Salem Grey stumbled through the shifting alleys of the city, or at least what passed for a city. The walls flickered between brick, metal, and light—sometimes all at once, sometimes dissolving entirely into the nothingness between realities. Every step he took felt heavier than it should, like gravity was personal, adjusting itself specifically to make him stumble. Somewhere above, a distorted siren wailed, half mechanical, half spectral, weaving itself into the cries of the invisible crowds.
"Why does it always smell like burnt popcorn in these timelines?" Salem muttered, his voice barely audible over the low hum of fractured time.
A shadow detached itself from the wall and flickered alongside him—a form that wasn't quite human but resembled the shape of someone he once knew. The shadow's movements were delayed, like watching a recording lag behind its source.
"You're late," it hissed, voice stretched thin like taffy. "And yet… somehow, on time."
Salem squinted. "Is that you… me?"
The shadow leaned closer, grinning. Its teeth were fragments of mirrors, reflecting a thousand possible Selams at once. "I am you, I am not you, I am everything you forgot… and everything you feared."
Salem's stomach twisted. "I don't have time for existential horror right now."
"Time," the shadow spat the word like venom, "is not what you think. And neither am I."
The alley pulsed beneath his feet. Each pulse shifted reality slightly, making him step on air half the time. A memory surged unbidden—a laugh he didn't remember laughing, a touch he didn't remember feeling.
"Stop… stop leaking into my head!" Salem yelled.
The shadow merely smiled. "Oh, I'm not leaking. You invited me."
Salem shook his head and kept running. Every street he entered became another version of itself. Neon signs flickered with wrong letters. Buildings bent at impossible angles. A storefront advertised "Fate Repair Kits—Guaranteed or Your Timeline Back." Salem wanted to throw up just looking at it.
"I don't have a timeline to repair," he muttered.
A sudden chime echoed around him, delicate but unignorable. He looked up to see a thousand floating watches spinning in chaotic synchrony above the alley. One of them, brass and impossibly intricate, lowered itself in front of his face.
"Tick-tock, Salem. You've got three choices. One, run until you forget who you are. Two, confront the past and shatter your sense of self. Or three…"
The watch paused dramatically. "Three is the one no one survives."
Salem's hands clenched. "Of course I'll pick three. Why wouldn't I?"
The alley widened suddenly, revealing a carnival, warped and strange. Ferris wheels twisted into themselves, carriages carrying faces he knew, faces he didn't, and faces that might never exist. The music was dissonant—fast then slow, sometimes skipping notes as if the composer were unsure what reality he was in.
"Welcome," the watch said, voice merging with the carousel's grinding melody. "Welcome to the echoes of what you've skipped."
A figure stepped out from the shadows of the carnival—someone familiar, impossibly familiar, yet entirely different. A younger Salem, wide-eyed and terrified, stood before him, mirroring every doubt Salem had ever buried.
"You… shouldn't be here," the younger version whispered.
"Neither should you," Salem replied, voice cracking.
The two stared, reflections bouncing off each other in the fractured light. The younger Salem's hands trembled, reaching toward him as if trying to grasp the very concept of who he was becoming.
"They'll rewrite us," the young Salem said, voice barely audible over the mechanical groan of the rides. "Every day… every skip… it's all going to… disappear."
Salem swallowed hard. "Then let's make sure we leave something that sticks."
The watches above pulsed in response, spinning faster, casting rainbows of impossible light across the carnival. Shadows detached from their sources, forming grotesque, laughing shapes, twisting the air into knots of memory and fear. One of them, larger than the rest, lunged at him, but vanished before contact, leaving a faint echo of his own scream behind.
"The fun begins when you realize," said the older watch, hovering closer, "that nothing you do here is permanent… except the pain you take with you."
Salem's chest heaved. "Pain… optional, right?"
"Optional to ignore. Mandatory to experience," the watch corrected, spinning in a chaotic dance.
He stumbled onto a platform that had no edges, no discernible floor beneath it—only infinite reflections of himself and the city he could no longer name. He was both observer and participant, trapped in a loop that felt older than memory itself.
From nowhere, a voice deeper than the fractured sky called out. "Salem Grey… what will you sacrifice to untangle what should never have been knotted?"
He turned, heart hammering. The Ferris wheel, impossibly tall, rotated slowly, each carriage carrying a version of him, each screaming, laughing, crying—or doing all at once. One of the carriages tilted unnaturally, and he glimpsed his own face, older, scarred, eyes full of silent warnings.
"Don't do it…" the older self whispered, voice cutting through the carnival's chaos like a blade.
"Do what?" Salem snapped.
"The thing you were always going to do… The choice no one warned you about. The choice that will undo everything and nothing at once."
Time warped violently, snapping the air around him. He felt himself pulled in three directions at once: toward the older version, toward the younger, and toward the brass watch spinning frantically above.
"Choose!" The watches screamed in unison.
Salem's hands trembled, and he closed his eyes. The carnival dissolved, replaced by a tunnel of light and shadow. Voices overlapped: past Selams, future Selams, forgotten Selams. Each one begged him, threatened him, laughed with him.
"I don't want to choose!" he shouted.
"Too late," the voice said, colder than ice and hotter than fire. "The choice is already made. You just have to live with the consequences."
The ground dropped away entirely. He fell. Memories, fragments of days skipped, faces forgotten, promises broken, and laughter lost—all collided around him in a kaleidoscope of chaos. His heart pounded like the pulse of the fractured city itself.
And just as he braced for impact, everything froze.
A single line of glowing text appeared in the void before him:
"One more step, and the multiverse remembers you… whether you like it or not."
Salem's breath caught. His hands clenched. He had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
The fractured, infinite carnival waited, patient and cruel, ready to spin him into timelines he hadn't earned and realities that didn't want him.
"This… this is just the beginning, isn't it?" he whispered.
"Oh, sweet Salem," the watches chorused, "it's never been anything else."
And then—the air shattered like glass, light and shadow twisting into a scream that was both his and not his. Salem Grey fell into the void.
Everything went black.