"The pain of remembering is the price of changing fate. Time doesn't rush in this place. It floods — a slow, relentless tide that drags everything out to sea and drowns the world in its own memory."
---
She wasn't breathing tar. Her legs weren't pulp. Her hands weren't gone. The sky was not falling in reverse.
She was alive.
Again.
She heaved a sob through her teeth as her stomach convulsed. Gold and black bile spilled from her lips, and her body trembled violently on the slick stone. The forest clearing around the temple pillars was just as it had been one minute before her second death. And yet…
The pain hadn't left. Not entirely.
Her lungs spasmed, struggling to take in the clean air. Phantom agony clawed down her arms and legs, memories of void tendrils ripping them apart. Her sternum throbbed with the echo of corruption boring into her soul.
She pushed herself upright with a grunt. Her fingernails dug into stone. Her eyes were bloodshot, her mouth metallic. Her knees buckled as she rose, vision doubling. The Chronosword shards swirled around her—hovering, damaged, loyal—and the white crown above her head flickered like an unstable sun, time-particles spilling like falling stars.
Then came the voice.
[System Rebooted: Temporal Rewind Protocol: ✔][Warning: Chronoenergy critically low — 4%. System instability: DATA BREACHED-LOADING.][Health: 63% (Nerve Trauma, Internal Bleeding), Mental State: ████ (PSYCHOSYNAPTIC ECHO)][System Glitch: "Causality Anchor" failure. YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THE LOOP.]
Juno gasped.
"Not alone…?" Her heart iced.
But there was no time to dissect it. Not yet.
Eclipsion's roar split the air again. The voidstorm reared. Selene and Exos surged forward to engage. The same moment, the same chase. But she had changed.
She clenched her teeth. She remembered the exact beat that led to her death—vaulting to the third pillar, placing her Chrono Glyph too soon, unleashing the Temporal Maelstrom before his core had truly opened. She'd given him the breach—fed him the fuel.
Never again.
Second Pass.
Juno's steps were deliberate now.
She ran the arc, but differently. Faster. Smoother. She dipped low, flipped sideways off the first pillar with a twist that bent air itself. Her eyes tracked every micro-crack in the temple floor, every flicker of void energy rippling in the trees.
As Selene rained down meteor-bright stars and Exos's glaives carved crescent arcs through Eclipsion's flank, Juno whispered under her breath:
"Chrono Mark."
[Ability Activated: Chrono Mark — Target location imprinted on timeline and-ERROR.][INFO RECALIBRATI-Cost: 0.3% Chronoenergy. Cooldown: 30s.]
The glitching's more stable now? She thought to hersel. She marked the center of the fourth pillar—a safe fallback point.
Then, with a shriek of motion, she leapt past the second pillar—not onto the third as before—but to the outer wall, ricocheting off the wet moss with a flip that sent the Chronosword shards streaming behind her like comet tails.
Her breath burned her lungs. Pain flared up her thighs. The memory of her legs being bitten off screamed in protest. But she gritted her teeth.
Eclipsion's head followed. The eyes of seething void narrowed.
Juno shouted, "EXOS! BRACE LEFT—HE'S CHANNELING THROUGH HIS CHEST!"
Exos didn't question it. His glaive twisted mid-spin, redirecting void-piercers to shield Selene as she veered wide, slamming another starlit explosion into Eclipsion's side.
Juno landed on the fifth pillar—one she'd never reached in her past loops. The runes on it were different. Older. Cracked and bleeding golden sap.
She pressed a bloodied palm to the surface.
"Chrono Bind," she whispered.
[Ability Activa-RE-INITIALIZING: Chrono Bind — Glyphs seeded with time-delay fuses in order to-GLITCHING DETECTED][Result: COMPROMISED-Trap will detonate on specific trigger — Eclipsion's core pulse-REDACTED]
Then she dropped off the side of the pillar and rolled under Eclipsion's next lunge—his jaw unhinging, void-corruption pouring from his throat like liquid entropy.
Her system screamed:
[Chronoenergy: 3.4%][Chronosword Fragment Sync: 87% — BLADE PARTIALLY STABILIZED.][Memory Fracture Detected — Synapse Echo Overflow.][WARNING: Repeating critical damage loop—MENTAL INTEGRITY AT RISK.]
