The front door clicked behind him with a low hydraulic whirr, and the familiar scent of scorched onions and simmered garlic wrapped around Kael like a soft net. A lesser man might've wept. He just stood there, armor half-dissolved from the raid dismount, boots dripping half-set glyph mud on the tile, staring into the kitchen like a man watching a dream he wasn't sure he still deserved.
"Boots, Kael," his wife called, without looking. She was chopping something — peppers? Her sleeves were rolled up past the elbow, showing the faint shimmer of an old flame ward tattoo on her right wrist. Not active, not needed. Her magic days were over. But she wore the memory like a keepsake.
Kael obeyed wordlessly, thumbing the rune along his heel. The boots disassembled in pieces, folding into his pack with a soft hiss of compressed light.
A squeal hit him from the left.
"Papa!"
And then she was on him — arms flung around his waist, feet dangling, her oversized hoodie still stained with paint from something she'd been working on. He caught her out of instinct. Her weight was featherlight, but the impact nearly floored him anyway. Six years old. Tiny. Alive.
"I drew you fighting a demonwolf and you were on fire and Mama says not inside voice but I had to show you!"
She looked up at him, eyes wide, face smudged with orange chalk dust. The smile stabbed something under his ribs.
"You what?" Kael asked, forcing his mouth into a grin.
She darted back into the living room and returned with a crumpled sheet of paper. Crayon scribbles covered it in furious, erratic strokes. Her drawings always looked like they were trying to animate themselves. This one was… him, apparently — stick-figure Kael with glowing yellow arms, facing off against a way-too-big demonwolf with three heads and a speech bubble that said NOOOOO KAEL!
He crouched next to her. "This is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen."
She beamed. "That means it's good, right?"
"The best."
"Mm-hmm," she said, smug now. "Mama said it looked like you were glitching."
That got his attention. "Glitching?"
His wife answered from the kitchen, not turning around. "She means glowing. She keeps saying you glow after raids. Like, literally glow. Your left hand especially."
Kael's stomach clenched. He instinctively clenched that hand — the left. Nothing there now. No heat, no crackling system glyphs. Just sweat.
"Probably the light filters at the gate exits," he said too quickly. "Some weird refraction." He tried to laugh.
His wife turned. Her smile was small. "Sure. Just… maybe let her win one night without talking shop, okay?"
He nodded.
She came over, set a plate in front of him on the dining table — stir-fried noodles with some kind of synthetic pork, peppers, and rice. Efficient. Hot. Real food.
"Dinner at dusk," she said. "Like always."
Kael sat. The daughter climbed up next to him, swinging her legs over the bench seat. Her head barely cleared the edge of the table. Her little sketchpad hit the table next to her bowl.
He picked at the noodles, trying to taste the seasoning. He couldn't. All he tasted was static at the back of his throat. Residual system resonance? Maybe. Or maybe just guilt.
"Mid-tier today?" his wife asked.
"C-rank gate. West zone." He chewed. "Routine. Got a little weird at the end."
"Mm?"
"The timer lagged. Cooldowns snapped twice as fast."
She frowned. "Like a rollback bug?"
Kael hesitated. Then: "Just a glitch."
He didn't say that he patched it mid-raid, something that should've required a full dev override. He didn't say that the cooldown "hotfix" he executed somehow synced system tick rates to his own pulse. He didn't say that, for about five seconds, it felt like he was the system.
His daughter tugged his sleeve. "You were glowing, though. I saw."
He looked down. Her eyes were still on him — that same weird sharpness she'd had since she was three. Like she could see behind things. Between things.
"Only a little," she whispered. "Yellow glow. Left arm. Mama didn't see, but I did."
He reached for her sketchpad, flipping through it.
More demonwolves. Raids. Crayon scribbles of gates. And then — one page near the middle — a shape he didn't recognize. A half-circle with glyph loops spiraling outward. Three tiny dots in the middle. Radiating lines.
It wasn't one of his raid glyphs. But it looked like one. More elegant. More organic.
"What's this?" he asked.
His daughter leaned over, peering at the page. "You."
"Me?"
