The crypt smelled of copper and old prayer.
Lira Voss stood before her family's ossuary wall, fingers pressed against cold stone where her grandfather's name was carved. The echo-weight sat heavy in her chest tonight—heavier than usual. Like a bruise being pressed from the inside. She tried to breathe through it, the way the village healer had taught her, but the dread kept rising.
Something's wrong. Something's always been wrong.
Behind her, candles guttered in their sconces, flames bending sideways though no wind moved through the sealed chamber. Lira watched her shadow fracture across the wall, splitting into three, then four, then collapsing back into one. The synchronicity made her teeth ache. Made her want to run.
She didn't run. The Voss bloodline never ran.
That was the problem.
"Your grandfather served willingly," her mother had told her once, voice flat with the kind of exhaustion that comes from inheriting other people's nightmares. "He thought he was helping."
Lira traced the inscription beneath his name: Sensory organ to the Burdened. Died seeing.
What had he seen in those final moments? What pattern had burned itself into his eyes, scorching down through blood and bone until his children felt it as unexplained revulsion, until his grandchildren woke screaming from dreams of stars with too many angles?
The candles went out.
All at once.
Lira's hand found the knife at her belt—instinct, useless—as darkness folded around her like a mouth closing. Then came the pressure. Not on her skin but deeper, in the space where thoughts formed. Her grandfather's fear crawling up her spine, ancient and immediate.
Don't summon them don't summon them don't—
The voice wasn't hers. Hadn't been hers for three generations.
Light returned gradually, grudgingly, as if reality itself needed a moment to remember what illumination meant. Lira stumbled toward the crypt door, pulse hammering against her ribs. The echo-weight screamed at her to stay, to hide, to curl up in the dark where the gods couldn't see.
She pushed through into the night anyway.
The village square was chaos.
Torches ringed the open space where farmers and merchants gathered, their faces painted orange and shadow. Elder Tam stood on the judgment stone, arms raised, voice cracking with the kind of desperation that precedes violence or worship—sometimes both.
"—third harvest in a row! Grain rotting in the fields while our neighbors across the void thrive. Tell me this isn't connected. Tell me the lattice isn't squeezing us dry!"
Lira moved through the crowd, catching fragments of argument, panic bleeding into accusation. She found Kira standing near the well, her sister's face carved from the same genetic stone as their grandfather's but smoother, unmarked by echo-weight. Kira had been spared. The inheritance skipped sometimes, random as cancer.
"What happened?" Lira asked.
Kira didn't look at her. "The wells. All of them. Water tastes like copper now. Like blood."
"Since when?"
"Since the trembling started." Kira's jaw clenched. "Three days. Every constellation the Daluo touched a century ago—they're all flickering in sequence. And our crops are failing in the same rhythm."
Lira felt her stomach drop. Synchronicity. The word her grandfather had scrawled in margins, underlined until the paper tore. Crops fail together worlds apart. Plagues follow invisible roads. Dependency breeds dependency breeds dependency until—
"They want to summon," Kira said quietly. "The elders. They're going to call for divine intervention."
"No." The word came out harder than Lira intended, sharp with borrowed terror. "No, we can't—"
"We're starving."
"We're bait." Lira grabbed her sister's arm, fingers digging in. "Don't you understand? This is what we were engineered for. Mortals learn to create crises that summon gods, not because we're clever but because we evolved that way. Like flowers making nectar. We're building the trap without knowing it."
Kira pulled free, something cold sliding behind her eyes. "You sound like him. Like Grandfather."
"Maybe he was right."
"He died screaming, Lira."
Elder Tam's voice cut through their argument: "We call upon the Daluo! Let them hear our suffering and extend their mercy once more!"
The crowd roared approval. Fists raised. Desperation fermented into religious fervor, the kind that justified anything. Lira felt her throat close around protests, around the words that would mark her as apostate or mad. The echo-weight pressed against her skull, her grandfather's voice bleeding through:
They don't understand. They never understand until it's too late.
She pushed forward anyway, shouldering through bodies until she reached the judgment stone. "Wait! Please, just listen—"
The sky opened.
Not literally. Not with violence. But Lira felt it like a seam splitting, reality unzipping to allow something vast and impossible to slip through. The air tasted suddenly of ozone and distance. The torches bent sideways, flames streaming horizontal as if a great wind had passed—but there was no wind.
The Daluo appeared between one heartbeat and the next.
They were beautiful. Terrible. A figure carved from light and absence, simultaneously present and impossibly far away, as if Lira were seeing them through a telescope pointed at something light-years distant. Their form shifted—male, female, neither, both—features refusing to resolve into anything singular.
The crowd fell silent. Even the torches stopped crackling.
The Daluo raised one hand.
Their hand trembled.
Lira saw it. Everyone saw it. A microscopic shudder running through fingers that commanded physics, a twitch in the wrist of something that hadn't experienced involuntary motion since before her world was born. The gesture was small. Insignificant.