Juno clenched her fists as she skidded to a stop. Blood dripped from her ears.
She wasn't just fighting Eclipsion anymore. She was fighting herself—her own past echoes, her body's memory of death. But she'd keep going. Because failure meant everyone died. And she'd die a thousand more times before she let that happen again.
The Plan.
She sprinted across the final arc, blasting up with a glyph burst that cracked the air beneath her.
"Selene! Get ready to blind him!" she barked.
Selene, mid-air, sliced open her own shoulder and conjured a burning sigil of the dying star Lyxion.
Juno reached the final pillar—the marked one.
Eclipsion's vortex-core pulsed open in the exact beat she remembered. Timing.
This was the real window.
"NOW!"
Selene hurled the burning sigil.
White fire burst in a screaming sunflare. Eclipsion reared back.
Juno launched.
Mid-air. Sword shards aligning. Her hands scorched with runes. The crown above her blazed into a second layer—its light cracking reality's surface like glass.
She drove the Chronosword forward.
[Ability Activated: Chrono Critical — FORCED STRIKE INTO SINGLE POINT IN TIME.][Chronoenergy: 0.9%][System Status: GLITCHING—Temporal anchor unsynced—ERROR—Core breach triggered…]
The sword pierced directly into the eye of Eclipsion's chest-core. The tip struck something behind the nothing—a nucleus of undiluted void. There was a snap like the universe flinching.
[DIRECT HIT — Critical fracture achieved.][ECLIPSION HP: 31%][System Alert: Internal void structure compromised. Void density destabilizing.]
The Core cracked.
Eclipsion roared like a collapsing sun.
But his hand—faster than breath—came down in retaliation. Its tendrils spiked through spacetime, reaching for Juno's exposed chest.
Too fast.
Then the white crown ignited.
It surged in a way it never had before—not in any previous loop. Runes spilled into the air. Time itself bent.
The entire world slowed.
[Temporal Veil: Activated on instinct.][System Feedback: "Temporal anomaly operating OUTSIDE USER INTENT."]
Juno dodged—barely—by curling into a spiral that let the tendril miss her heart by inches. It still caught her shoulder, ripping through flesh, but her body twisted with the impact.
She rolled across the pillar, coughing blood, sword still embedded in Eclipsion's core.
And then—something new happened.
The fragments of the Chronosword, once floating like shattered hope, began to realign. They sang. Not a sound of metal—but of time reasserting itself.
One by one, the pieces floated. White threads of golden light connected them.
Her system blinked—
[CHRONOSWORD: 99% Synchronization.][New Entry Unlocked — "ΩBlade: Timelines Rewritten"][Forging…⟲]
The blade reconstructed midair.
White. Gold. Seams stitched by the blood of memory. Hilt etched with every death she'd endured.
Juno stood, wobbling.
The sword floated to her outstretched palm.
Eclipsion howled, his core bleeding paradox.
Her crown burned brighter than the sun, and she whispered through clenched teeth:
"You didn't kill me, Eclipsion. I rewrote the page where you did."
Eclipsion's silhouette ballooned, a slow inflation of corruption. Where its skin had once pooled like old oil, now thick veined tendrils burst outward, siphoning life from earth and air. Roots blackened into writhing spears. The treeline shuddered as if some vast throat swallowed wind. Birds that had sat on branches an instant ago warped into gray, angular things and snapped like paper under a child's hand.
Juno felt it first in her jaw — a prickle of static behind her teeth, like a warning bell. Her breath came shallow and fast. The crown of white flame above her head guttered once and then roared as if stoked by a hurricane. Her shards hummed; the threads of white light that joined them shivered like violin strings plucked by an unseen hand.
Exos and Selene were already moving. They'd read her pulse: go, now. They surged forward, a comet and a slow blade-storm in tandem.
"Charge!" Exos bellowed. He was iron incarnate — the way his shoulder rotated, the creak in his back from calling weapons through the void, the way his boots dug trenches in the moss as he threw his body like an anchor. The halo of blades that orbited him peeled outward like petals. He whispered the activation word more like a prayer: "Starforged—UNLEASH!"
[System Notice: Allied Buff | Time Surge effect active on allies.]