"Your arm. That's the shape it made before the wolves exploded."
His wife froze mid-bite.
Kael stared at the page. It was accurate. Uncomfortably so.
But no one should've been able to see that. He hadn't used a standard glyph. That was a glitched overlay, something that shouldn't have even manifested visually. Hell, he barely understood what it was.
And yet his daughter had drawn it like a memory.
The lights overhead flickered.
Just once. Barely a blink.
Then the holoscreen on the far wall stuttered — audio skipping a beat before continuing:
"—a routine press conference by Eclipse Dominion today confirmed that the west gate anomaly is fully contained—"
Kael's wife slowly set her chopsticks down.
"Everything okay?" he asked.
She didn't answer right away.
Then: "They said the west gate was stable this morning. But they issued a containment rollback notice this afternoon."
His chest tightened. "That's not public info yet."
"I know."
"How'd you—"
"I still get priority feeds," she said softly. "I watch. Because I have to."
Their daughter looked back and forth between them, mouth slightly open, a noodle hanging half out of her mouth.
Kael leaned back. "The raid's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine."
But the glyphs on the drawing still shimmered faintly. Faint enough that only he noticed.
His daughter didn't.
But her fingers — stained with chalk dust — were glowing.
A soft yellow light.
And Kael didn't breathe.
Kael's raid comm flickered to life at 2:11 a.m., three hours after he'd collapsed into bed beside his wife, her hand loosely curled against his side.
The screen hovered above his nightstand.
[DOMINION GATE OPS]
⛭ [ECLIPSE PROTOCOL – HIGH PRIORITY]
All mid-to-high tier operatives report to Zenith Spire. Code: CRIMSON FAILSAFE.
Below that, in red:
"Multiple breach patterns. Timer desync. Emergency rollback rejected. Containment unstable. Projection: city-wide casualties if unaddressed."
Kael blinked.
Rollback… rejected?
That wasn't a thing.
Even in critical cases, the System's automated rollback function acted as a last resort — not just for raids, but for preserving reality stability. Rejection meant only one of two things: an internal override… or interference.
He sat up. The glyphs on his left forearm — normally dormant unless mid-raid — flickered.
Then vanished.
Ten minutes later, he stood in the vertical transit capsule, watching the city blur beneath him. Zenith Spire loomed ahead — Eclipse Dominion's high command tower, gleaming obsidian veined with digital white.
Dozens of other operatives blurred past in parallel tubes, each isolated in their own streams of light. A few flicked glances toward Kael. Recognition flickered. No one spoke. Not at this tier.
He checked his arm again. Nothing. Normal.
But the feeling in his ribs hadn't left. A pressure. Like the system was breathing the wrong way.
"You're glowing again."
His daughter's voice echoed unbidden in his head. The drawing. The glyph that shouldn't exist.
Kael rubbed his temple.
Focus.
He stepped off the capsule deck into the spire's war chamber.
A live 3D map of the city pulsed in the center, red rings radiating out from the northwest quadrant. The gate breach looked like a spiderweb — multiple overlapping rifts where there should've been one. A few flickered in and out of visibility entirely.
Raid Commander Halden stood at the console, face half-lit by command runes. Sharp, humorless, guild-blooded.
"Kael," she said, not looking up. "Mid-B Class. Glad you're here. You're late."
"I'm early for someone who just got the call."
She ignored that. "You're with Fireteam Rho-7. Objective: destabilize breach cluster near Nevrin Park. We suspect a Class-A anchor beneath it. Not confirmed. Do not engage if it manifests."
"Understood."
She tapped a few glyphs. A file unfolded in the air.
"One more thing. This gate's not reading normal spawn cycles. Mob types are… inconsistent. The AIs are self-adapting. We think the core script was tampered with."
Kael frowned. "By who?"
She finally looked at him.
"We were hoping you'd tell us."
Before he could ask what the hell that meant, someone shouted from across the room:
"New reading—Gate 8 just shimmered. It phased out of the system grid for two seconds!"
Halden turned sharply. "What?"
"Visual feed confirms a hard flicker. We lost camera lock."
