The clock over the stove blinked 7:42.
Then again: 7:41.
And once more: 7:42.
Kael stared at it, a spoonful of bitter tea hovering halfway to his lips. He didn't blink. Didn't move.
The seconds ticked normally again—three, four, five. No sound. No hum from the fridge. Just stillness.
And then:
7:41.
Again.
He stood so quickly the chair scraped behind him. Liora looked up from her corner of the kitchen, eyes sharp but tired. "What now?"
"The loop's started."
"Loop?" she echoed, but Kael was already at the wall panel. He pressed three fingers to the faint glyph etched into the plaster, watching as it flared a dull green.
The overlay lit.
SAFEHOUSE STABILITY: 92%
TEMPORAL ECHO: ACTIVE
LOOP ANOMALY: RECURSIVE — LOCALIZED
Liora crossed her arms. "In plain words, Kael."
Kael's voice was low. "Something's trying to echo through the anchor."
She followed his line of sight to the glyph spiraling outward from the corner of the room — not one of his.
One of Senna's.
"Where is she?" he asked, sudden urgency cutting through the static.
"In her room," Liora said. "Said she had a dream she had to finish drawing."
Kael didn't run. He moved like a loaded circuit — all energy packed tight into motion.
⸻
He opened the door to her room quietly.
Senna sat on the floor cross-legged, charcoal smudged across her fingers and cheek. The wall behind her was covered in glyphs again — not large, not sprawling, but dense. Symbols stacked over symbols like a woven pattern, and in the center, one mark shimmered faintly.
She didn't look up. "The sky isn't holding still anymore."
Kael knelt beside her. "What do you mean?"
"In the dream," she said, tapping the center glyph with her fingertip, "the stars blink too fast. Not like twinkling. Like… they're trying to restart."
Kael reached out, his hand hovering inches from the mark.
He didn't touch it.
But he felt it — a pull in his chest, like the patchcode was coiling inward.
Repeating.
"Have you drawn this one before?"
Senna nodded. "In my head."
She looked at him, serious.
"Papa… it doesn't want to stay hidden anymore."
Kael's breath caught. "What doesn't?"
"The countdown."
He blinked. "Senna, there's no—"
And then the glyph pulsed once.
Numbers unfolded, not drawn, but embedded into the pattern.
03:19:57:12
Kael stared.
Three days. Nineteen hours. Fifty-seven minutes. And counting.
"What is this?" he whispered.
Senna whispered back.
"Something coming through."
⸻
Outside the apartment, unseen to anyone not synced with rollback residue, the air shimmered at the corners of the block.
Digital birds blinked in and out of existence. A local drone froze mid-hover, reversed six feet, and replayed its path.
An elderly neighbor dropped her groceries — the bag hit the ground, rebounded into her arms, and dropped again. Her scream echoed twice.
Reality had started folding.
And only those marked by rollback could feel the drift.
The lights in Aria's quarters buzzed overhead — not broken, not flickering. Just… pulsing.
She ignored it.
Too many things were pulsing lately. Time. Code. Memories she didn't know were hers.
The console in front of her spat warnings in triplicate. She bypassed each. Layered decryption wrapped her connection like a shroud, masking her location in a chain of false nodes.
She wasn't supposed to access Dominion Black Stack.
No guild leader was.
No one was.
But Kael's glyph trace wasn't normal. Not even close.
Not anymore.
She entered the trace string:
VARIN: SECTOR 12C — ROLLBACK ANCHORLING SPIKE
Results: 0
Override: Enabled
MATCH FOUND
SEALED FILE ACCESS — PROJECT ANCHORLING
Clearance Level: Dominion Origin Class
Audit Warning: Live Packet Trace Enabled
Continue? [Y/N]
She tapped Y.
The screen didn't open like it should.
It folded.
Panels broke apart like decaying glass. Words spilled in layers, non-linear. Aria's eyes narrowed as she fought to track meaning through entropy.
…initial test candidates proved unstable beyond rollback event threshold…
…three survived recursions, but only one maintained stable echo signature…
…designation S-13-VRN
…birth anomaly: rollback threads detectable pre-manifestation
…recommended action: monitor proximity to active anchors
…dangerous intersection if emotional sync exceeds system threshold
Aria froze.
That string.
S-13-VRN.
"Senna… Varin."
The girl wasn't affected by Kael's damage.
She was the recursive root.
This wasn't exposure. It was design.
She scrolled deeper. A security daisy-chain tried to reroute her access — too late.
One more page loaded.