[System: Description corrupted — SYNCHRONIZATION ERROR — APPLIED EFFECT: Velocity Amplification (Partial).]
"Time Surge!" Juno called, her voice a bell. She slammed her palm forward and felt the world answer with a reluctant whine — like tightening cables. For a heartbeat, Exos and Selene blurred; their momentum was tied to a thread she tugged. They moved with unnatural keenness, blades and weapons carving arcs meant to cleave the void itself.
Selene's daggers fell like small suns. Lament traced sorrowful arcs; Solace shrugged light into the air that tasted of ozone and old lullabies. She spun on an axis, hips and shoulders whipping, each movement precise and bright.
"Starfall—Ignite!" she cried, and the small drawn stars at her dagger's edges flared, throwing hot white embers at Eclipsion's malformed skin.
For a heartbeat their assault landed. Exos' telekinetic pikes punched into sheened void, and Selene's constellation-embeds burned anomalous tracks of light across Eclipsion's hide. Black crust cracked and slipped in sheets. Eclipsion staggered, that vast maw of a head cocking as if surprised by the taste of pain.
And then the thing learned fast.
It exhaled — not breath but a dark law — and the forest answered like a chorus of snapped strings. Exos' orbiting blades stuttered mid-flight, their gleam sagging as corrosion wormed up the blades' edges. The supernova slivers Selene had spent herself to conjure fizzled, their starlight curdling into onyx motes. The very air turned viscous; every movement acquired the resistance of moving through honey.
"NO—" Exos snarled, feeling the theft of his arsenal as a personal violation. He slammed his glaive into the ground, sending shockwaves of kinetic iron outward, but the spikes dissolved into smeared black. He looked older in that moment — younger than his hundred battles — and terrified.
Juno ran.
She bounded across a mossy knoll, chased by the pressure of collapse, the sense that this battle wanted to rewrite how she had moved in it. Every step she took left pale footprints like clock hands scorched into the earth. The Chronosword fragments circled her wrist in a living ouroboros. Her lungs felt like they were pulling through old bandages. She could feel the system fracturing in her periphery, lines of text tearing: -ERROR- -RE-INITIALIZING- -DATA CORRUPTED-.
[System: ABILITY QUEUE — Chrono Glyph (queued).]
[System: FAIL-SAFE CHECK — SYNAPTIC STRESS LEVEL CRITICAL.]
[System: -ANOMALY DETECTED- | Chrono-energy: FLUCTUATING]
She tried to think cleaner, to hack reality by sequence and by effect: distract, create, collapse the anchor points. She'd watch Eclipsion feed and learn its preference — it corrupted weapons, stifled stars, ate the sparks of life. So weapons, stars, life — those were its food. She'd starve it of that sustenance or turn it back upon itself.
Plan. Execute. Rewind if death. Rewind if catastrophe. Juno had lived and died on that loop enough to know the rhythm.
"Chrono Glyph—ACTIVATE!" she shouted, words like a litany. The fragments clawed together, stitching a ring of faint script across her arms. White runes spun outward, painting sigils into air that smeared like frost across glass.
[Ability: Chrono Glyph — DESCRIPTION: Bind temporal vectors to physical anchors. EFFECT: Create localized time-circuit. -ERROR- SUBROUTINE: STABILITY UNKNOWN.]
The glyphs sank into the pillars — old standing stones that had not even been there moments ago — and the stones answered, humming to the cadence she gave. The field around Eclipsion buckled, as if time itself tried to cinch around the voidlord and compress it.
For a trembling second it worked. Eclipsion jerked, its motion becoming choppy, like a warped film reel. Exos used the opening to surge, his glaive cleaving with brutal intellect. Selene leapt and carved a streak of starfire along its flank, rekindling hope like a lantern lit in a storm.
Then Eclipsion smiled.
It's laugh, when it came, was the sound of a thousand brittle things collapsing into dust. The corruption it carried was not merely destructive; it adapted. The runes on the pillars glitched as if their shapes were swallowed by static. Eclipsion inhaled, and the pillars' runes screamed backward, flinging shards of frozen time like spear tips — not at Eclipsion, but at Juno.
