The glyph wall hummed like a heartbeat.
Each pulse slower. Dimmer.
The delay field was dying.
Kael stood near the front door, bag slung over his shoulder — not much inside. A wrapped medical kit, Senna's notebook, two water filters, a shard of nullstone. Bare essentials.
Liora leaned against the wall, arms tight around herself. Her breath was steady, but her eyes betrayed her — they kept flicking to Senna.
Senna knelt beside the glyph wall, crayon in hand. She was quiet, but not afraid.
Focused.
Kael checked the time again.
00:02:14
LOOP BREAK IMMINENT
His HUD jittered. Already losing sync. Dominion's veil was beginning to thin.
He crouched beside Senna. "We'll have to run as soon as it drops. Where does the exit thread go?"
She didn't answer right away.
Then she pointed.
It wasn't a normal glyph.
More of a sketch. Incomplete curves, unclosed spirals. An open form.
Kael frowned. "That's not anchored."
Senna smiled. "Not yet."
SYSTEM QUERY: DESTINATION INVALID
THREAD: CORRUPTED
ACTION: REJECTED
Kael's stomach dropped. "Senna—"
She reached up and, without hesitation, added a single line.
A thin, swooping curve.
The glyph blinked. Once. Twice.
THREAD STABILIZED
NAME: [NULL/NODE/ANCHOR]
DESTINATION: PATCH CORRIDOR — UNSAFE
STATUS: PROCEED?
Kael stared.
"Where did you learn this?" he whispered.
Senna shrugged. "It came to me. Like the others."
Behind them, Liora whispered: "Thirty seconds."
The glyph lit up — a pale door in the wall.
Kael looked at Senna. Then Liora.
Then stepped forward.
"Stay close."
The moment his palm touched the mark, the wall split.
Not into a tunnel.
Not a gate.
Something… between.
It wasn't reality on the other side.
It wasn't anything.
The world twisted — light becoming thought, ground becoming breath, edges bleeding like watercolors.
They stepped into a corridor of broken glyphs, floating threads, and glitching air. Patches of memory floated past like lanterns — snapshots caught in the rollback.
Kael saw the wolf gate. Aria's blade. The first time Senna called him "Papa."
Then it was gone.
Senna clutched his hand. "Don't talk loud," she whispered.
"Why not?"
She looked up at him.
"Because it hears."
Kael froze.
"…What does?"
She didn't answer.
Further down the corridor, Liora stumbled.
Kael turned — she was staring at something. Pale light washed over her face.
He followed her gaze.
A memory fragment.
Kael, slumped against a tree, bleeding out. Dominion forces closing in.
Liora, screaming his name. Holding his face.
He remembered this.
He'd died.
That timeline had folded.
And yet—here it was.
Perfect. Preserved. Like a ghost.
Liora stepped back, shaking.
"Keep moving," Kael urged. "It's not real."
But his voice wavered.
Because behind that memory…
Was another.
Senna.
Alone.
Drawing glyphs in an empty apartment.
And Kael wasn't there.
The corridor trembled.
A new pulse rolled through — not rollback.
Not glyph.
Something else.
A tear opened in the side of the corridor — black static, twitching at the edges.
Senna flinched.
Kael grabbed her. "Run. Now."
The family sprinted down the corridor — spirals folding around them, reality glitching at the edges.
The static followed.
Not fast.
But not far.
They ran.
Not through space, not through time — but through something stranger. The patch corridor twisted and folded behind them, the rollback threads unraveling at the edges.
And always, just behind, the static crawled.
Not fast. But inevitable.
Kael's boots struck nothing. There was no ground. Only the illusion of one — threadlight stretched thin to give the body something to believe in. Without it, they might float, fall, or unravel entirely.
He could feel it now — the cost of walking in a space not meant for living things.
Each step scraped away a layer of him.
Ahead, the corridor narrowed. Spirals collapsed inward, and the shimmering path broke into floating shards.
And beyond them — the end.
A wall of pure threadglass. Smooth. Silver. Waiting.
And blank.
Kael skidded to a stop.
The "gate" shimmered, its surface unreadable. Not closed… but not open either.
"No anchor glyph," he muttered. "No exit."
He raised his hand, flicked through system overlays, tried to manually override.
THREAD STATUS: LIMINAL
EXIT: DENIED
GLYPH: UNWRITTEN
ERROR: DESTINATION NOT AUTHORED
Liora gasped behind him. "What does that mean?"
"It means—" Kael's jaw clenched. "There is no gate. Not yet."
The static drew closer. Senna pressed into her mother's side, trembling.
But only for a moment.
Then she pulled away.
Stepped forward.
And lifted her hand.
Kael blinked. "Senna—what are you—"
"It's not locked," she whispered. "It's waiting."
Her fingers moved through the air — not touching wall, not using charcoal, not even summoning the system glyph menu.
She just… drew.
Lines looped from her fingertips like ink on invisible paper. Elegant. Fluid. Not anything Kael recognized.
Not any patch format.
This wasn't a rollback key.
It was a creation.
Kael's breath hitched. "She's not using stored code…"
Liora whispered, "She's inventing it."