Related node trace: Command Unit – A-8.R1A
Her breath stopped.
That was her own designation.
She wasn't just chasing this case.
She was part of it.
Aria leaned forward, heart pounding.
The file flickered.
WARNING: TRACE DETECTED
DOMINION DAEMON ACTIVE
PURGE INITIATED
"Damn it—"
She scrambled, fingers flying, capturing what she could. One image. One log line.
The rest disintegrated.
Her screen went black.
Then flared.
YOU WERE NEVER HERE.
Aria sat back. Sweat clung to her neck.
The saved file blinked in isolation. She opened it.
A child's silhouette — digital render, no features. But unmistakably small.
Down the spine, glowing glyphs.
Not Kael's patterns.
Not Dominion glyphs either.
Something older.
And above the image, stamped in red:
ANCHORLING SEED – S-13-VRN
SYNC PROJECTION: CRITICAL
ESCALATION PROTOCOL: REAPER-TIER
Aria whispered, "They didn't find her by accident."
They'd been waiting for her to bloom.
And Kael…
Kael had been the soil.
The lines hadn't moved.
Not on the wall. Not that Kael could see.
But the glow?
The glow had deepened.
What was once faint like a memory was now humming. It vibrated in the marrow of his arm. Behind his eyes.
The glyph was no longer just there.
It was near.
"Countdown," Kael muttered, kneeling. "You're counting down to something. But what?"
He touched the spiral's edge — the curve where Senna's crayon had darkened and sharpened into rollback script.
His palm buzzed.
Not pain.
Permission.
The glyph let him touch it.
Kael pulled back, breath caught. No glyph just "lets" anyone touch its root thread. That meant Senna hadn't drawn it. Not in the normal sense.
She'd cast it.
And whatever it was counting toward, it wasn't designed to be stopped.
Still, he tried.
Kael reached deep into the system, scraping together all the old rollback symbols he could remember. Ward-glyphs. Lockdowns. Stasis glyphs from the Aria days. Even half-corrupted Reaper-protocol junk code he'd seen buried in Dominion caches.
He wove a containment array over the glyph.
It held for three seconds.
Then a pulse beat outward — soft, like a breath.
And the containment melted.
Kael blinked. "No…"
He tried again.
This time slower.
Structured. Layered. Recursive.
He built a cage.
The glyph shifted.
It didn't fight the cage.
It adjusted with it.
His eyes went wide. "It's learning…"
Behind him, soft feet padded into the room.
"Papa?" Senna stood half-asleep, blanket trailing behind her. Her eyes glowed faintly in the dark.
"You okay, little star?" he asked gently.
She nodded, but her voice was dream-heavy. "It's almost done."
Kael froze. "What is?"
She looked past him to the wall.
"The gate," she said.
Then she turned and wandered back toward her bed.
Kael turned back to the glyph. His hands trembled now, not from fear — but from awe.
The spiral had shifted again.
It wasn't closing anymore.
It was unfolding.
The countdown wasn't a detonation.
It was an awakening.
He whispered, "What are you, Senna?"
And the glyph pulsed.
Once.
Then…
Zero.
The spiral widened, and the wall cracked—not with force, but with light. The paint, the plaster, the very atoms of the space bent outward as a third-dimensional glyph blossomed into the room.
It wasn't glowing.
It was lit from inside reality.
Rollback threads wove into the furniture, the floorboards, even Kael's skin.
And in the center?
A new symbol began to write itself.
One he didn't know.
One Senna hadn't drawn.
But it knew him.
And it was waiting.
The glyph writhed.
Not violently.
Not chaotically.
It was elegant. Spiraling outward, refracting rollback light like veins of crystal cracking through midnight glass.
Kael watched, stunned. All his training — all the guild manuals, forbidden protocol scrolls, even the hidden chants Aria once whispered about — none of it prepared him for this.
This wasn't a drawing. It wasn't even a system cast.
It was a living seal.
And it had noticed him.
A strand of light peeled from the central spiral. Thin as thread, sharp as wire, shimmering with rollback static.
Kael tried to back away.
Too late.
The thread leapt.
It struck his arm — right where the old rollback scar lived, the one he'd hidden beneath wraps and half-sleeves since the Ridge Forest Gate.
The moment it touched, the world inverted.
Kael collapsed.
Or maybe the floor fell.
Or maybe neither existed anymore.
The wall. The house. The air — all pulled into a swirl of recursion.
A memory —
No.
A collapse echo.
The rollback hit like drowning.
⸻
He was standing in his apartment.
But it was broken.