The shards slammed into her shoulder with a force that unstitched muscle. Pain exploded — bright and searing. Her vision spun, the white crown flickering, threads of the Chronosword stuttering like a dying radio signal. She tasted copper and memory.
[System: WARNING — Time Anchors Compromised. SYNCHRONIZATION FALLOUT.]
[Status: HP 47% | Chronoenergy: 24% | System Integrity: -RE-INITIALIZING-]
Exos roared, and with a gesture, he threw his body as a living wall. He summoned pikes from memory, from the bone-archive of his will, chain after chain of shining steel. They rose in a fan that slowed the next onslaught, biting into void-limbs until they were cindered. But every weapon he pulled now cost him, a piece of himself drawn from a ledger of life he couldn't refill.
Selene's face had gone pale, a washed comet. Her chest heaved but her hands moved steady as ritual. She planted one dagger and then the other into the ground; their blades drank the star-embers she forced up with a howl that was part rage, part prayer.
"Constellation—Anchor!" she gasped, ripping a light out of herself like a splintered moon. She flung it and the ground where it struck split with a celestial fracture, pinning Eclipsion's foot with a lattice of starfire.
It worked. The lattice held for a breath, and the world shivered with potential. Juno felt the thread in her gut pull taut. Now, now — hit it through its anchor, destabilize the core.
She leapt.
Her fragments were a riot around her, shards of time that hummed with every memory she'd never wanted to face. She launched herself at a seam in Eclipsion's corrupted skin where Exos had carved open a ribcage of void. With every movement she counted rhythmically to keep her mind clear: one, two, three — not the numbers of defeat but the cadence of strike.
The moment her broken blade met the seam, the world screamed.
It wasn't the searing slice she expected. Instead the Chronosword fragments sang — a thin, keening note that hooked into the wound and latched to a thing inside Eclipsion that was not flesh but narrative: a core of stolen endings.
White thread surged from the fragments, reaching like fingers, trying to stitch together a wound that had never been meant to scar. For an instant, Juno felt it: the steadiness of time reasserting itself, the idea that moments could be rewound gently, not torn.
Then Eclipsion reacted.
It lunged with a speed that betrayed its size, a wall of black glove-claws whipping through the air. Its corruption was now less an infection than a physics rewrite. The claw's motion burned through Juno's attempts as if she had nothing to anchor it to. The arm swept — an absolute, jagged scythe — and she couldn't move her feet in time to fully dodge.
It clipped her shoulder. A white-hot slice that unmade tendons and memory. Pain like the tearing of a map. She felt the crown above her blaze white-hot, threadstrings snapping as if someone plucked cord by cord.
"NO!" Selene's shout was close; Exos' cry was thunder. The two closed in with everything they had left — a last bright onslaught — but Eclipsion moved like a lesson learned in blood. It refused their insistence.
The claw found its mark. It hooked into her side with a vice of corrupted time, and for a dizzying instant Juno felt herself being severed — not of limbs alone but of sequence. Moments slid out of her like coins, spilling in the grass: childhood, the ache of an orphanage, the first time she'd tasted the idea of killing herself to save others — those memory-pearls slid away and were swallowed by the void as if they had been trivial currency.
She screamed, a sound that was not wholly hers.
Exos screamed too, and he surged, a cataclysm in iron form, but Eclipsion's field flashed and his assault decayed into brittle shadows. The void did not need to kill her to defeat her. It needed to hollow.
Then the impossible happened.
White threads — frail, stuttering, like the first stitches after an amputation — began to gather from the scattered shards of her Chronosword. They pulled, trembling, and the fragments rose. They braided awkwardly at first, then with more purpose: a ring, a blade, a promise. Juno could feel the reformation in her marrow, feel the fragments calling one another like siblings who had been separated in a riot.
"Hold!" she rasped, even as blood ran over her knuckles. "Hold, hold, hold—"
[System: -RE-INITIALIZING- — CHRONO-REASSEMBLY SEQUENCE DETECTED.]
[System: -DATA PATCHING- | Chronosword recombination: INCOMPLETE; structural integrity: 42%]
The reassembled blade was imperfect — jagged where it had been smitten, glimmering with borrowed light — but it hung together. Golden edges glinted through soot. Threads of white tethered each piece like a constellation stitched by a trembling hand.
