The first breath wasn't air. It was ash, clotted against his teeth. Granular. Warm. Wet.
Cael's mouth moved before he remembered he had one. His eyes—if they were still his—fluttered open to blackness so complete it felt intentional. Thoughtless silence folded in around him. No direction. No sound. No time.
Only pain. Familiar, raw, purposeful pain.
[System Warning: Fragment Instability—Threshold Breach] [Physical degradation at 34% | Thread Decay imminent] [Bone-thread cohesion: Disrupted]
Something cracked in his shoulder—not from pressure, but from the memory of pressure. The ache arrived before the movement. That meant the Hallow Step had backlashed again. Worse this time.
His breath hitched. Too shallow. Not enough rib movement. He turned his head—then screamed.
Not out loud. Not in sound. But in every neuron.
His neck rotated twice. Once in real space—and once in the lingering after-image left behind by the fragment's momentum. A split-second delay where his body obeyed two realities.
He curled inward, fetal, arms digging through layers of caked silt and half-burnt bone dust. Every joint pulsed wrong. His knees felt like they belonged to someone else.
And under his skin, something moved.
No. Something squirmed.
At first he thought it was muscle tremor. Then it wasn't. Tiny wriggles, weaving just beneath his wrists. Like threads—or worms. Grit-covered, translucent. Breathing. Squirming.
He gagged and tore at his sleeves. Nothing. No punctures. No entry wounds. But the movement persisted.
"System—" he rasped. "What's in me?"
[No parasitic lifeforms detected.] [Psychosomatic response within acceptable ranges.] [Hallucination Index: 42%]
So not real. Or not entirely real. Good enough. He bit his lip until he tasted iron.
Another breath—not his—unfolded behind the vault's inner arch.
Thick. Wet. Rattling like old meat over coals.
Cael pushed himself up on hands that shook like paper caught between magnets. His vision wobbled—frame lag on his own life.
Something was breathing in the dark. Something patient.
"Light," he whispered. "Give me light…"
No glow-sigil. No ambient glyphs. His HUD remained dead. He was alone. Just the vault, the blackness, and something that didn't want to be seen.
Then—movement.
To his left, a hand dragged across stone.
A hand with too many knuckles.
The hand vanished as quickly as it came—flickered like a bad thought. Cael didn't chase it. He was too busy bleeding inside himself.
His ribs weren't broken, just… bending wrong. Spatial drag clung to every breath. Like the world couldn't quite remember where to put his lungs.
A slow metallic whine crept into the vault, starting at the edge of sound. The same note over and over again, rising—not in volume, but in presence.
The Gate was close.
[Proximity Warning: Primary Gate Signature detected] [Cognitive Contamination Index: 12% and rising]
The vault's eastern wall—what should've been stone—now rippled with that same luminous fracture he'd seen during the Severance. A shimmer, like oil on ice. But it pulsed. Not with light. With meaning.
Cael's pupils dilated. He blinked, and there it was—
—a lattice of rotating angles that didn't make sense. Spinning inside a space that couldn't exist. A thing both flat and deep, too still to be motion, too fluid to be real.
The Gate.
Its pressure weighed on the world like a migraine waiting to hatch. He felt it tugging at the air around him, adjusting. Remembering. Breathing.
And then it spoke.
No sound. No voice. Just understanding.
"You are not the first."
The thought crawled inside his skull like wet fingers. Cael staggered backward, colliding with nothing, because the floor had changed angles without warning. The pressure shifted again.
"You are the fracture."
He dropped to one knee, head swimming. The hallucinations came faster now.
Shapes. Spirals. An after-image of his mother standing on the threshold of the vault, backlit, face erased—smooth as uncut stone. Her voice was all vowels, twisted backward.
He grabbed at his belt and tore free the prayer shard—a palm-sized scrap of obsidian etched with a single glyph: The anchor.
He gritted it in his palm like a lifeline. Focus.
One breath. Then two. Then—
The Gate pulsed.
Something behind it laughed.
He moved without knowing how. His legs were his, but only barely. Each step felt distant—remembered instead of lived.
The pressure of the Gate receded slightly, but it never left. It watched.
The corridor curved downward. The stone shifted beneath his boots, soft and warm like a molted skin. He didn't ask why. He didn't want the answer.
The prayer shard trembled in his hand.
Ahead, the corridor opened into a half-buried antechamber. Smaller than the vault, but deeper. Colder. Older.
Bone dust covered every surface like frost. Along the walls—murals. Skeletons posed in slow-motion agony. Dozens. Hundreds. Bent backward in praise. Jawless skulls angled upward. Ribcages blooming outward like fossilized flowers.
At first, he thought they were carved.
Then one blinked.
The chamber breathed.
Not in rhythm. Not in pattern. But in a sick, staggered harmony. One ribcage lifted. Another sank. A femur rattled softly. Vertebrae cracked into chorus.
They were singing.
Not with voices. But with pressure.
The air vibrated with a single held note. Too low to be heard—only felt. His bones hummed with it. His thoughts wavered like candlelight in wind.
He stepped forward—and something copied him.
A shape, just outside the edge of the nearest mural. Humanoid. Motionless.
Until he moved.
Then it did too.
He lifted his arm.
So did it.
He twisted his wrist.
It lagged behind—but matched.
He froze.
The figure did not.
It took a step.
Then another.
Its silhouette emerged from behind a cracked pillar.
Him.
Same armor. Same tattered Citadel markings. Same broken prayer shard clutched in one fist.
But its face—its face was an echo. Waxen. Smooth. No features. Just skin stretched across memory.
Cael's breath hitched.
The figure tilted its head.
Then it ran.
Cael didn't move.
He couldn't.
Something in him—a thread, a root, a law—refused.
The figure standing across the bone-dusted chamber… wasn't him. Couldn't be. But every instinct screamed otherwise.
The posture was too familiar. The way the left knee bent inward, just slightly—old injury. The slant of the shoulders, crooked from years of carrying salvaged gear. Even the fragment bruising along the collarbone—he knew it. Had lived it.
Is this a hallucination? A mimic? Another fragment effect?
The Gate's whisper still clung to the back of his skull like a second voice. Like a memory echoing before it happened.
You are not the first.
Was this what the Gate meant? Some distorted reflection left behind by the Severance? A parallel self birthed by too many skipped realities?
He looked down at his hand—at the prayer shard still gripped white-knuckled in his palm. But it didn't ground him. Not now. The edges flickered. Glyph unstable. Like it didn't know which version of him to tether.
This figure—this thing—wasn't just copying his movements. It was predicting them.
What happens if it moves first?
What happens if I move wrong?
He felt his breath spiral. Thoughts looping.
A spiral.
A recursion.
A—
The figure twitched.
Cael flinched.
Too late.
The double was already running.
Straight at him.