Kael turned to the live map. Gate 8 was—
Downtown. Near civilian zones.
No, no, no. That wasn't the original placement. That's not where this raid was supposed to trigger.
Another shout:
"Sector 8 just requested evacuation support. Civilians reporting visual distortions — long shadows, shapes in reflections."
Kael's blood froze.
Reflections.
He remembered something — from weeks ago. A glimmer in a raid mirror. Something that looked like a man in a cloak. But wrong. Too tall. The edges of him didn't move right.
"Shadows in glass."
That had been the system tag. A bug, supposedly.
"Commander," Kael said. "You said the rollback rejected?"
Halden nodded. "Failed three separate sequences. The auto-sync didn't initialize. System says… 'error: corrupt anchor protocol.' Whatever that means."
Anchor?
He felt the glyphs in his forearm throb. Not activate — throb.
That had never happened before.
"Kael." Halden's voice was sharper now. "You're burning system light. Is your arm flaring?"
He looked down. His left hand — faint glow. Pale yellow. Exactly like the sketch his daughter made.
"No. Must be a reflection from the command runes."
She narrowed her eyes, but didn't push.
Thirty minutes later, Kael dropped with Fireteam Rho-7 into Nevrin Park.
What he saw when he landed made his stomach turn.
The gate wasn't open.
It was flickering.
Phasing in and out, as if fighting itself.
And worse — it wasn't one gate.
It was three, overlapping, cycling between different biome environments. Ice, then desert, then black swamp. Each flash was faster than the last. Even the system couldn't keep up.
One of the other operatives cursed. "This isn't a raid breach. This is a damn codec desync. How the hell is this even live?"
Kael didn't answer.
Because something was watching them.
Not from inside the gates.
From above.
He turned slowly. Just above the edge of a flickering billboard, he saw it.
A figure. Cloaked. Seven feet tall. Motionless.
No face. Just a swirl of shadows.
Then — it stepped backward into the reflection of the building glass.
And vanished.
"Kael," Halden's voice hissed through the comm, "we've got a rupture incoming. Five seconds. Defensive positions. Now."
Kael moved.
But his thoughts were on his wife and daughter.
Sector 8.
That wasn't where the gate was supposed to be. But now it was. And rollback wasn't working.
He stared at his hand — now fully glowing.
Yellow.
Unmistakable.
Not just light.
A glyph.
New. Growing. Pulsing.
And not his.
The rupture didn't roar.
It hummed.
A low, sickening frequency, like an airlock depressurizing underwater — wrong and heavy and endless.
Kael's head snapped toward the skyline as the light changed.
Not from the gate in front of him.
From behind.
From Sector 8.
Where his wife and daughter were still sleeping.
A ripple of wind slammed through Nevrin Park, not physical — a data wave. The air snapped into a bright white shudder, flickering with overlay code, hexagon arrays scrambling like they'd been rewritten mid-load.
Raid sirens screamed.
His comm chirped once — then cut.
Then the scream started.
Not a siren.
Not digital.
Not human.
Kael turned toward the breach on instinct, expecting spawn mobs — wolves, crawlers, maybe a corrupted knight-type.
But what emerged wasn't logged in any guild bestiary.
It looked like a man. Or a statue of one. Cloaked in shadows, arms unnaturally long, fingers like silver needles. Its face was a mirror.
And in the mirror, Kael saw himself. Not current Kael — dying Kael. Body torn. Face pale. Glyphs cracked like glass.
Then the image changed.
His daughter.
Screaming. Eyes glowing.
The creature stepped forward.
Kael moved.
He didn't remember triggering the override glyph. Didn't remember rerouting his teleport permissions. He just willed himself toward the breach zone — Sector 8 — and the system, broken as it was, obeyed.
He skipped across the city in three jarring, illegal jumps — bypassing raid walls, breaking instance boundaries. Each jump bled light from his left arm.
By the time he landed four blocks from home, his forearm looked like it had been carved by a drunk god — glowing runes of no known language, sparking mid-air with corrupted light.
The street was gone.
Buildings half-vanished into nothing. Sidewalks looped in recursive geometry. Lightposts stretched like pulled taffy. A tree burned in complete silence.