Eclipsion recoiled as if the sight of that blade was a rebuke. It swore something in a sound that made the trees tilt away. Corruption hissed, bubble-popping across its body.
For a fractured second, victory trembled on the horizon.
Then the crown over Juno's head flared, and her vision telescoped into an impossible focus. She tasted ash and iron and the cold honey of the forest. Her muscles screamed. Her system blinked one final, blazing red line: -ANOMALY DETECTED- — -SYNAPTIC MATRIX FISSURE-.
The battle was far from won. Eclipsion's body was fading, cracking like old lacquer and reforming with darker lacquer beneath; it was receding into a more dangerous patience. Exos and Selene were battered and burning on fumes. Around them, the forest was a wound: fauna and stone corrupted, time itself blistered.
But Juno stood. The Crown burned hotter, a testament to the price she'd paid to be here again.
She hefted the half-assembled Chronosword. Its fragments thrummed, held together by white threads that glowed like the pulse of something still living in her chest.
"Not yet," she whispered to the vanishing sky. "Not on my watch."
[System: -DATA STREAM INTERRUPTED- | Residual Void Structures collapsing — new rift forming: PROBABLE.]
Juno's ribs burned. Her crown guttered. The world breathed, and then the breath stopped.
The world folded like a page being creased in half and then burned.
Juno felt it first as a pressure under the skin — not the soft, soluble pressure of fatigue but a grinding hurricane inside her chest that vibrated the fillings in her teeth. The crown above her head detonated into a light so pure it was obscene, a white that wasn't color but an argument. Her shards screamed themselves together in a single, hungry tone. The Chronosword in her hands thrummed like a heart that refused to die.
She had poured everything into this strike. Every loop, every death, every small, awful lesson she'd learned about timing and pain and the exact sequence of muscle and breath that made a single moment lethal — she stuffed them into the hollow of her palm and shoved them into the universe's eye.
"Chrono Oblivion—FINAL." The words left her throat like a threat she owed the world.
[(System Info)] [Chronoenergy: 0.2%] [Ability: Chrono Oblivion — DESCRIPTION: Collapse target's causal threads into a single point of nonexistence — ERROR — UNSTABLE DATA STREAM — COST: ∞?] [WARNING: CORE SYNC BREACH — TEMPORAL BACKLASH IMMINENT]
The crown burned until its edges blurred. The forest went thin, like a cut of film held to light: leaves became skeletons of themselves, shadows went soft and long. Time pulled its scarf tight and tried to suffocate the battle into one final exhale.
She shoved the sword forward. The blade's tip pierced the black heart of Eclipsion with a sound that was more wrong than noise — a hollowing, as if a word had been swallowed mid-sentence. The voidlord, which had held the look of drowned mountains for as long as she'd been watching, flared. Its bulk faulted, and the corruption crowed — a shrill, wet thing that spilled darkness like oil.
Juno wanted that sound to be the ending. She wanted the world to collapse its teeth around the corruption and swallow it whole. She wanted to stop hearing the echo of her own deaths in the empty places in her bones.
For a heartbeat, it seemed to answer. The black shell around Eclipsion cracked like thin lacquer. Pale insides — the narrative guts, the stolen endings — flared white and almost clean. The thing that had been eating moments choked on one of its own.
And then Eclipsion moved.
It was a motion that had not been in any of her recorded loops, a twitch of cunning rather than of pain. Its remaining mass surged upward like a beast that learned to swim. The corrupted arm that had been hit re-stitched itself with a new, faster logic, and it lunged toward the incoming blade the way a viper lunges for a candle flame.
It clipped the sword.
The contact didn't slash — it unmade. The white that Juno had woven began to buckle under the wrongness of Eclipsion's counter. Threads snapped. The Chronosword, born of her will and of recovered memories, shuddered in her grip and sang like metal under a storm. She felt the time between her breaths thin to a sharp wire.
"NO," she breathed, not as a plea but as a command.
Eclipsion's claw — a slash of living void that smelled like rubbed ozone and wet paper — arced faster than the universe wanted it to. It found the empty space left by her chest's courage. Where the white crown had been brightest was now raw open.
The claw sank.
