Distrust was a cold poison, and Lyra could feel it pumping slowly through her veins.
She watched from the shadows, a predator in her own territory, her focus entirely on the man who had become her reluctant ally. Kaelen.
He was an enigma wrapped in a paradox, an archivist with the knowledge of a demon. And right now, he was doing something that terrified her more than any monster she had ever faced: he was talking to nothing.
She had seen him sit at the table, opposite an empty chair. For a moment, he just looked like a man resting his legs.
But then, his posture shifted. His head tilted as if listening, his eyes locking onto the empty space with an intensity Lyra had only ever seen in zealots gazing upon their gods.
His pale features contorted in a cascade of emotions—shock, understanding, fear, resignation. He whispered words she couldn't hear, gestured subtly at the empty air.
To anyone else in The Hatchery, he would look like a madman.
But Lyra had felt it. The moment Kaelen sat, an unnatural stillness had settled over that table. The air grew colder, thinner. It was as if the universe itself was holding its breath around that one empty chair.
She remained motionless, her hand gripping the hilt of her dagger so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
Her training in the Order had taught her to fight monsters of flesh and bone, to purge corruption that could be seen and touched. But how did one fight an invisible enemy waging a battle in a man's soul?
She was powerless, a guardian watching a plague she couldn't cure. Her faith, however broken, screamed that this was profane. A communion with that which should not be seen.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.
There was an almost imperceptible shimmer in the air before Kaelen, like heat rising from pavement on a summer day, and the feeling of "presence" vanished.
Kaelen shuddered, his body going slack as if a taut rope had been cut. He sat there for a moment, pale and sweating, the very picture of exhaustion.
That's when Lyra moved. Her patience had run out. The questions in her mind were a swarm of hornets. She needed answers.
She needed to know if her only ally was insane, possessed, or something far, far worse.
Emerging from the shadows, her approach silent and deliberate, she stopped at his table. Her face was a mask of steel, hiding the fear churning within her.
"So," she said, her low voice cutting through The Hatchery's murmur. "What kind of demon was that?"
Lyra's voice was an anchor dragging along the seafloor of his mind, pulling him back to reality.
He looked up, the echo of the Moderator's final words—my favorite anomaly—still ringing in his ears. Before him, Lyra was a fortress of suspicion.
His Read confirmed what his eyes already told him.
Entity: Lyra
Status: Suspicion (High), Concern (Moderate), Combat-Ready.
He couldn't blame her. From her perspective, he had just had an intense conversation with an empty chair.
Trying to explain the truth was going to sound like madness, but lying was no longer an option. Their alliance, fragile as it was, had to be built on the impossible foundation of his reality.
"It wasn't a demon," Kaelen said, his voice hoarse. "It was… worse. It was the system administrator."
Lyra's expression didn't waver. "Translate."
And so, Kaelen did. He translated the Moderator's digital concepts into the language of a fantasy world.
The "regional server of reality" became "the tapestry of this corner of the world." The "Paradox Hunters" became "predators that feed on the unraveling seams of existence."
And the "Reality Loop" became "a hiccup in time, a moment stuck on repeat like a scratched record, poisoning the world with its repetition."
As he spoke, he watched her variables. Her [Belief Level] fluctuated, starting at 15% (Skepticism) and climbing slowly as the details he provided aligned with the "wrongness" she herself felt in the world.
When he finished, she was silent for a long moment.
"So, this… janitor… gave you an order. Clear out a nest of temporal corruption, or he erases you himself."
"Exactly," Kaelen confirmed.
"And one of these soul-predators is being drawn to this hiccup in time."
"Yes."
"It's a suicide mission based on the word of a ghost only you can see."
"It's also our only option," Kaelen concluded.
Lyra looked at him, and the suspicion in her eyes was slowly replaced by a grim resignation. "I told you the world had loose threads. I just didn't know I'd met the weaver." She gave a single, sharp nod. "Alright. What's the plan?"
The speed of her acceptance surprised Kaelen, but he understood. Lyra was a woman whose faith in a divine system had been shattered. The idea that the world was, in fact, a literal system with rules, glitches, and janitors probably made more sense to her than to most.
The plan was simple and desperate. They left The Hatchery, the safe neutrality of its hall now seeming like a distant memory.
Back on the streets, Kaelen was no longer just avoiding danger. He was hunting. He extended his Read, not looking for people or objects, but for inconsistencies. He was looking for the stutter of time.
And as they neared the Textile District, he began to feel it.
It was subtle at first. A Read on a loaf of bread at a vendor's stall showed a [Bake Timestamp: 06:15], but a second later, it flickered to [06:14], then back to [06:15].
A pigeon took flight, and its [Flight Vector] seemed to jump a fraction of a second ahead and then correct itself.
They were tiny anomalies, rounding errors in reality's calculation, but they were getting more frequent, more obvious.
"This way," Kaelen said, his voice tense. "The static is getting stronger."
Lyra, in turn, was his shield. While Kaelen's attention was on the invisible world of code, hers was on the physical one. She noticed the watchman on the roof, the group of thugs forming at the end of an alley, the glint of steel that didn't belong on a merchant's belt.
She guided them through a maze of backstreets, avoiding conflict with an efficiency Kaelen could only admire. They were two halves of a single survival unit.
Finally, they reached the epicenter. An isolated sewer entrance in a forgotten part of the district. The static here was nearly overwhelming. Kaelen felt dizzy, feverish. The air around the entrance seemed to shimmer, reality struggling to maintain cohesion.
And there, etched onto the rusted iron grate, was the symbol the Moderator had described. A circle biting its own tail. The Ouroboros.
It wasn't a physical carving; it seemed burned into the very fabric of the code, a [Status: Temporal Anomaly] tag glowing only in his vision.
"This is it," he whispered, more to himself than to her.
"Then let's end this," Lyra said, her voice firm.
Kaelen reached out to touch the grate, to test its solidity. The moment his fingers were inches from the metal, he felt a strange pulling sensation, like dipping his hand into cold water.
His hand passed right through it.
There was no sound, no resistance. His hand simply phased through the iron as if it were an illusion, a projection of light.
He looked back, shocked, to share the discovery with Lyra.
She was standing beside him, exactly where she had been a second before. But her expression was different. There was a faint line of confusion on her brow.
"What are you doing just standing there?" she asked. "Were you about to say something?"
Kaelen's blood ran cold. Her question… it was the same one she'd asked a moment before. He checked his own memory, his Read of his own event log. No, she hadn't said that. He had only thought about turning to her.
He looked at Lyra's status notification. What he saw made his heart stop.
Entity: Lyra
Status: [Trapped at the Loop's Threshold - Iteration 1 - Resetting...]
Before he could fully process the information, Lyra's expression softened, her brow cleared, and she repeated the exact same question, in the exact same tone.
"What are you doing just standing there? Were you about to say something?"
He was inside. Within the paradox's reach.
But she was stuck at the threshold, her memory resetting every few seconds. He looked at his hand, still on the other side of the phantom grate, and then back at his
companion, trapped in a broken instant of time.
The Moderator had told him to enter. He just hadn't said he'd have to do it alone.