The Shatterglass Ravine didn't earn its name from geology. It earned it from optics.
Standing at the edge, looking down into the mile-long gash in the earth, I saw infinity. The Ravine's walls were crystal, not rock—quartz formations so pure they reflected reality like a funhouse mirror designed by a sadistic mathematician. Every angle was wrong. Every line defied Euclidean geometry. My overlay struggled to map it, rebuilding the 3D wireframe three times before stabilizing with an [ERR: NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY DETECTED] warning.
"What do you see?" Drek asked, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.
"Fractals," I said. "The crystals grow in recursive patterns. Each fragment contains the whole. It's not a Ravine. It's a 4-dimensional object projected into 3D space."
Mira shivered. "The Warden used to say it's haunted because the dead here don't realize they're dead. They walk the same paths, over and over."
My parallel analysis flickered. [QUANTUM STATE THEORY: TIME LOOPS IMPLICATED]. That explained the haunting. Not ghosts. Echos. Residual data from overwritten timelines.
And data could be calculated.
[SANITY CHECK: ROLLING...]
[ROLL: 6 + 8 (WIS) = 14]
[TARGET: 15]
[FAILURE: MINOR DEJA VU ACQUIRED]
The debuff hit immediately. I saw myself stepping into the Ravine. Then I saw it again, a half-second offset. [PREDICTIVE POLLUTION] . My parallel analysis was mistaking the loop echoes for real futures.
I disabled precognition. Reverted to passive observation.
[TACTICAL PRECOGNITION: OFFLINE]
[ABSOLUTE CALCULATION (PASSIVE): ONLINE]
The Ravine was quiet. No birds. No insects. Just the hum of crystal resonance, a frequency that made my teeth ache. My overlay filtered it, shifted it to a subharmonic I could analyze. The hum wasn't random. It was data.
[FREQUENCY ANALYSIS: MORSE CODE VARIANT]
[TRANSLATING...]
[MESSAGE: "TURN BACK TURN BACK TURN BACK" ON REPEAT]
A warning. Or a trap designed to look like a warning.
"Down we go," Drek said, already descending. His boots crunched crystal shards that reformed behind him like time-lapse footage in reverse. The path was remembering his steps.
I followed, mapping our descent manually. Each step was logged:
- Footprint pressure: 73 psi
- Crystal displacement: 0.3mm
- Temporal residue: +1.2 seconds (AHEAD OF SCHEDULE)
Wait. Ahead of schedule?
I checked my internal clock. [TIME ELAPSED: 00:02:14] . But my overlay's chronometer read 00:02:11. We'd been walking for two minutes and fourteen seconds, but the world thought it was two minutes and eleven seconds.
[ANOMALY: TEMPORAL ACCELERATION FIELD]
[EFFECT: PARTY MOVES +10% FASTER THAN EXTERNAL TIME]
[SIDE EFFECT: EXTERNAL REALITY LAGS BEHIND]
The haunting wasn't a loop. It was a drift. We were falling out of sync with the rest of Aetheuron. If we stayed too long, we'd return to find years had passed.
"The Handler chose this place for her base," I said. "Time moves differently here. She could spend a month setting up, and only a day passes outside."
Mira's face paled. "How long have we been down here?"
"32 seconds ahead of baseline. At this rate, after 3.2 hours, we'll be one hour out of sync."
Drek grunted. "Then we move fast."
The Ravine floor was a maze of crystal pillars that reflected us into infinity. Everywhere I looked, I saw our party—some versions lagging, some leading, some staring back with wrong eyes. The loops were visible here, temporal afterimages.
[SANITY CHECK: ROLLING EVERY 5 MINUTES...]
The Handler's waypoint signature pulsed stronger. [DISTANCE: 0.8 MILES] . She was deep in the Ravine's heart.
A reflection moved out of sync. Not a lag. A lead. A future version of Drek, walking a path we hadn't taken yet. It turned its head, looked directly at present-me , and mouthed:
[READ LIPS: "DON'T TRUST HER"]
The reflection dissolved. Drek, walking beside me, hadn't seen it. My parallel analysis calculated: [TEMPORAL ECHO: 4.7 MINUTES AHEAD].
Don't trust her. Mira? Or the Handler?
Mira's blood had activated the Stranglevine. Warden bloodline. Loyalty to the Reach. Probability of betrayal: 3% . But her hidden agenda probability was still 78%. That was a statistical contradiction.
Contradictions meant missing data.
The waypoint led to a crystal grotto, a cathedral of refracted light where a thousand reflections of the sun danced on every surface. In the center, on a pedestal of black stone, sat the Handler's marker.
It wasn't a magical beacon. It was technology. A hexagonal device that pulsed with the same cyan light as my system UI.
[ARTIFACT: PHASE ANCHOR (RARE)]
[FUNCTION: WAYPOINT FOR PHASE-WALKERS]
[OWNER: CALLUM (SYNCED), MASKED WOMAN (ADMIN)]
Admin rights. She could overwrite Callum's phase signature. She wasn't his handler.
She was his overseer.
"Touch it," Drek said.