Shock wasn't the right sensation. It was more like the world being cut in two with a slow, surgical quiet. Light unstitched itself from matter. The forest, the pillars, even the white crown that had wrapped her like armor, began to dissolve into a blinding starch of whiteness. Juno could feel her body's edges go soft. Her hearing did a strange thing: everything folded into her and left with the hand of a thief.
She thought of Selene's laugh — quick, reckless, always like it wanted to start a riot at a funeral — and of Exos' steady shoulders, the way his hands kept promises to a memory. She thought of small things, trinkets and corners of nights that had defined her. They poured out of her like beads from a ripped pouch, and the claw ate them.
Then the white took. Not death — not yet — but an erasure more absolute than bleeding: the scene itself went blank as an overexposed photograph. Sound folded into nothing. The last pressure she felt was the keen, intimate tearing of narrative: the sense of cause and effect, the ordered stream she had been holding like a cup, went with the light, and whatever remained of her reached for one last piece of time to hold.
Her thoughts were a peculiar, precise semaphore:
If I die, rewind. One minute. Remember the notch. Keep breathing.
She never got to finish the instruction. The white closed like a lid. Everything ended in a single, searing blank.
—
When she returned, she did not feel like someone who had awoken. She felt like a coin that had been dropped and would not stop spinning.
Juno lay on the mossed stone of the clearing, her cheek pressed to cold, slightly damp earth that smelled faintly of crushed lichen and char. Her breath came in staccato moons; each inhalation gouged at the inside of her ribs. There was the taste of iron and salt filling her mouth. She blinked, and where the crown had once floated with impossible grace, there was only a faint, powdery halo that drifted in the air above her like dust motes.
Her fingers brushed for the sword.
Dust. Not shards. Not gleaming, alive metal — just powder the color of spent bone. The Chronosword's pieces had been unmade down to their weave. The white threads that used to stitch them were nothing but ash between her fingers.
She tried to move and discovered movement had become a high tariff. Her limbs felt like borrowed wood. Her ears felt hollow, as if the world had retreated into a room she no longer owned. She opened her mouth to call, to check on Selene, Exos, the shameless, loud, infuriating companions who had bled light into the dark with her — and the sound that came out was a thin, incarcerated croak.
[(System Info) — NO RESPONSE] [(System Error) — FAILED TO INITIALIZE: COREFRAME] [(System Missing: TEMPORAL LINK: UNKNOWN)]
Something inside her constricted then: the system. The string of text she had been living with since the Aspects chose her — the running ledger, the HUD that whispered warnings, the cold rationality that let her run simulations of her deaths a dozen times over — it wasn't just gone. It was gone the same way a limb that had been removed leaves a phantom itch. The space it had taken up in her cognition was a wound.
"No system," she whispered. The words tasted like a shock. Her voice kept the sugar of disbelief.
She fumbled for the crown again. The ghost of its light clung to the air for an instant and then snapped away as if someone had taken a photograph of the moment and burned the negative.
The clearing was still. A wind moved through leaves but the sound was muffled, like a radio caught in another room. The pillars that had been carved with rune-maps and ancient names were intact around them, but their runes no longer thrummed toward her. The world had been quieted like a child who had refused to go to sleep.
She expected voices. Selene's, probably: blasphemous, bright, full of sugar and curses. Exos' heavy steps, an anchor that told her the ground would keep its shape. But the space where their presence should have been was a drafting table left mid-sketch.
Panic pushed through the fog. Juno pushed up on one elbow. Her clothes — the hooded cowl the color of midnight that had been stitched with little constellations of shadow, the leather jacket with constellation embroidery that she stole light from with her movements, the cargo pants with rune-lined pockets — were intact but shredded in places like an old diary. The iron-toed boots that had always been silent on the battlefield were caked with a mix of mud and black tartar. Her wrists felt naked without the liquid-metal swirl watch that had been half a joke and half a compass.
She patted herself down like someone trying to locate missing pockets in a jacket. Her fingers scraped dust where the moon-phase charm bracelet used to bite into her wrist. The bracelet was gone.
No system. No Chronosword. No crown.
She staggered to her knees. The forest leaned in like a curious animal. All she could see was the smear of a black pool not far off where Eclipsion had once been a colossal, bruised statue of corruption. Now it lay as a puddle of glossy, viscous black that reflected the sky in a way that made the world look thinner. It pulsed faintly, as if something ached in its depths.
