Couldn't sleep. Wouldn't, even if he tried.
Lysander sat on the edge of the cot, elbows on his knees, staring at the cracked floor beneath his feet. It felt like the kind of night where the air forgets how to breathe.
He hated silence. Not the quiet kind, but the kind that felt watched.
His comm-link buzzed once. Just once. A flicker of static, then nothing. He tapped it without thinking, but it stayed dead. Typical. It always picked the weirdest moments to pretend it mattered.
Then came the voice.
"WARNING. LEVEL CODE BLACK. CONTAINMENT BREACH DETECTED. ANCHOR ESTABLISHED."
It wasn't loud. But it cut through the room like a blade of cold metal—clear, clinical, mechanical. Not built for humans. Built for systems. And yet… it felt aimed at him.
He stood up, heart thudding a little too loud. Every nerve in his body pulled tight.
The air changed. It shimmered. Bent.
And then—
A second voice. Not from the comm. Not from anywhere he could place.
Quiet. Fractured. Like a memory forgetting itself mid-sentence.
"You always knew it wouldn't end here."
He froze.
Something in the way it said those words sent a chill crawling up his spine. Not because it was scary. Because it was familiar.
He opened his mouth to speak, but then the world shifted.
A low hum swallowed the silence. The light above him flickered, warped. For a second, he saw his own shadow split into two—one standing still, the other walking ahead.
His knees buckled.
The floor caught him harder than it should have. His breath punched out of him. Everything stretched—then snapped.
Darkness surged in. Fast, heavy, consuming.
Just before it all went black, a whisper cut through the static inside his skull. Like something spoken not aloud, but remembered wrong:
"Write it forward."
---
He woke with grit in his mouth and an ache stitched through the back of his skull. Sunlight bled into the room. Too clean. Too ordinary.
But something was off. Tangibly so.
He sat up slowly. His limbs didn't feel like his. Like he'd borrowed someone else's skin.
Then he saw it.
Under the cot. Burned into the concrete in thin, scorched lines.
Three words:
"Write it forward."
His chest tightened. Not out of fear. Not exactly. It was something else. Like waking up and realizing you've been sleepwalking for years.
He reached for the words, but stopped short. Didn't touch them.
Didn't have to.
---
Outside, the morning was loud. Jason stood in the yard, barking at someone through a holopad, tossing a drone ball lazily in the other hand.
Lysander stepped out, squinting into the light.
Jason looked over, then gave a low whistle. "Damn. You look like a body they forgot to bury."
"Couldn't sleep."
"So you set off a Level Two perimeter alarm instead?"
Lysander blinked. "What?"
"Yeah. About three in the morning. System flagged a temporal flux inside the estate. Thought it was a hacking attempt."
"It wasn't."
Jason shrugged, but something flickered in his eyes. "Yeah. Didn't think so."
A pause. Long enough to be uncomfortable.
"You okay, Knight?"
Lysander looked away. The air felt heavy again. He shrugged, almost to himself.
"I don't know. Feels like something cracked last night. And I'm the only one who heard it."
Jason didn't answer. He just nodded once, real slow, and turned back to yelling at the drone.