The glyph formed — wild and graceful. Unrestrained by logic. It shimmered with a color Kael didn't have a name for. And then…
It stopped.
One final stroke missing.
Senna turned to Kael.
"I need your hand."
He gave it without thinking.
She placed his palm at the center of the glyph.
And drew the last line across him.
It hurt.
But not like pain.
More like opening a door in a room he didn't know he'd been locked in.
The glyph flared.
GLYPH ACCEPTED
GATEWAY AUTHORIZED
AUTHOR: UNREGISTERED
NAME: [SENNA VARIN]
ACCESS GRANTED
The threadglass door cracked down the middle.
Light poured through.
Behind them, the corridor collapsed.
The static screamed.
Kael grabbed Liora. "Go!"
They ran.
Right before stepping through, Kael glanced back.
Just once.
And he saw it.
A figure, deep in the static.
Tall. Wrong. Watching.
Not following.
Just waiting.
For the next opening.
He stepped through the door.
And the world dissolved.
The light swallowed them.
No sound. No pain. Just transition.
Kael stumbled forward, boots crunching against rough ground. Not threadlight. Not data.
Soil.
Real, textured, messy terrain.
He looked up.
The sky above flickered — glitching between dusk and dawn, as if caught between system updates. Buildings sagged inward like broken teeth. A raid biome, long abandoned.
His breath caught.
"I know this place," he whispered.
Liora staggered beside him, holding Senna close. "Where… are we?"
Kael turned slowly.
It hit him like a blade to the ribs.
"This is Ridgepoint Six. The canyon region. It collapsed during the third rollback wave… two years ago."
Liora frowned. "Collapsed? As in—"
"Gone. Wiped. Erased from the grid. There was a fight… one of the anchor lines failed. I—"
He stopped.
He remembered dying here.
Alone.
But this time… he wasn't.
Senna looked around, wide-eyed. "It feels quiet. Like… before thunder."
Kael forced himself to move. The terrain here was unstable — still echoing false weather patterns and faded monster spawn points.
But one thing stood out.
A structure.
Half-shielded. Partially hidden inside a broken cliff geometry — as if someone had used raid debris to build a pocket shelter. It shouldn't be there.
Kael stepped inside.
It was a shelter. Barely.
Solar panels scavenged from guild gear. A lightless screen connected to nothing. A table. Some cans. Water filters. Scrawled paper maps with old raid layouts and anchor points marked in red.
And on the far wall…
A message.
Chalk.
Two words:
WELCOME BACK, KAEL.
Kael stopped breathing.
Liora whispered, "You've… never been here."
"I have," he said slowly. "But not this me."
Senna wandered to the far shelf. She picked up something wrapped in cloth. "Papa."
Kael opened it.
A notebook. Bound in real paper — old, weathered, smudged.
He flipped it open.
Glyph sketches.
Patch fragments.
Annotations in a handwriting… not his. But so close it made his hands shake.
One margin note read:
"If the next me finds this: the glyph isn't static. It grows. Watch for the spiral. She'll know what it means."
Kael sat down hard.
There had been another Kael.
Another loop.
Another failure.
And he'd left breadcrumbs.
Liora placed a hand on his shoulder. She didn't speak. She didn't have to.
Kael stared at the last page of the notebook.
A final glyph, unfinished.
Identical to the one Senna had drawn on the wall days ago.
The safehouse didn't breathe.
It hummed.
Kael could feel it now — beneath the dust and debris, a low thrumming, like a heart behind the walls. He paced the space slowly, fingers trailing the chalk lines on the walls, some familiar, others deeply wrong.
Senna sat cross-legged, notebook open on her lap, mirroring the glyphs she'd seen. Her pen moved on its own rhythm now — faster than before.
Liora sifted through a pile of canvas near the rear wall. She pulled something out and froze. "Kael…"
He turned.
She held a mirror.
Except it wasn't glass. Not anymore.
It was… translucent. But not reflective. The surface shimmered like corrupted UI code — rolling static with rollback bleed flickering through every second.
Kael stepped closer, heart hammering.
As he touched it, the mirror jerked — then locked still.
And showed himself.
A version of him. But not now. Not this timeline.
His reflection stood alone in the Reaper field. Screaming.
Then it cut.
Another version.
Kael collapsed, glowing cracks spreading up his neck, a Reaper towering over his body.
Cut again.
A third Kael — calm, older, etched with glowing marks, standing in a chamber of floating glyphs. Senna beside him, glowing too.
Kael's hand trembled. "These are… timelines. Branches."
Liora whispered, "Are they real?"
"I think they were."
Senna approached, eyes wide. "That's not all."
"What do you mean?" Kael asked.
She pointed at the mirror.
It flickered again.
Glowing eyes emerged from the static — not Kael's. Not the Reaper's. Something else.
No face. No mouth. Just eyes that understood.
The hum deepened.
Kael stepped back instinctively.
"What is that?" Liora asked, hand going to Senna's shoulder.
"I don't know," Kael muttered. "It's not from a loop."
Senna's voice was eerily calm. "He's from outside."
The mirror cracked.
