The training yard blurred.
Cael stood still, but the world refused to agree with him. The cobblestones beneath his feet—he remembered stepping on them, but they weren't beneath him anymore. Or they hadn't been yet.
The drills were underway: rows of Initiates lunging in formation, halberds slicing arcs through steam-fogged air, barked commands from drillmasters syncing them into something like harmony. But to Cael's eyes, it wasn't rhythm. It was recursion.
He watched the same Initiate lift her halberd three times in a row. Not thrice in sequence—but once, badly remembered.
A whisper. A stutter. A glitch.
His right arm flexed unbidden, mirroring the twitch of someone in the next row. He hadn't seen them move. He had seen them remember moving.
A dull pressure pulsed behind his eyes. Not pain. Not yet. Just a presence—a knot of timing tied too tight behind his vision.
[System Notice: Peripheral Sequence Perception: Offline]
[Compensatory Focus Ratio: 62% | Thread Drift: Accelerating]
Cael blinked. The alert vanished. When he opened his eyes again, the yard had shifted. Not in layout—just in order.
Some drills had ended. Others had not begun.
A ripple of sweat slid down his spine. Not from exertion. From absence. Something should have been where it wasn't.
He turned toward the shade of the obsidian wall and found Riven standing there, arms folded, unreadable. She didn't nod. She didn't move. But she was watching. He had the sense she'd already seen what he hadn't yet done.
The crowd buzzed. Something new was forming at the edge of the yard.
Then:
"Hey, Ghost Boy. Thought they left you buried in the Vault."
The voice cracked the air like a wet whip.
Brann Sorrel stepped into the ring, shirtless and smug, tossing aside a blunted halberd with mockery dripping from every motion.
"Or maybe you phased into your own ass and forgot how time works."
Cael didn't respond. He wasn't sure he'd heard it yet. The words hung in his mind like a quote from a memory he hadn't made.
"C'mon, Thread-Freak. Let's see if your corpse rhythm still keeps time."
The crowd turned.
The Overseers did not stop it.
Riven didn't blink.
Cael stepped forward. The ground did not wait for him.
The pit opened ahead—not physically, but perceptually. A circle of gravel and silence, scorched from hundreds of half-remembered duels. He knew the rules: don't kill, don't maim, don't show the whites of your mind.
And yet, he already tasted iron behind his teeth.
I shouldn't be here. Not like this. Not with this body. Not with this Fragment writhing beneath my ribs.
Cael's breath caught in his throat, and his heartbeat followed half a beat late. Then early. Then not at all.
Brann paced the edge like a performer milking applause no one had clapped.
"You gonna blink out again, or are we doing this the old-fashioned way?" Brann said, voice slicing sideways through time. "Go ahead. Shimmer. Split. Spasm. Doesn't scare me. You're still meat, and I hit meat."
He doesn't know. No one does.
Cael lowered his center of gravity, or thought he did. His knees bent—but they bent too soon. Or too late.
[Spiral Dislocation: Thread Shift imminent.]
[Balance Drift: +0.27 seconds | Stability Cost: Negligible]
The world pulled taut like a bowstring. Brann's outline blurred—but just around the eyes. Like someone had blinked the wrong way.
Cael saw two of him.
No. Not two. One, played on a reel that skipped.
I'm bleeding seconds. Even before it begins.
He could hear Brann's heart. Or maybe his own.
He could see Riven's silhouette in the dark. She had not moved. But he remembered her doing so. In a different thread.
Brann lunged.
Cael didn't see the motion. He felt the result.
The haft of the blunted training staff cracked against his shoulder—sharp, immediate, late. He reeled backward three steps. The blow still echoed. But he had no memory of it being thrown.
Too soon again. Or too slow. I can't tell anymore.
Brann grinned, twirling the staff with theatrical flourish.
"Thought you'd Spiral outta that one." He jabbed. "Or is your glitch a bluff now?"
Cael said nothing. He raised his hand—late again—and ducked under the next swing a moment before Brann made it.
[Spiral Dislocation: Passive Desync Detected.]
[Stability Drain Accelerating.]
He moved—three inches to the left—then stuttered there, his own body dragging behind like an afterimage yanked on delay. Something tore in his shoulder. A ligament, or time.
Brann flinched.
Not from Cael's dodge—but from the echo that followed half a second later. A blur of Cael's own elbow snapped through the space where Brann's ribs had just been.
The second strike didn't hit.
But it could have.
I didn't summon that echo.
Brann staggered and dropped his stance into something less cocky, more feral.
"You cheating bastard," he hissed. "What the hell even are you?"
Cael's knees locked. His left leg twitched backward a full foot, then forward again. He tried to breathe, but the breath had already happened. Or hadn't come yet.
He couldn't trust the world. He couldn't trust his body. He couldn't trust sequence.
[Thread Drift Approaching Hazard Threshold.]
[Recommend Fragment Override or System Stasis]
Or I stop now. Let him win. Let it break me later.
