Some futures rot inside you before they're ever born.
They left the Cathedral as morning bled into sky.
But the sun didn't rise.
It hovered. Hung like it was unsure it belonged here, casting a light too sharp and too pale, illuminating shadows that didn't point in the same direction. The world felt... reskinned. Like someone had taken reality and wrapped it in something secondhand.
Pippa was the first to speak. "Anyone else feel like their skin doesn't fit?"
"I feel like I'm dreaming through someone else's memory," Grim said, tightening his coat around his shoulders.
They walked without speaking much after that.
Luna, barefoot, clutched a shard of soulglass from the altar. She didn't bleed. She should've. The edge was sharp enough to carve bone.
Ashkore watched her from the back. Lyara from the front.
Neither said what they were thinking.
That night, they camped near the roots of a silktree.
The air smelled like salt and distant metal. There were no stars.
Ashkore took first watch.
He sat with his back to the fire, listening for footsteps that never came. But instead of silence, he heard breath. Rhythmic. Inhuman. As if the land itself had lungs.
Luna slept curled against Lyara's side, one hand open like she was waiting to catch something in the dark.
And then she whispered again.
This time: names.
Not real ones. Not exactly.
But ones that felt true.
"Riven," she breathed.
"Fell."
"Not-mother."
"Ash-throat."
"Mine."
Pippa stirred in her sleep, muttering nonsense. Grim gripped his staff so tightly his knuckles went bone-pale.
Ashkore didn't sleep that night.
He just watched the trees.
They moved like they were listening.
At dawn, the first change came.
Not with sound. With scent.
Grim was the one who noticed. He stood slowly, sniffing the air with the precision of someone who'd spent too long cataloging ruins.
"Something's wrong."
Pippa stretched and groaned. "Everything's wrong, love. Be more specific."
"No birds," he said.
That froze everyone.
"No birds, no insects, no rot." He walked to the tree line. "There's a body nearby."
"How far?" Lyara asked.
Grim didn't answer.
Because it wasn't far at all.
The corpse lay beneath a weeping yarrow, twisted into a fetal position. Dressed in Thornheart armor. Veil-struck.
Not from violence.
From grief.
That's what the land looked like. Mourned.
Lyara knelt beside it. She reached out and stopped. Her breath hitched.
Ashkore moved closer. "What is it?"
She didn't look at him.
"This is Rhalen."
"Who?"
"My" She stopped herself.
"My brother."
The silence turned solid.
Pippa stepped back. Grim turned away.
Lyara closed her eyes. "He was stationed here. After the Fall. We weren't close. But he sent me a charm last frost season. Told me he still had the family blade."
Ashkore looked at the weapon still strapped to the body's hip. Burnt. Shattered.
Lyara picked it up anyway.
Not for usefulness.
Just... to hold it.
Luna toddled forward then, past them all, and touched the corpse's hand.
And the air shifted.
Suddenly, they weren't standing in the clearing.
They were inside something else.
A memory?
A dream?
No. A possibility.
Around them: a version of the world that had never broken.
The Cathedral stood, untouched, wrapped in sunlight. The sky was whole. No fractures. No Veil bleed. No screaming in the stone.
And in this version, they saw themselves.
Ashkore. Grim. Lyara. Even Pippa.
Alive.
But wrong.
Too polished. Too peaceful.
Ashkore had no shadow. Grim's beard was black again, no scars. Lyara wore golden armor, not Thornheart steel. And Pippa, Pippa looked clean. No cracks in her grin. No rot behind her eyes.
And Luna... wasn't there.
At all.
"Where is she?" Lyara whispered.
"No such child," the wind replied.
Ashkore felt his heart spasm.
No such child.
This was the world that never found her. Never caught her when she fell through.
They didn't exist here.
Not really.
Just echoes.
They watched their better selves walk past, laughing softly.
And then those versions vanished.
Just flickered. Gone.
Ashkore turned to Grim. "What is this?"
Grim's voice was quieter than usual. "Possibility rot. Veil showing us what it thinks we want. Just before it decides to eat us."
Luna was still holding Rhalen's hand.
She looked up.
"I didn't like that world," she said.
Ashkore felt his throat close.
"Neither did I."
They burned the body that night.
Lyara didn't speak for a long time.
But when the flames were almost ash, she said, "I never told him I forgave him."
"For what?" Ashkore asked gently.
"For surviving something I didn't."
And she walked away from the fire before anyone could answer.
That night, Luna didn't sleep.
She drew spirals in the dirt with her fingers, muttering fragments of languages no one recognized.
And at the edge of camp, something watched them.
It didn't move.
Didn't breathe.
It was shaped like a person, but wasn't.
Not a hallucination.
Not a shadow.
Just a possibility that had overstayed its welcome.
It looked like Luna.
Older.
Taller.
But with eyes too black and smile too still.
It whispered one word.
Ashkore heard it as he passed by on patrol.
"Soon."
When he turned to look, it was gone.