Chapter 114
They crossed into the Shatterreach at dawn.
There was no clear boundary. One step placed them on cracked stone dusted with frost, the next on warm earth breathing out mist. The ground could not decide what it had been or what it wanted to become. Every footfall echoed twice, sometimes three times, as if multiple versions of the sound were arguing over which one was real.
Sang Sang felt it immediately.
Not pain—recognition.
Her heartbeat aligned with the fractured rhythm of the land, and the pressure in her chest eased for the first time in days. The Shatterreach did not resist her presence. It welcomed it.
"That's not comforting," Darius muttered, eyes darting as a ruined tower flickered between intact and collapsed states. "Nothing should feel this… friendly."
Lirien adjusted the sigils woven around her wrists. "It's not friendly. It's familiar. To her."
Kael kept his gaze forward, jaw tight. "Stay close. If any of you see yourselves doing something you haven't decided to do yet, do not follow it."
Darius frowned. "I don't like how specific that warning is."
They moved deeper.
The sky above them folded inward, layers sliding past one another like overlapping sheets of glass. In one layer the sun was rising. In another, it had already set. Shadows stretched and shrank in disagreement.
Sang Sang slowed.
Ahead, figures stood scattered across a shallow basin—dozens of them, frozen mid-motion.
"No," she whispered.
They were people.
Some wore armor she recognized from fallen sects. Others wore clothing from eras she had only seen in broken memories. A few were unmistakably future-born, their bodies threaded with technologies that hummed faintly even now.
All of them were dead.
But not decayed.
"They're preserved in divergence," Lirien said softly. "Moments that never resolved."
Darius swallowed. "Is that what happens when a timeline loses?"
Kael didn't answer.
Sang Sang stepped forward despite him reaching for her arm. The air shimmered as she approached the nearest figure—a young man with a cracked spear and terror frozen in his eyes.
Her vision split.
For an instant, she saw him alive, charging forward, shouting a name she didn't know. In another instant, she saw him retreating, wounded but breathing. In a third, she saw nothing at all.
All possible outcomes, denied resolution.
Her hands clenched.
"This place isn't a prison," she said. "It's a graveyard for choices that scared someone powerful."
The ground trembled.
A sound rolled across the basin—not a roar, but a resonance, like a bell struck far too hard.
Something was waking.
"Too late," Kael said. "We've been noticed."
The dead figures began to move.
Not smoothly. Not fully alive. They jerked as overlapping intentions pulled at them from different directions. Some took a step forward and backward at the same time. Others raised weapons that flickered between intact and shattered.
Darius drew his blade. "I'm guessing talking won't help."
One of the figures turned its head toward Sang Sang.
Its mouth opened—and three voices spoke at once.
"Anchor. Error. Catalyst."
The basin erupted.
They came from every side, not charging so much as collapsing inward, trajectories folding unnaturally. Darius met the first with a heavy slash, steel biting through unstable flesh that dissolved into drifting fragments of light.
"Don't let them touch you!" Lirien shouted, unleashing a wave of stabilizing force that locked several figures into a single state before shattering them.
Kael vanished into shadow, reappearing behind another attacker and driving his strike through its spine. The body froze, then split into multiple versions that disintegrated one by one.
But there were too many.
Sang Sang felt the pull again—doors slamming, rattling, begging to be opened. Each frozen corpse represented a decision denied. A future strangled before it could breathe.
She raised her hands.
The world resisted.
"Don't," Kael snapped, sensing it. "You don't know what you'll unleash."
"I do," she said, voice shaking. "And I accept it."
She stepped into the center of the basin.
Time warped violently around her, enemies freezing mid-strike as probability bent inward. Sang Sang closed her eyes and reached—not outward, but down, into the fracture itself.
She didn't try to fix it.
She listened.
Pain flooded her senses. Not physical—emotional. Regret, terror, rage, hope, all compressed into a single unbearable mass. These weren't monsters. They were people who had been denied the right to fail or succeed on their own terms.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
Then she chose.
She forced the Shatterreach to resolve.
Not into one outcome—but into many.
The basin exploded with light.
The frozen figures screamed—not in agony, but release. Some collapsed into dust. Others faded gently, expressions softening as they dissolved into nothing. A few—only a few—fell to their knees, gasping, suddenly, impossibly alive.
The backlash hit instantly.
Sang Sang dropped to one knee, blood splattering onto the fractured ground. Her vision tunneled, ears ringing as something deep inside her tore and rewove itself.
Kael caught her before she could fall fully. "You're burning yourself out."
She laughed weakly. "Better than letting them rot."
The remaining enemies were gone.
The basin lay silent, empty save for three figures kneeling in shock—survivors dragged into existence by force of will alone.
One of them looked up.
He was young, eyes sharp despite confusion, a jagged scar cutting across his cheek. "You pulled us through," he said slowly. "I felt it."
Lirien stared. "That's impossible."
Sang Sang met his gaze, exhausted but steady. "What's your name?"
"Jin Rui," he replied. "From a future that never reached its third year."
Darius let out a breath. "Great. Another complication."
Jin Rui's eyes shifted to Kael, then to the sky. His expression hardened. "They won't forgive this. The Observers. The Architects. Whatever name they wear now."
Kael stiffened. "You've seen them?"
"I died because of them," Jin Rui said. "Three times. This is the fourth."
The sky above the Shatterreach darkened, layers grinding together like tectonic plates. Far beyond sight, something vast recalculated.
Sang Sang pushed herself upright despite Kael's grip tightening. "Then let them come."
She looked around the broken land, at the scars left by stolen choices and unresolved lives.
"This place doesn't belong to them anymore."
The Shatterreach answered.
Not with resistance.
But with alignment.