The day passed without an attack.
It was worse than battle.
All throughout Duskfall Reach, soldiers waited for an assault that never came. They paced trenches, oiled weapons, sharpened blades already honed to hair-splitting sharpness. They choked on silence. Every gust of wind became a scream. Every birdcall—rare now—sounded like a command.
And the orchard pulsed.
It had begun humming at noon. Low at first, like distant thunder. Then higher, vibrating the marrow. Some said it was the trees singing. Others insisted it was the Dominion's song-ritual, an enchantment meant to soften the veil between moments. Ilyra didn't believe in metaphors anymore. She believed in spells, wounds, and tactics. But when she walked past the orchard at the eighth bell, her own name drifted out between the leaves.
Not shouted. Not whispered.
Sung.
By dusk, Vess ordered the reach sealed.
No one in. No one out.
The gates—what remained of them—were barred with infused ironwood and silver braids. Senn laid a ward-net over the eastern wall, a lattice of anti-phase sigils and time-denial glyphs. If any part of reality tried to rewrite itself, the net would scream.
Kael warned them: "That might only work once."
"Once is enough," Ilyra said. "We only need to live long enough to outlast them."
She didn't believe it. But soldiers needed lies as much as truth.
In the last hour before the Reversal began, she sat in the officer's dugout, hands clenched tight. She'd re-read the intercepted scroll until the ink felt burned into her retinas.
Reversal begins at nightfall. Object secured. Shard active.
"What object?" she asked Kael.
He shook his head. "Could be anything. A relic. A soul. A copy of something real."
"You're not helping."
"I'm not trying to. I'm preparing you."
"For what?"
"For a war where truth is the first casualty."
The bells failed at nightfall.
They had been set to ring every hour, measured by the fey-temporal sand inside Vess's private chamber. But when the ninth bell passed, silence followed.
No chime. No echo.
Only static.
Senn confirmed it first. "Chrono-rhythm is off," she said. "One of the moons shifted. Not in the sky—in here."
She pointed to her chest. "Inside time."
Kael murmured a ward. The glyph fizzled. "Nothing holds."
Then it began.
The trenches folded.
Not visibly. Not all at once. Just—slightly wrong.
Ilyra turned a corner she had walked a dozen times before and found herself back at her own quarters. She went west—emerged east. Her boots left footprints that looped in figure eights. Her voice echoed before she spoke.
"Where is the enemy?" someone screamed.
"Inside!" another cried. "They're inside the walls!"
But no enemy came.
Just reality, turning traitor.
That's when the double appeared.
Ilyra froze when she saw herself walking toward her from the far end of the southern trench.
Same armor. Same stride. Even the same limp from where the cannon shockwave had bruised her ankle.
The double nodded. "Captain."
Ilyra raised her blade. "Stand down."
"I have. You haven't."
"Who sent you?"
"You did."
Kael stepped between them, spell crackling in his hand. "It's a dominion trick."
"No," the double said calmly. "It's a mirror. You needed to see what you're becoming."
"I don't care what I become," Ilyra said, stepping closer. "As long as they don't win."
The double smiled. "Then they already have."
Ilyra struck.
The blade passed through. No resistance. No scream.
Just air.
The image faded.
But when she turned to Kael, he looked different. Older. Tired. Eyes too full.
"You're bleeding," he said.
She wasn't. Not yet.
But the words stayed.
Elsewhere in the Reach, the Dominion made their move.
It wasn't a charge. Not a grand cannonade. Just a quiet infiltration.
Troops didn't scale the walls. They stepped inside—wearing Coalition faces.
It started with a medic, recognized by three squadrons. Then a quartermaster, identical down to the mole on her chin. Then a child, weeping beside a trench fire, wearing the badge of Ilyra's old company—disbanded ten years ago.
Senn tried to purge them.
Her wards screamed. Her mask cracked.
Kael tried a truthbinding.
It backfired—tethering him to a version of himself that had betrayed the Reach. For a moment, he was that man. He dropped his staff and wept in the mud.
Vess ordered the execution of six infiltrators. Four of them bled. Two turned to mist.
"We're losing," he said to Ilyra.
"We've lost worse," she replied.
"No. You don't understand."
He pointed to the orchard.
It was empty.
Ilyra ran.
Past the ruined trench. Past the ghost-lanterns flickering blue in the reversed wind. Past the soldier whispering the future in reverse.
She stopped at the orchard's edge.
No trees.
No graves.
Just her.
Dozens of her. Standing. Sitting. Fighting. Praying. One was already dead, curled beside a grave that bore Kael's name.
She staggered backward.
Behind her, the Dominion waited.
A line of soldiers, not advancing. Just watching.
They held nothing in their hands.
Because they already had everything they needed.
The Reversal wasn't about terrain.
It was about identity.
The shard the Dominion had activated wasn't a weapon. It was a memory-fracture. A relic stolen from the old Gods, once capable of preserving timelines. They'd corrupted it. Bent it backward.
Now the Reach was bleeding selves.
Each defender saw their choices unspool into branches. Every "what if" became a ghost. Every regret, a whisper.
Soldiers turned on comrades not because they betrayed—but because they remembered differently. One soldier insisted the war had ended last year. Another that Vess had died a month ago.
In the command cavern, time died.
Clocks ran backward. Orders contradicted their givers. One report claimed the Dominion had always held the Reach.
Ilyra carved a line in the stone floor.
"This is real," she whispered.
Kael, swaying beside her, nodded. "It has to be."
Vess didn't respond. He was reading a report from a battle that hadn't yet happened.
In the final hour of the Reversal, the Dominion made their only mistake.
They let one of the infiltrators speak.
A lieutenant named Alren—one of Ilyra's oldest friends—stood atop the western rampart and called down to the trench below.
"Peace," he said. "No more games. No more lies."
"Traitor," someone hissed.
But Alren raised his hands. "No. Just a man tired of dying. Again and again."
He pointed to the moons. "This cycle ends when we let it. The Dominion isn't our enemy. Time is."
And that was their mistake.
Because Ilyra knew the Dominion's greatest flaw wasn't cruelty. It was certainty.
They believed they were the only truth.
And so, she used that against them.
She cut herself.
Not deep. Just enough to draw blood.
Then she knelt in the mud and began to write.
Symbols. Old ones. Learned in Tharim Hold, beneath the cold whispering stones. Kael joined her. Then Senn.
Together, they formed a ritual—not of power, but of choice.
A binding to reality.
Not truth, but consent.
Each soldier who wished to remain real had to bleed. Had to mark the ground. Had to remember who they were—not perfectly, but with intention.
And slowly, the Reversal faltered.
The doubles faded. The trenches straightened. The orchard returned—twisted, but anchored.
The cannon did not fire that night.
Because the shard failed.
Not shattered.
But rejected.
By sunrise, the Dominion had withdrawn one mile.
Not retreated.
But reset.
They would try again.
The Reach still stood.
Barely.
Ilyra stood on the eastern wall, eyes red, blade sheathed.
Kael approached. His voice rasped. "You bled us to save us."
"No," she said. "I named us."
And for now, that was enough.