Exos and Selene: gone.
The thought scraped like chutney across an old bruise.
She tried to remember where they'd last been, what they'd said, how their fingers had slid over hers. Her memory brought up images in sharp, stabbing flashes: Exos flinging a halo of pikes like a storm of polished teeth; Selene's daggers singing as they pulled star embers from her chest and threw them like fireworks. Both had been close enough that their breaths had been audible. But close like the sea is close to the shore — one moment, there; the next, nothing.
She rolled onto her back and stared at the sky, which had found a new kind of quiet. The clouds were peeled thin like tissue; there were no birds. The smell of the forest had gone to a careful, antiseptic absence. Her throat trembled. She tried to run the system in her head the way she'd once accessed a HUD. She searched for logs, for a list, for any trace of that cold, efficient announcer.
No breadcrumbs.
Something that had felt like a cliff edge yawned where her lifeline used to be. Without the system, without that recursive, painfully precise suspension of possibilities, she was a girl with a history and no map.
Questions flooded like algae.
Do I still have the one-minute rewind? she asked herself. Is the Aspect of Time… corrupted? Did it sacrifice its favor with her without warning? How many times did she die for this to happen? Did the system go with the sword? Is this the version where she can't fix anything?
She tried to prod the worst thought into a cogent question: if the system is gone, is the rewind gone too?
Her muscles tightened around a memory that felt older and more honest than the rest: the moment she'd stabbed the Chronosword into her chest in another life, the hot, sharp certainty of ending a life so it might fold back. The idea of death as a tool sat in her like a coin. She had been brave enough to use it. But that had required the system's ledger, the ability to collect up her old maps and fold them back into a new one. Without that ledger, what did she hold? Mere bravery or a misfired prayer?
Fear rose like a tide behind the knees.
But it wasn't only fear. Relief seeped in too, soft and guilty. The black pool was small now. The sickly, live infection that had been trailing the land — the Void's hangover — was not sliding across the clearing anymore. The trees hadn't begun to reshape themselves into the geometry of loss. For the first time in perhaps months, she could say with slightly less trembling voice:
Eclipsion is gone.
The realization was enormous, tender, and cheap all at once. It made her chest ache with everything it hadn't been allowed to be: grateful. Exhausted. Hollow.
She pressed her palms to the stone, feeling cracks run under her skin like roadmaps. The absence of the system had a shape. It felt like loss and freedom braided together. The instruments that had been strapped to her life had been tools and bulwarks; their removal left her stranded but air finally plain and unfiltered.
She could have sobbed. Instead she coughed, tasted more powder from the Chronosword's remnants in her throat, and laughed — a small, brittle sound that was half a curse and half a child's joke about how the universe was incompetent at timing.
"Of course," she told the empty air. "Of course the universe would let me keep the guilt and lose the cheat codes."
She tried to stand. Her thighs didn't want to cooperate. The forest leaned again, closer, as if waiting for her to show whether she'd crack.
Her mind — hungry for plan — took inventory the way a thief checks pockets.
System: gone.
Crown: faded.
Chronosword: dust.
Selene: gone.
Exos: gone.
One-minute rewind: unknown.
She breathed the list like a mantra. Saying things aloud sometimes made them feel less monstrous.
Where were they? A dozen theories ran quick as minnows. Selene might have been thrown through a rupture, or she may have used herself as a star-anchor and been dragged toward a sky that ate constellations. Exos might have been ripped back into the memory of the forge where his chains had been made. They might be dead. They might be alive. They might be in a state she had no word for yet.
She was afraid, but even that fear was a kind of work she could do. Start with the immediate: survive. Then search. Then, if the system did not return, rebuild.
Her fingers found the pattern in the stone beneath her—the grooves where runes had once answered the system's prompts. The stone hummed faintly with residual temporal friction. It was like a wakening breeze against a grave.
"I don't know how to do this without you," she said, not asking anyone in particular. It was an accusation and an apology.
The forest did not answer.
For a long minute she listened to her own heart deciding whether to be brave. It decided to be something like cautious. She was too aware of the hollowness where the system's voice had been — that practical, unromantic partner she'd carried like a weight belt. The crown's light had been intoxicating; its absence was a constant, low shudder.