And above it all — the gate.
Sector 8's gate was supposed to be stable.
It was now a sky-wide tear in space — a jagged vertical wound pulsing with every biome at once.
He saw trees, desert, a frozen waterfall hanging sideways, chunks of a collapsed dungeon, a cathedral made of screaming glass — all rotating behind the veil like a broken slideshow.
And the Reapers were stepping through.
Not one.
Not two.
Dozens.
No gate boss. No countdown. No spawn rhythm. Just chaos, bleeding through unchecked.
Kael ran.
—
His house was still intact.
Somehow, miraculously, their building hadn't collapsed. Not yet.
Kael bolted through the front entry, shielded his body as debris rained from above, and kicked in the apartment door.
His wife was dragging their daughter down the hallway, one arm clutching a glowing kitchen knife — enchanted from the old days. Her eyes widened as she saw him.
"Kael—?"
"MOVE!"
He caught their daughter mid-step, tucking her against his shoulder. Her tiny hands clutched his chest. He felt her heartbeat. Real. Alive.
"Raid breach," he rasped. "No rollback. It's not a gate. It's everything."
"I saw them," she whispered.
He looked down. "What?"
"In the window," she said. "I saw me. But not me. I was glowing. I was screaming."
His wife grabbed his arm — the left one. She recoiled. "You're—Kael, your skin—"
It wasn't skin anymore.
It was glyph-glass.
Yellow veins ran under translucent panels, pulsing like an overclocked circuit. The glyphs were spreading. Responding to him. Or to her.
Another tremor hit the building. The walls flexed like fabric. The kitchen cracked in half.
He pulled them toward the stairwell. "We have to get underground. Basement's reinforced—"
But the stairwell was gone.
Replaced by a hallway he didn't recognize.
Black stone. Velvet floor. Endless.
He froze.
This wasn't a system bug.
It was a choice.
Made by something watching them.
"Kael," his wife said, voice shaking. "What's happening to our city?"
And then—
The wall behind them ripped open.
A Reaper — the same one — stepped into the room. Slowly. Deliberately.
Kael moved between it and his family.
The Reaper tilted its head.
Its mirror face glitched.
Now it showed Kael again — but this time, not dead.
Gone.
The image was his wife and daughter kneeling in the rubble. Alone.
And then the Reaper lifted one hand and pointed—
At the child.
Kael didn't think.
He triggered a manual patch on his raid cooldowns — something only devs could do. He grabbed a line of system code and snapped it, reversing the Reaper's aggro logic.
The room blinked.
The Reaper staggered.
And then it screamed.
The scream broke the windows. The mirrors. The lights.
Kael's glyphs flared, lighting up the entire room.
He lunged.
Fought.
Slashed. Screamed back.
Killed it.
The Reaper dissolved into static.
He turned—
His wife was bleeding from the side.
A silver shard in her ribs.
The child was sobbing.
"Nonono—no—" Kael dropped to his knees beside her.
Her breathing was ragged.
She reached up. Touched his cheek.
"You did…glow."
Her eyes closed.
And the glyphs on Kael's arm surged.
He turned.
Another Reaper had stepped into the hallway.
This one didn't wait.
It lunged at the girl.
Kael reached for her—
But the world fractured.
The hallway became a gate.
The air snapped.
She screamed—
And vanished.
Gone.
Nothing.
—
Kael stood there.
Alone.
In the rubble of his home.
Holding his wife's body.
Blood on his chest.
Glyphs cracked.
System broken.
And he screamed.
So loud it didn't sound like a man anymore.
Just noise. Pure. Ripping.
The glyphs began unraveling.
The sky opened.
Something ancient looked down.
And whispered in binary:
"Rollback Error: Anchor Rejected."
The rupture didn't roar.
It hummed.
A low, sickening frequency, like an airlock depressurizing underwater — wrong and heavy and endless.
Kael's head snapped toward the skyline as the light changed.
Not from the gate in front of him.
From behind.
From Sector 8.
Where his wife and daughter were still sleeping.