A fracture of white shot down the center — rollback energy bleeding outward like a virus.
Then the entire surface went black.
The hum stopped.
The temperature dropped five degrees instantly.
No more movement.
No more glyphs.
Just a dead mirror.
Kael stared at the glass, his voice barely audible.
"…someone's been watching us."
The mirror hadn't just cracked.
It had gone dead.
The rollback hum that filled the room — the quiet undercurrent of static and time distortion — was gone, like a current cut at the source. For the first time since entering the safehouse, the room was quiet.
Kael's breath fogged in the chilled air. No one moved.
Senna stared at the black glass like it might come alive again. Liora stood with her back against the wall, arms crossed tightly.
"That thing," Liora finally said, her voice clipped. "That wasn't from here. It wasn't part of the system."
Kael nodded.
"No Reaper moves like that. No rollback trace acts like that. It saw us."
"It didn't just see," Senna said. "It… knew."
Liora turned sharply. "Then we leave. Now. This place isn't safe anymore."
Kael hesitated.
The wall of glyphs behind him still pulsed faintly — the only thing in the room reacting. Not to the mirror. To them.
"Kael," Liora pushed, "We don't even know who left this place. Or which you."
Kael said nothing.
That's exactly why he couldn't leave.
The versions of himself in the mirror — screaming, dying, surviving — they hadn't appeared randomly. They were windows. Warnings. He couldn't look away from that and pretend the answers weren't here.
"I think the glyphs are more than messages," Kael murmured.
Senna stood slowly and pointed to one corner of the wall. "They're a map."
Liora blinked. "What?"
Kael's eyes scanned the spiraling layers of symbols. "She's right. These aren't normal activation glyphs. They're sequences. Layered logic. Nested commands."
"A map to what?" Liora asked.
"To what happens next," Senna said.
Kael's mind raced. He saw the three options in front of him — a literal decision tree:
Leave. Abandon the safehouse and hope they could outrun whatever was watching.
Stay. Decode the glyphs and risk drawing more attention.
Force a loop. Trigger a rollback event manually and see who — or what — responds.
Each branch had a cost.
He made his choice.
"We stay."
Liora's fists clenched. "Kael—"
"I'll keep the failsafe ready." He raised his palm. A patch-glyph shimmered faintly in his skin — incomplete, but primed. "If anything goes wrong… I trigger a loop."
Liora bit back her fear. She trusted him. But her eyes held the same fear they had the night they first ran — the night the system had killed her and he'd dragged time backward just to hold her hand again.
Senna moved to the wall, notebook in one hand, charcoal in the other. "They aren't all your glyphs," she said to Kael. "Some are mine. Future ones."
Kael stepped beside her.
Side by side, father and daughter began decoding the glyph-wall.
As they worked, one symbol flickered near the center — slow, uncertain.
Then… it changed.
It wasn't one of theirs.
It was writing back.
The safehouse felt like it was holding its breath.
Senna's chalk scraped gently against the stone, duplicating one of the glyphs in her notebook. Kael knelt beside her, eyes flicking between the wall and her notes, drawing connections between their forms, comparing them to known rollback logic patterns.
These glyphs weren't simple instructions. They were records. Fragments from looped timelines, frozen as complex symbols — each one like a timestamped scream etched in light.
"I think these are keys," Senna whispered. "Like… parts of something bigger."
Kael nodded. "A ciphered network. Each glyph activates only if the timeline matches."
He traced a spiral with one finger — one of the ones he hadn't drawn. His skin tingled.
"Some of these… weren't made by human hands."
Senna looked up. "Then who—"
The glyph pulsed.
Kael jerked back.
Not like before — not a static echo. This time the lines moved, subtly at first, but deliberate. The spiral rethreaded itself at the center. The outer bands shimmered.
Senna gasped. "It's rewriting."
Kael's hand hovered near the emergency glyph burn. He didn't activate it.
Not yet.
The wall etched itself one line at a time.
Three horizontal dashes. A diagonal. A mirrored curve.
Senna stared. "That's… that's a recursion key. It's… Kael, it's your code."
"No," Kael said quietly. "It's not. Not exactly. It's… too clean."
The line finished drawing.
A full sentence.
DO NOT TRUST ME.
Kael's heart kicked into his ribs.
"What the hell does that mean?"
Senna whispered, "Who's me?"
Before either could answer, a second glyph blinked into life just above it. Faster this time. The lines didn't wait — they burned in.
Another sentence.
ONLY ONE OF US MADE IT OUT.
Kael stood still as stone. "It's a message."
Senna's voice trembled. "From another you?"
"Or something pretending to be."
They turned to face the wall together, glyphs glowing brighter now. Like the mirror before — they weren't just watching.
They were being watched back.
A third line etched itself between the first two.
Backwards.
As if mirrored from the other side.
Kael read it slowly, out loud.
"You have forty-seven hours."
The room went completely silent.
Even the hum of the glyphs paused — like the house itself was listening.
Kael felt it like a weight inside his chest:
This wasn't a message from a stranger.
This was from a version of him that had already failed.
And it wasn't just a warning.
It was a countdown.