There was blood on the training floor. Someone else's. Not fresh. Cael stepped over it anyway.
The echo of drills rang out in perfect rhythm from rows of initiates across the Citadel's lower gymnasium. Footfalls and blade-hum struck the air with rehearsed brutality. Overseers moved among them like wind through tall grass—soundless, unseen, and unforgiving.
Cael stood at the end of a cordoned mat ring, wrists bandaged, breath calm, eyes wrong.
He couldn't feel when it started.
A bell rang. The drill began.
He lunged forward. His opponent—a boy from the West Wing named Dirric stepped to meet him, polearm raised.
Then everything fractured.
Dirric's strike landed before Cael saw him move. Then it missed. Then Cael had already countered.
It wasn't pain that followed. Not yet. It was delay. A freeze between actions where something inside him skipped. Like a page torn out of a book. Like blinking, but forgetting which side of the blink came first.
Cael stumbled. His knee didn't bend. He caught himself an inch from the mat, dislocated only in sequence.
[SYSTEM WARNING: Peripheral Chrono-Thread Unsynced]
[Thread Deviation: ±0.8s | Combat rhythm mismatch detected]
"Again," barked a voice. It was Trainer Lakkel. No—it was Riven. No—it was no one.
Dirric was already walking away.
Cael rose slowly. The mat felt soft, then hard, then something in-between. He flexed his fingers and could not tell if they had finished the movement.
Across the gym, Riven watched him. Expression unreadable. She lifted her blade to parry an incoming strike—but blinked, and her opponent had changed.
A cold breath coiled under Cael's skin.
He was still here. Probably.
They put him through another drill. This time, it was the pressure gauntlet—ten seconds of contact sparring, followed by immediate reflex test against an echo-dummy.
The dummy screamed before he touched it.
[System Error: Anticipatory Echo Detected]
[Thread Feedback Loop (x3) | Suggest manual override]
He heard someone shouting across the chamber—his name, maybe. Then not his name. Then nothing.
The fourth spar knocked him flat. He didn't see the strike until it was in the past.
He tried to rise—his elbow hit the floor first. Then his wrist. Then time rearranged again and he was upright, staring at a set of frightened recruits he'd never spoken to.
They stared at him like he'd done something unspeakable.
Had he?
Infirmary. Smell of tonic resin and cold metal. Veyl was there.
"I'm fine," Cael said before she asked.
She didn't reply. She opened her hand, revealing a small silver thread pulled from his training uniform.
"This was growing inside the seams," she said. "Not standard issue."
Cael blinked. The thread curled in her palm. Then it wasn't there.
No one else in the room spoke. No one else in the room was real.
"Can you tell me the name of your first opponent today?" she asked.
Cael opened his mouth. Closed it.
There was blood on the floor again. Not fresh.
"Try again," she said.
He spoke a name.
It was his own.
The Citadel's memory chamber was built underground, inside a hexagonal obsidian block carved from Gate-scab. Nothing organic grew there. Even breath sounded artificial—muffled, mirrored, obsolete.
Cael stood in the center of the ring. The walls pulsed faintly with sigil-light, red and reverse-folded, stitched in spirals. A single chair awaited him. He did not sit.
Overseer Veyl entered without sound, as always. But she did not sit either.
Behind her, another Overseer followed.
This one wore no rank glyphs. His mask was stitched from something not quite cloth. One eye was covered in glass. The other… flickered.
"Name," Veyl said, arms behind her back.
"Cael."
"Full designation."
"Fragment-Bearer Class Zero, Shatterlight Vault Initiate."
"First Severance?"
Cael opened his mouth—
[ERROR: Invalid Recall]
[Timeline Reference Overlap Detected]
He tried again. The room twisted.
"I gave up… the ability to feel meaning in endings."
That wasn't true. That wasn't what he gave up.
Was it?
The stitched Overseer leaned in. The eye behind the glass lens blinked sideways. Like a lizard. Or a camera recording something that hadn't happened yet.
"Tell me," he said. "What did the Gate whisper to you?"
Cael felt his legs shift without moving. He tasted cold steel in his mouth. His tongue wasn't his.
"I—"
"Don't lie," the stitched man said gently. "It's written in your spine."
The walls warped. Memory signatures bled through—Riven's voice repeating his name backwards. A scream layered with his own heartbeat. The static crackle of System feedback.
Cael looked at Veyl.
But she was frozen in place.
The other Overseer was still moving.
The flickering eye widened.
It was his eye.
His own eye staring back from the mask.
Then he understood: the stitched Overseer wasn't someone.
It was a contamination echo of himself—recorded, projected, reverse-indexed.
It had followed him out of the Gate.
[System Alert: Unauthorized Reflex Access | Echo Detected in Proximity Layer]
[Thread Deviation: 3.4s and growing]
Then everything restarted.
Veyl blinked. The room was normal.
She tapped her wrist console.
"Psychic desync at 41%. You're fragmenting," she said flatly. "Your next Severance is being moved forward."
"Already?" Cael's voice cracked.
She didn't answer.
She just walked out.
Behind her, the stitched Overseer no longer existed.
The room did not remember him being there.
But Cael did.
And his eye still itched.
There were no windows in the Initiate Dorms.
Only vents that hummed. Lights that flickered in triplets. And the occasional smell of crushed bone powder from the floor above—Vault storage.
Cael sat cross-legged on his cot. Sweat itched behind his ears. His System interface glowed dim blue, like a thing afraid of itself.
[USER: CAEL]
[ACCESS LEVEL: Provisional Fragment Class Zero]
[Query: System Logs / Severance Threads / Recent Echoes]
[Override code: ReversePath001]
A long pause.
Then—
[UNLOCKED DATA: 3 Threads Contaminated]
[Anomalous Entry Detected: Fragment - "Self-of-Others"]
[Access Timestamp: 0.2 seconds BEFORE first Severance]
Cael froze.
That wasn't possible.
He hadn't had any Fragments before the Gate.
Unless…
Unless the System thought someone else had entered before he did.
Or he had.
Again.
He swallowed bile. The interface flickered. A humming static began to fill the corners of the room, like sound bleeding in from a place not nearby.
His fingers hovered over the access glyph. He pressed in.
And then—
"That's not yours," said a voice.
It came from the door.
Cael turned. Slowly.
Nothing.
The hallway was empty.
He stood anyway.
Looked down at the access panel again.
But the System had already logged him out.
[USER DISPLACED]
[Authority Revoked]
[Severance Scheduled: 04:00 Standard]
[Vault 3-Black | Overseer Present: Veyl]
Cael didn't sleep. He didn't try.
The cot never looked more like a table.
He sat there, still. Trying to hold still in a world that no longer let him.
And in the dark, from somewhere in the Citadel—
A laugh. Not cruel. Not familiar.
His own.
But younger.