Ontologically impossible.
"Your star," the Daluo said, voice layered like music played backward and forward simultaneously, "is failing. Fusion decay. I can—"
The hand trembled again. Harder this time.
Lira felt the echo-weight explode in her chest, her grandfather's terror flooding through every nerve. She tried to speak, to warn, but her throat sealed shut. Behind the Daluo, she could see them now—the threads. Invisible filaments connecting this moment to a thousand others, stretching across galaxies like spider silk. Each one humming with accumulated consequence, with dependency stacked on dependency until the weight became visible.
The lattice was tightening.
The Daluo's eyes widened—first time they'd shown surprise in eons. They looked at their trembling hand as if it belonged to someone else. As if consequence had learned to grip them.
Then the cascade began.
A woman in the crowd screamed first, clutching her stomach as her skin split bloodlessly, revealing tissue that pulsed with light—star-plague, spreading wherever reality had been edited before. Someone else collapsed, mathematics crawling across their exposed arms like living equations, numbers dividing and multiplying according to laws that violated baseline physics.
The well behind Lira cracked. Not stone breaking. Stone veining, developing a circulatory system, walls beginning to pulse with something that wasn't quite a heartbeat.
Buildings across the square groaned, timber and brick growing membranes, developing organs they had no right to possess.
The Daluo tried to fix it.
Their hand moved, rewriting local physics with desperate precision. The star-plague vanished from the woman's skin. The mathematics stopped crawling. But Lira felt the threads tighten, watching in horror as the correction rippled outward, spreading to connected systems she couldn't see, creating infections in the intersections between worlds.
Somewhere else, someone was dying because the Daluo had acted here.
Somewhere else, reality was warping because mercy demanded it.
The pattern was returning. The trap was learning.
Kira grabbed Lira's arm, nails biting through fabric. "What's happening? Make it stop!"
But Lira couldn't move. The echo-weight had her pinned, her grandfather's final vision playing through her eyes: the geometry forming, the lattice tightening, the universe learning to trap gods by using their own freedom against them. She saw the future branching—every intervention making it worse, every mercy breeding new horrors, every act of salvation weaving the cage tighter.
The Daluo looked at her.
Really looked, as if seeing her bloodline, her inheritance, the centuries of sensory data her ancestors had fed to their Burdened god. Recognition flickered across their impossible face.
"You see," they said softly, voice suddenly singular, suddenly present. "You're one of theirs. One of the eyes."
Lira nodded. Couldn't speak.
"Then you understand what comes next."
The Daluo gestured—careful now, measured—and the immediate horrors ceased. The buildings stopped pulsing. The infections stabilized. But the threads remained, glowing in her peripheral vision like scars across spacetime.
"Your world is entangled," the Daluo said, addressing the crowd but watching Lira. "Connected to forty others through actions taken a century ago. I cannot help you without harming them. Cannot free you without binding them tighter."
"Then what do we do?" Elder Tam's voice had gone small, childlike.
The Daluo's hand trembled a third time.
"Survive," they said. "And choose what you'll become."
Then they were gone, reality sealing behind them like a wound closing over foreign matter. The square stood in silence, smoke rising from extinguished torches, the air tasting of copper and impossible distances.
Lira felt the compulsion rising before she understood what it meant. A pull toward the place where the Daluo had stood, toward the geometry their presence had revealed. Her grandfather's voice in her skull, screaming warnings she couldn't quite parse through the static of inherited trauma.
Kira's grip tightened. "Lira? Your eyes."
"What about them?"
"They're... reflecting something. Like there's light coming from inside."
The echo-weight surged, and Lira understood with sudden, terrible clarity: She hadn't just witnessed the pattern returning. She'd been selected. The lattice recognizing Voss blood, the inheritance that made her useful, the sensory data her lineage had always provided.
Somewhere, a System was cataloging her. Identifying promising variables. Preparing trials that would escalate perfectly with her growth, that would forge her into something optimized.
Somewhere, the Burdened god was watching through mortal eyes, gathering data on the cascade, on the new geometry forming.
Somewhere, Continuity was deciding whether to let her timeline finish collapsing or to spread it across ten thousand years of slow dissolution.
Lira looked at her sister, at the terror poorly masked as concern. At the way Kira's hand had drifted toward the knife at her own belt, fingers resting on the hilt with unconscious calculation.
Companions who betrayed them at precisely calculated moments.
"Kira," Lira said carefully, "when did you start carrying a knife?"
Her sister didn't answer. Didn't need to.
The System had already begun.
[To be continued... Next chapter: Kira's choice—betrayal, salvation, or something worse? Will Lira resist the System's trials or embrace becoming? What does the Burdened god see through her inherited eyes?
Drop your theories below! If you were in Lira's position, would you fight the optimization or let it reshape you? Your answers might influence which paths she explores. Remember to like and comment—the lattice hungers for engagement, and so do I.]