A ripple of wind slammed through Nevrin Park, not physical — a data wave. The air snapped into a bright white shudder, flickering with overlay code, hexagon arrays scrambling like they'd been rewritten mid-load.
Raid sirens screamed.
His comm chirped once — then cut.
Then the scream started.
Not a siren.
Not digital.
Not human.
Kael turned toward the breach on instinct, expecting spawn mobs — wolves, crawlers, maybe a corrupted knight-type.
But what emerged wasn't logged in any guild bestiary.
It looked like a man. Or a statue of one. Cloaked in shadows, arms unnaturally long, fingers like silver needles. Its face was a mirror.
And in the mirror, Kael saw himself. Not current Kael — dying Kael. Body torn. Face pale. Glyphs cracked like glass.
Then the image changed.
His daughter.
Screaming. Eyes glowing.
The creature stepped forward.
Kael moved.
He didn't remember triggering the override glyph. Didn't remember rerouting his teleport permissions. He just willed himself toward the breach zone — Sector 8 — and the system, broken as it was, obeyed.
He skipped across the city in three jarring, illegal jumps — bypassing raid walls, breaking instance boundaries. Each jump bled light from his left arm.
By the time he landed four blocks from home, his forearm looked like it had been carved by a drunk god — glowing runes of no known language, sparking mid-air with corrupted light.
The street was gone.
Buildings half-vanished into nothing. Sidewalks looped in recursive geometry. Lightposts stretched like pulled taffy. A tree burned in complete silence.
And above it all — the gate.
Sector 8's gate was supposed to be stable.
It was now a sky-wide tear in space — a jagged vertical wound pulsing with every biome at once.
He saw trees, desert, a frozen waterfall hanging sideways, chunks of a collapsed dungeon, a cathedral made of screaming glass — all rotating behind the veil like a broken slideshow.
And the Reapers were stepping through.
Not one.
Not two.
Dozens.
No gate boss. No countdown. No spawn rhythm. Just chaos, bleeding through unchecked.
Kael ran.
—
His house was still intact.
Somehow, miraculously, their building hadn't collapsed. Not yet.
Kael bolted through the front entry, shielded his body as debris rained from above, and kicked in the apartment door.
His wife was dragging their daughter down the hallway, one arm clutching a glowing kitchen knife — enchanted from the old days. Her eyes widened as she saw him.
"Kael—?"
"MOVE!"
He caught their daughter mid-step, tucking her against his shoulder. Her tiny hands clutched his chest. He felt her heartbeat. Real. Alive.
"Raid breach," he rasped. "No rollback. It's not a gate. It's everything."
"I saw them," she whispered.
He looked down. "What?"
"In the window," she said. "I saw me. But not me. I was glowing. I was screaming."
His wife grabbed his arm — the left one. She recoiled. "You're—Kael, your skin—"
It wasn't skin anymore.
It was glyph-glass.
Yellow veins ran under translucent panels, pulsing like an overclocked circuit. The glyphs were spreading. Responding to him. Or to her.
Another tremor hit the building. The walls flexed like fabric. The kitchen cracked in half.
He pulled them toward the stairwell. "We have to get underground. Basement's reinforced—"
But the stairwell was gone.
Replaced by a hallway he didn't recognize.
Black stone. Velvet floor. Endless.
He froze.
This wasn't a system bug.
It was a choice.
Made by something watching them.
"Kael," his wife said, voice shaking. "What's happening to our city?"
And then—
The wall behind them ripped open.
A Reaper — the same one — stepped into the room. Slowly. Deliberately.
Kael moved between it and his family.
The Reaper tilted its head.
Its mirror face glitched.
Now it showed Kael again — but this time, not dead.
Gone.
The image was his wife and daughter kneeling in the rubble. Alone.
And then the Reaper lifted one hand and pointed—
At the child.
Kael didn't think.
He triggered a manual patch on his raid cooldowns — something only devs could do. He grabbed a line of system code and snapped it, reversing the Reaper's aggro logic.
The room blinked.
The Reaper staggered.
And then it screamed.
The scream broke the windows. The mirrors. The lights.
