He had scavenged a captured German supply crate that morning, rifle in hand, and amidst the rations, bullets, and scraps of enemy papers, he noticed something unusual: a small coin, glinting faintly under the grey light of the forest edge. It felt strangely heavy in his palm. He put it into his pocket without thinking, unaware that it had already claimed a life before his.

That night, after tending to the wounds of his comrades, Andrei drifted into sleep under the canopy of pine trees. When he awoke, he was no longer in Romania, no longer in 1944. The world around him had shifted: he stood in a frozen, foreign landscape, somewhere in occupied Poland, amidst the quiet hush of a resistance cell plotting against the Nazis.

He was no longer himself. He was another partisan, another body, another life in a war not his own—but the courage, the instincts, the urgency were all unmistakably his. Andrei threw himself into the struggle with reckless determination, rescuing Jewish children from deportation trains, sabotaging enemy supplies, and running through snow-laden forests where death could strike at any moment.

The battles were fierce, the nights long, and the losses unbearable. Yet he persisted, driven on by a sense of purpose - perhaps the coin’s influence, perhaps fate itself. In an ambush along a frozen river, Andrei’s luck finally ran out. Bullets tore through the trees and the ground, and he fell among the fallen, blood mixing with the snow.

The coin tumbled from his coat and lay among the bodies, unnoticed except by a fellow fighter who retrieved it. He held it in his hand, its surface cold, unyielding, strangely alive. To him, it was just another trinket, a small treasure in a world otherwise consumed by suffering. Yet it carried the weight of centuries, the echoes of lives it had touched, and the unending journey ahead.

And so the coin moved on, as it always did, ready for the next hand to hold it, and the next life to be rewritten across the tapestry of time.

Ceaușescu Era, 1970s → Medieval Dungeon

In the grey, suffocating corridors of Bucharest’s Communist bureaucracy, Ion Dănescu shuffled papers with a characteristic indifference. The coin lay in his desk drawer, unnoticed among envelopes with bribes and petty embezzlements, a small, cold weight that gleamed like a promise. Rumour whispered of its origin, but Ion cared only for its potential - privilege, power, the quiet thrill of bending men to his will.

That evening, after another day of flattering nods and forged signatures, Ion returned to his Unirii Boulevard apartment. He held the coin in his palm, admiring its intricate carvings, and felt a strange warmth seep into his fingers. Then the air thickened, the room dissolved, and he fell through a darkness that had no floor.

He awoke in the stench of wet stone and burning torches. Iron shackles lined the walls, and groans echoed in the cold, cavernous halls. A hooded guard shoved a parchment into his hands. He was no longer a clerk; he was an inquisitor in a medieval dungeon, centuries before he had even been born.

At first, a rush of power surged through him. Prisoners trembled at his command, their groans and pleading a symphony to his arrogance. He twisted, pulled, and prodded with cold precision, relishing the fear he inspired. For hours—or days, time blurred—he inflicted torment, convinced of the righteousness of his authority.

Then, without warning, the tables turned. Shackles latched onto his wrists and ankles. A hood was drawn over his head. Whips cracked against his back; each lash tore more than skin, splitting pride, shattering bone, and crushing the soul. The dungeon he had ruled became his tomb, the screams he had commanded now his own. Pain consumed him utterly, a fury of agony that no bribe, no influence, could ever shield him from.

When he died, it was a death unrecorded by history books, centuries before his time, yet absolute. His cries echoed into the stone and faded, leaving only silence.

A humble servant, a girl with a mop, entered the dungeon at first light. She moved among the broken and the dead, mopping blood and remnants of suffering. On the cold floor, her eyes caught the glint of a small, seemingly ancient coin. She picked it up, feeling its cold weight, and quickly tucked it into her apron pocket, unaware that the cycle of the eternal coin was destined to continue.