She dug a hand into her jacket, finding, with a small flare of absurd joy, a single coin — a memory-fragment she had stitched into a pocket for emergencies. A trinket Selene had given her once: an engraved sliver of glass that blinked with a borrowed star when you tilted it. It still shone faintly.
Small things mattered. The coin's glow was pathetic and stubborn. She cupped it like a small sun and found she could still think in sequences, though they were fragile and demanded more effort without the system's scaffolding.
If the rewind was gone, she would have to make even fewer mistakes. If it remained, unseen, she would have to play her next moves with the knowledge that its saving hand might be missing.
She closed her eyes and let the memory of Exos' voice be the thing that steadied her — the low click of plates on a forge, the way he said improbable kindnesses as if he were cataloguing them. She let Selene's grin burn behind her eyes, a dangerous compass.
The clearing was quiet in the way abandoned things are quiet — not tranquil, but holding its breath. The black pool sat like a bruise. The pillars were intact. But beyond them the world shifted.
She'd had a thousand reasons to die to save worlds and a thousand more reasons not to. Now, stripped of her system, stripped of the sword that stitched outcomes, the choice before her was raw and awkward like a newborn concept.
She pushed up, knees trembling. A prickle of white hair stood up at the nape of her neck when she felt the air change.
Behind her, something that had not been there before scraped open the soft fabric between moments.
At first it was a whisper of sound — a sibilant tearing that might have been wind through reed. Then it became a pressure at the back of her skull, as though someone had put a palm against the world and pressed.
She turned slowly.
Where, moments before, there had been only tree and sky, a wound in the air yawned. It was a vertical seam, a tear with edges that glowed an impossible, hungry violet. Around the seam, the grass had gone brittle and black, curling like paper left too close to flame. The air warmed and smelled like the inside of an old clock: oil and ozone and something sweeter that made her think of lost afternoons.
The rift pulsed once, and then everything went black.
She couldn't tell if the blackness was like a blink or a swallowing. It was not the white she had known before. This black swallowed sound and light and the memory of both. A pressure like the getting of a hug that contains you a little too tight.
Her heart kicked.
She didn't have a system to analyze the rift. She didn't have a Chronosword to jam into it. She didn't know if she could depend on rewinds, or if that tiny last-minute safety net had been taken away along with her tools. She felt naked, and furious, and very, very small — but also, in a strain of bright light, intensely alive.
Juno planted her boots into the earth, feeling for the familiar grip of inertia. The coin in her palm warmed. She kept it close to her chest as if it could anchor everything she was about to be.
This was the moment where old versions of her had died and learned it wasn't enough. This was another loop in the myth. But loops were not destiny until she bowed to them. She had been given endings so she could learn to make a new shape of the plot.
She breathed, and the breath tasted of iron and possibility.
"All right," she said, because saying things aloud made them less like monsters. Her voice was raw but precise. "If the system's gone — then I make the rules. If the crown's gone — I find a new one. If the sword is dust — I make a new edge."
She pulled herself to standing. Her joints screamed and her muscles protested, like an old bell rusting back into chime. She straightened the remains of her jacket, feeling the ghost of the liquid-metal watch on her wrist and the empty scrape on her wrist where the bracelet had been. The hood bunched at her shoulders like a tired animal.
The rift behind her pulsed again, closer this time, and a sound rose out of it — not voices but a chorus of things that were not human: the rattle of packages being opened, the sigh of a city's last breath, the soft, hungry clatter of thoughts being unglued. It smelled of wet stone and burned paper. A taste of sodium caught on her tongue.
Juno didn't know where Exos and Selene were. She didn't know if the Aspect of Time had abandoned her. She didn't know whether the one-minute rewind would still answer because in a second she might not be allowed to answer it.
But she did know this: the Void had been pushed back for a moment. A rift opened regardless. There were other worlds to save. Other deaths to endure. And even if she had to do it without the comforting click of a system prompt, she still had her brain, such as it was, and a stubborn muscle in her chest that would not accept the end.
She tightened her fingers around the coin until it felt like a compass.
The black swallowed everything.
;
...
.
Who are you now? Juno?