Kael's glyphs flared, lighting up the entire room.
He lunged.
Fought.
Slashed. Screamed back.
Killed it.
The Reaper dissolved into static.
He turned—
His wife was bleeding from the side.
A silver shard in her ribs.
The child was sobbing.
"Nonono—no—" Kael dropped to his knees beside her.
Her breathing was ragged.
She reached up. Touched his cheek.
"You did…glow."
Her eyes closed.
And the glyphs on Kael's arm surged.
He turned.
Another Reaper had stepped into the hallway.
This one didn't wait.
It lunged at the girl.
Kael reached for her—
But the world fractured.
The hallway became a gate.
The air snapped.
She screamed—
And vanished.
Gone.
Nothing.
—
Kael stood there.
Alone.
In the rubble of his home.
Holding his wife's body.
Blood on his chest.
Glyphs cracked.
System broken.
And he screamed.
So loud it didn't sound like a man anymore.
Just noise. Pure. Ripping.
The glyphs began unraveling.
The sky opened.
Something ancient looked down.
And whispered in binary:
"Rollback Error: Anchor Rejected."
The first breath came like drowning in reverse.
His lungs didn't fill — they downloaded.
Kael's eyes snapped open.
No rubble.
No Reapers.
No blood.
Just the soft, early light of morning leaking through half-open curtains.
His apartment. Unbroken.
Ceiling fan humming.
Distant kettle whistle from the kitchen.
He sat up too fast. The blanket tangled around his legs.
He fell sideways, gasping.
Felt for the floor.
It was solid.
His forearm — clear.
No glyphs.
No fractures.
No bleeding light.
But the memory was still there. Like a scar burned into thought.
The scream. The collapse.
Her blood on his hands.
The look on his daughter's face as she vanished into static.
The Reaper's finger pointing.
The glyphs.
Kael staggered to his feet.
There — on the wall. The family photo.
Still intact.
Still framed.
He turned—
And the bedroom door cracked open.
"Papa?"
Her voice.
Not static.
Not memory.
Real.
She was wearing the same oversized hoodie. Crayon on her cheek. One sock. Hair a warzone.
Kael fell to his knees.
She blinked at him. "...Did you fall out of bed?"
He reached for her like he didn't believe she was solid.
"Hey…" she said, slowly stepping forward. "Are you okay?"
He touched her cheek. Warm.
She made a face. "You're crying."
He was.
He couldn't speak.
Behind her, his wife's voice floated in from the kitchen:
"Kael? You up? I swear if you forgot today's your shift—"
She walked in, holding a cup of tea, mid-complaint.
She saw him kneeling.
Crying.
Holding their daughter.
And her words froze.
"Kael?" she whispered.
Kael looked up.
And saw them both.
Whole. Breathing. Unaware.
He broke.
Not with sound. Not with rage.
But with relief so deep it hurt.
His wife crossed the room and crouched beside him.
He pulled them both into his arms, holding on like they might vanish again.
"What happened?" she whispered.
Kael could barely speak.
"I saw it," he rasped. "You died. Both of you. I tried to stop it but… I couldn't. I couldn't—"
She didn't flinch.
Didn't question.
She just whispered back, "I'm here."
And then their daughter wriggled between them, mumbling:
"Too early to cry. I didn't even say good morning yet."
Kael pulled back, just enough to look at her. "Say it now."
She smiled, sleepy and sideways. "Good morning, Papa."
His voice cracked. "Good morning, Senna."
Liora looked at him sharply — her name on his tongue like a spell he hadn't spoken in years.
He turned to her slowly.
"Liora," he whispered.
She blinked. "Kael… how do you sound like you haven't said that in a lifetime?"
"I haven't."
Not in that timeline.
She reached up and touched his cheek.
And he swore, then and there, as his glyph pulsed beneath his skin—
"Not this time. Not ever again."
[SYSTEM LOG: ROLLBACK COMPLETE]
[ANCHOR: STABLE – VARIN-KAEL]
[DEBT: PERSISTENT – MONITORED]
[USER MEMORY: RETAINED]
[VOW LOGGED]
"For Liora and Senna."