Wrong.
The ceiling sagged. Rain poured in through splintered boards. Static shimmered like fog, rising from cracked tiles.
The glyph was still there.
But burned. Inverted. Corrupted.
Its spiral was shattered — pieces missing, threads looping into dead ends.
A broken countdown.
A failed sync.
Kael moved — or the echo of him moved. His limbs dragged like underwater cloth.
Then he saw the toy.
Senna's toy — a stuffed moss-beast — lying by the hallway door.
Next to it…
Blood.
Dripping from the frame.
From fingers.
Liora's fingers.
Kael tried to scream.
And in the distance, he heard himself — another him — roaring like a man on fire.
Then everything blinked.
⸻
Reality snapped back.
Kael was lying on the floor, gasping. Light flooded his arm, but not from the wound.
It came from the new seal burned into his skin.
Not drawn.
Etched.
The lines weren't rollback code. Not exactly. They twisted too elegantly, looped too organically. They pulsed, yes — but not like timers or traps.
They pulsed like heartbeat.
He flexed his hand.
The seal responded — a ripple of light echoing up his forearm and vanishing near his collarbone.
Kael sat up slowly.
His scar… was gone.
In its place?
The living glyph.
Not static.
Not reactive.
Responsive.
A sigil.
One that had memory, will, and purpose.
And Kael knew — deep in the pit of his gut — that it hadn't come from him.
It had come from her.
Senna.
Somehow, she'd cast a glyph that reached into a timeline that no longer existed, pulled a broken thread from it, and used it to anchor a new one in him.
Kael whispered, "You saved something. Not just me. Something worse."
The seal pulsed once — and Kael heard the faintest whisper:
Not saved.
Unsealed.
Kael didn't speak.
Not even to himself.
The house was still. Liora was in the back, pretending not to watch. Senna — asleep. Probably. Hopefully. Kael didn't check.
He sat at the kitchen table with his arm rolled up, the mark glowing softly.
The sigil pulsed like something alive.
Each time his heart beat, the glow shifted — not brighter, but deeper. The lines rearranged in real time, recursive and precise. Kael had seen living glyphs before. None like this.
He activated a low-level scan — the kind Guild diagnostics used when testing for corrupted glyph-casters. The kind he was never supposed to run on himself.
The scan glyph hovered above his palm.
"Map," he whispered. "Decrypt pattern. Feed level zero."
The glyph blinked.
Processing...
Then —
ERROR. ANCHOR THREAD NOT FOUND.
ALT-TIMELINE DETECTED.
Kael stared. "Alt-timeline?"
He ran a deeper scan. This time, a lattice of light spread from the seal — unfolding like a blueprint made of starlight and string. It hovered in the air above his hand.
Not code.
Not exactly.
History.
But not his.
The lattice rippled and began to play.
A scene:
Kael alone in a corridor. Behind him — guild hall ruins. Ahead — Liora's body. His own voice echoed: "Why didn't I stop her?"
Flash.
Another:
Kael at a podium. Wearing a Dominion crest. Reading from a script with dead eyes. "Rollback Protocol is for the survival of humanity."
Flash.
Senna. Running through a hallway. A raid breach behind her — and no Kael in sight.
Then silence.
Kael gasped. The lattice trembled — and the sigil on his arm dimmed.
He pulled his hand back.
His pulse was erratic.
He hadn't just seen alternatives. He'd felt them.
What he could've been. What he might still become.
And threaded through each fragment was one consistent thing:
Senna. Dying. Lost. Alone. Missing. Fading.
In every failed timeline… she was erased.
But not deleted.
Buried.
Kael stared at the sigil.
The scan hadn't revealed a weapon.
It had revealed a vault.
A rollback-anchored, emotion-indexed, recursive thread vault.
Built not by Dominion.
But by a child.
By his child.
By Senna.
Using dreams.
Using memory.
Using him.
Kael whispered, "She's keeping pieces of the collapse. She's keeping… her own death."
The sigil pulsed in reply.
Almost like it was agreeing.
Or warning.
Kael stepped away. The air around him felt thinner.
He realized with sudden clarity: this wasn't a countdown anymore.
It was a map.
A trail of echoes.
Each thread pointing not just backward.
But forward.
The door creaked.
Kael turned.
Senna stood there, barefoot in her oversized sleeping shirt, blinking up at him.
She tilted her head.
"Papa," she asked, "are you reading the broken stars?"
Kael didn't speak.
He knelt, pulled her close, and whispered: "Not if I can stop them from breaking again."