"Bad idea," I countered. "Phase Anchors have—"
I stopped. My overlay showed 12 versions of myself reaching for the Anchor. In 11, my hand phased through, and the Anchor imploded, sucking us into a pocket dimension. In 1, the Anchor recognized my system signature and downloaded.
[HYPOTHESIS: PHASE ANCHOR = SYSTEM COMPATIBLE]
My Unique Skill wasn't from Aetheuron. It was from outside, same as the Anchor. Same source code.
I touched it.
[CONNECTION ESTABLISHED]
[DOWNLOADING...]
[DATA PACKET: "WELCOME, WORLDLOST #5. YOU'RE LATE."]
A voice. Not spoken. Transmitted directly into my neural interface. The same way my system communicated.
[NEW CONTACT: ARCHITECT (PRIORITY THREAT)]
The grotto's crystals shifted. Our reflections solidified. Twelve copies of Drek, Mira, and I stepped out of the walls, each one perfect, each one armed.
[ENEMY ENCOUNTER: MIRROR PARTY]
[LEVEL: 6 (MATCHED)]
[ABILITIES: IDENTICAL TO PARTY]
[WEAKNESS: NONE DETECTED]
Perfect copies. The only difference was their eyes. Cyan. System-controlled.
"Test 1," the Architect's voice echoed from the Anchor. "Survival of the fittest iteration."
The copies attacked.
[SANITY CHECK: ROLLING...]
[ROLL: 1 + 8 = 9]
[TARGET: 15]
[FAILURE: IDENTITY CRISIS]
My overlay flickered. [AM I THE COPY?] flashed across my vision. The debuff was psychological warfare. I was Kael . Level 6. INT 24. LUCK 1.
The copy of Drek charged me, hatchets spinning in a pattern I'd seen 0.7 seconds ago. My parallel analysis predicted 847 countermeasures. I chose the one with the lowest probability of success but highest psychological impact.
I didn't dodge. I opened my arms .
The copy-Drek's hatchet buried in my shoulder. [HP: 115/120] [BLEEDING: 2 HP/SEC] . The pain was real. Too real for a copy.
[HYPOTHESIS: THESE AREN'T COPIES. THEY'RE US FROM ALTERNATE LOOPS.]
The real Drek saw me get hit. " Kael! " He moved to intercept, but copy-Mira's arrow pinned his boot to the crystal floor. The arrowhead was alchemically treated— [PARALYSIS AGENT DETECTED] .
I grabbed copy-Drek's wrist. "You're not a copy. You're a record. The Ravine records everything."
[INSIGHT: SHATTERGLASS = QUANTUM STORAGE MEDIUM]
[THESE ARE RECORDED ITERATIONS, NOT CLONES]
Recorded data could be overwritten. I activated Tactical Precognition (LV3) and interfaced with the Anchor directly.
[COMMAND: ACCESS RECORD 4781-B (THIS MOMENT)]
[PERMISSION: DENIED - INSUFFICIENT CLEARANCE]
Clearance. LUCK was clearance. In a quantum system, probability was the key.
I gambled. I let go of the copy, drew my shortsword, and stabbed myself in the leg.
[HP: 80/120] [SELF-HARM: 35 DAMAGE]
[DEBUFF: INSANITY (ROLEPLAYING)]
The Anchor's AI froze. [ERR: UNPREDICTED VARIABLE] . It could calculate combat. It couldn't calculate despair.
I used the freeze. [COMMAND: OVERRIDE WITH LUCK STAT]
[OVERRIDE ACCEPTED: LUCK 1 = 0.01% SUCCESS CHANCE]
[ROLLING... ROLL: 100]
Success. The 0.01% chance hit. My 1 Luck finally paid off its debt.
[RECORD ACCESS GRANTED]
[SENDING COMMAND: DELETE ALL ITERATIONS...]
The copies froze, flickered, and unraveled into streams of cyan data that flowed back into the Anchor. The grotto went silent.
[QUEST UPDATE: THE HANDLER]
[NEW OBJECTIVE: LOCATE ARCHITECT]
[LOCATION: UNKNOWN (MULTI-DIMENSIONAL)]
[PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS: LUCK DEPENDENT]
The Anchor shut down, its light dimming. But it left a final packet:
[DATA: ARCHITECT'S BASE = HOLLOW'S END, SUBTERRANEAN]
[ENTRY METHOD: PHASE-WALK (REQUIRES ANCHOR SYNC)]
[SYNC REQUIREMENT: CALLUM'S BIO-SIGNATURE]
We needed Callum. The cat's-paw was now the key.
Drek pulled the arrow from his boot. Mira bandaged my self-inflicted wound. We were battered, but we had direction.
The Handler wasn't in the Ravine.
She was under it.
And we'd just disabled her security system.
[LEVEL UP! LEVEL 7 ACHIEVED!]
[+5 STAT POINTS]
[+1 SKILL POINT]
[HP/MP RESTORED]
Level 7. [INT 24 → 27] [VIT 9 → 10] [AGI 8 → 8 (SAVED POINTS)] . I dumped the last point into Agility. [AGI: 8 → 9] . Movement mattered in phase-space.
[SKILL POINT: SAVED] . Something told me I'd need a skill I couldn't predict yet.
The Ravine was still haunted. But now the ghosts worked for us.
We just had to collect their master.