Brann roared—an honest roar this time—and came down overhead with the full weight of his staff.
Cael moved.
Not forward. Not back.
Sideways through decision.
Cael didn't dodge.
But something did.
Brann's staff came down like an executioner's hammer. Cael's knees twitched out of sync, off-beat, too slow to matter.
And then—
A smear of light split sideways from his shoulder.
An echo of himself. Pale, flickering, angrier.
It didn't flinch.
It stepped through the swing.
Brann cried out as the full weight of an elbow cracked across his face—not from Cael, but from the image two steps behind him.
Wood clattered to the floor.
Cael blinked once.
Brann hit the dirt twice.
A delayed strike—a rewind—a phantom replay.
[Spiral Dislocation Override Triggered]
[Manual Consent: Absent]
[Thread Drift: 72% — Breach Threshold Surpassed]
[Initializing Safety Recoil Protocol]
A sick snap twisted through Cael's collarbone. He staggered, reaching out for balance. His hand grabbed air. Too late. Then too early. Then nothing.
Across the pit, Brann groaned. Blood welled from his lip. His eyes tracked Cael—not in fear, but confusion.
"You didn't…" he muttered. "You didn't move."
Neither did I.
Steam hissed from nearby glyph nodes. Overseers stirred. One of them—the tall one with the obsidian veil—tapped her wristband.
"Instability event confirmed."
Riven stood unmoving, but her fists were clenched. Her boots left no echo.
Then something happened Cael would not remember until hours later:
He saw himself. Not a reflection. Not an echo. Another him, standing just outside the ring.
Watching.
Expressionless.
Mouthing words he hadn't spoken yet.
Cael's knees buckled.
The world spun—but the whisper was straight as a blade:
"The Vault didn't open. It remembered you."
Pain didn't come back all at once.
It arrived in pulses—like time exhaling through a broken ribcage.
Cael's eyes opened. Or had they already?
The ceiling above him moved—then snapped back. Stone arches. Pipes. Glyphs half-burned into the walls, flickering with red systemic failsafes. He was on a stretcher. Carried. Voices all around him.
"...fifth time this cycle. Override event. Fragment-induced. Spiral class."
"Instability that early? Either he's a prodigy... or a breach vector."
"Send the record to Veyl. No delays."
Cael shifted, and the pain followed—first in his joints, then between them. Like something had slipped the ligaments off their proper time slots.
The System chimed in his skull like a pulse fed through broken glass.
[Spiral Dislocation Status: UNCERTAINTY STACKED]
[Thread Stability: 28%]
[Balance Oscillation: Catastrophic]
[Physical Desync: Minor. Cognitive Drift: Rising]
[System Advisory: Subject's identity core is beginning to misalign]
He opened his mouth to speak.
His name tried to come out second.
The first word wasn't his.
It wasn't even in a language he knew.
And yet… it knew him.
"You're not first. You're just earliest."
He bolted upright.
The Overseer holding his legs swore. Another gripped his shoulders and slammed him back down.
"Thread breach confirmed. We're moving him to Wing 3. Reverse-prone."
Their hands were gloved. Not in fear—but in containment.
Cael's vision twisted.
A loop of the last moment played again—Brann's face shattering, the whisper from his other self, the ring of glyph alarms—and then a new one. A boy in red standing at the gate of the Vault.
His face was smiling.
His eyes were Cael's.
Sleep didn't take him. Sleep was dragged over him like a burial cloth.
The infirmary lights blinked out one at a time, each flicker a nail.
When Cael opened his eyes, the Vault had already sealed shut behind him.
No…This isn't now. This is then. This is…wrong.
The floor was the same rust-colored stone. The altar hummed with residual heat. The glyphs pulsed with a rhythmic burn in the wrong order.
But this wasn't memory.
He wasn't watching the moment.
He was in it again.
His arm still ached from the first Severance. The sutures pulsed—though he'd never had sutures. Not then. Not like this.
He tried to step away, but the floor repeated. Three times.
He blinked.
The altar was behind him again.
The altar was ahead.
The altar was beneath.
[Thread Drift: Recursive Memory Breach — WARNING]
[Reverse Path Interference Suspected]
A second presence entered the space—not as a sound or light, but as a correction. Like a word deleted from a sentence that no one had written.
Cael turned slowly.
There was a boy there.
No older than ten.
Same hair. Same eyes. Same scar that shouldn't exist yet.
"You shouldn't be here," Cael said—except he hadn't. The boy had.
"Neither should you."
The boy smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. They flickered like a broken recording, skipping one emotion behind.
"You took me out. You put this in. "He raised his arm. No flesh. Just a spiral of disjointed joints—an imitation of Cael's dislocated limb, but childish, crude.
Cael took a step back and felt the floor multiply.
He fell upward. Sideways. Landed back on the altar.
The boy was on the ceiling now. Watching.
"I'm not your ghost." "I'm the part that noticed first."
The glyphs burned white.
The Vault screamed.