Two years had passed since I was sent to the Prison World.
In the first few months, I tested its physical limits.
I died thousands of times.
Some deaths were planned. Others were accidents. Unstable spells exploded in my hands, barriers collapsed onto my body, and poorly calculated artifacts turned parts of the house into temporary zones of combustion.
The real problem was preserving my progress.
My workshop occupied the former grounds of the Parker estate. I had removed furniture, torn down interior walls, and transformed the houses into specialized laboratories.
One room was dedicated to metallurgy; another, to containment runes. The basement was used for destructive experiments.
The main house stored my grimoires, my tools, and the artifacts that couldn't be left exposed.
Every morning, part of that work would disappear. Every night, I had to rebuild something.
It was frustrating. Not because of the physical effort. I'd repeated the same tasks so many times that I could perform them in my sleep.
But it was… tedious to build everything from scratch. I could spend ten hours refining a runic matrix and lose it at the reset. I could build a perfect storage core, and the next morning it wouldn't even exist anymore.
The Prison-World gave me infinite time, but it tried to prevent me from accumulating results. So I began to study the cycle itself.
The first hypothesis was obvious: The reset didn't destroy the objects.
It restored a previous state. This meant that the Prison World possessed a kind of temporal record of everything.
A baseline image. As the cycle neared its end, reality compared the current state with that record and corrected the differences.
The mechanism wasn't conscious. It wasn't an entity.
It was a rule. And rules could be exploited.
I spent weeks testing small objects.
A coin.
A spoon.
A screw.
A piece of wood.
I imprinted different changes on each one and observed what happened at the reset. Some returned to their original locations. Others remained with me because I had magically altered them. Some disappeared and reappeared in duplicate.
The result wasn't random. I just didn't understand the criteria yet.
The magic didn't override the cycle. It created inertia—a resistance to restoration.
If I could amplify that resistance, I could make an object pass through the reset without returning to its original state.
But that still wasn't enough. I didn't just want to protect an object.
I wanted to choose when it would be affected by the cycle. I wanted a key.
[...]
I spent months calling the project different things.
Anti-temporal rune;
Persistence rune;
Suspension rune.
None of the names fit. "Anti-temporal" was imprecise. I wasn't nullifying time.
"Persistence" was too narrow. The object wouldn't just persist; it could revert to a previous state.
"SUSPENSION" described a function, not the nature of the spell.
The rune didn't destroy the cycle. It created a gap between the object and its restoration—a space where the reset continued to exist but had no immediate effect.
That is why I called it the Rune of the Interstice. The interstice was the space between two things. Between one cycle and the next.
Between the current state and the restored state. Between what the world demanded and what I chose to preserve.
The first Rune of the Interstice occupied the center of a circle composed of four smaller matrices.
The first was an anchor. The second defined the object's original state. The third recorded the current state. The fourth functioned as a valve.
Without the valve, the rune simply prevented the reset. This seemed perfect until I realized that the object remained stuck in the state it was in when the magic was activated.
A broken blade remained broken. A cracked glass could not be restored. A poorly assembled gear remained poorly assembled.
I needed control. So I added a return instruction.
The rune didn't just say "skip the cycle." It had to respond to three commands:
Preserve. Restore. Release.
Preserve caused the object to continue existing in its current state once the cycle ended.
Restore caused the rune to return the object to its previously recorded state.
Release removed the protection and allowed the Prison-World's natural restoration process to take over.
The system seemed simple on paper; in practice, it nearly killed me. Not literally.
The first full test was conducted using a pocket watch.
I engraved the rune on the case, inscribed the return matrix on the inside, and placed the watch in the center of the circle.
I activated the preservation command. The watch continued to run. The hands moved forward.
When the cycle ended, the world reset.
I woke up on the same day, and the watch was with me. And the hands were still at the time from the night before.
It worked for about three seconds. Then the metal split open.
It didn't explode. It didn't break.
It simply tried to occupy two states at the same time. The lid was both open and closed.
The hands were in two different positions. The case existed in two overlapping places.
I siphoned off the magic immediately, but the damage had already been done. The watch disintegrated into a mass of twisted metal.
I noted the result. "Persistence without state isolation causes superposition."
The second test went even worse. I tried to record the original state of a key and then restore it before the end of the cycle. The rune worked, but it also restored the object's spatial position.
The key vanished from my hand and reappeared inside the lock where it had been recorded.
A small but important flaw. I wasn't just creating a copy of the physical state. I was recording position, orientation, integrity, temperature, and magical signature.
To control an object, I needed to decide exactly which aspects would be preserved. The rune would have to be selective.
[...]
Success came from the simplest object possible: a steel screw.
There was no magic in it—no spell, no special charge. Just an ordinary piece that I had marked with the complete matrix.
I set the original state: on the table, unmarked.
Then I moved it to the floor, dented its head, and recorded a new state. I activated Preserve, and the cycle ended.
The house was restored. The streets were restored. The sky returned to how it was at the start of the day.
The screw remained on the floor. Dented.
I laughed. It wasn't a powerful artifact. It wasn't a weapon. It wasn't an escape.
But it was proof that I had overcome the cycle in a small area of reality. The Prison-World had tried to return the screw to its previous state.
The Rune of the Interstice had replied: No.
I touched the inscription and activated the second command.
Restore.
The screw vanished from the floor and reappeared on the table, intact, exactly as it had been when the original state was recorded.
The rune worked. It didn't just preserve. It controlled.
After that success, I stopped working on isolated objects.
The Parker estate would be my next test. The coven's original runes covered the entire property. As you know, they were responsible for the illusions that hid the houses and the barriers that prevented supernatural intruders from crossing the boundaries without permission.
I didn't destroy that matrix. I rewrote it.
I kept the geometric structure, the anchor points, and the underground channels. I removed the concealment function and replaced it with interstice instructions.
The main house was designated as the command center. The other houses were designated as secondary anchors. The gardens served as distribution points. Each entrance was connected to a preservation matrix.
The entire property now existed in a state partially separated from the cycle. Not completely.
I still needed to allow water, light, and air to be restored. Otherwise, the site would quickly become uninhabitable. The barrier did not isolate the property from time.
It allowed me to choose what would pass through the reset. Objects marked with the Rune of the Interstice remained.
Unmarked objects were restored. If I wished, I could release a specific artifact, allowing it to return to its original state.
I could also restore an entire area. The property became my permanent workshop.
My workbenches didn't disappear.
My grimoires remained open to the correct pages. My experiments weren't erased. Broken prototypes could be restored without my having to rebuild them.
I had finally accumulated progress. Two years of work were no longer just two years of isolated attempts.
They became a foundation.
A library.
An arsenal.
A life that the cycle could no longer erase.
I sat in the center of the old garden and watched the runes glow beneath the earth.
The Prison-World was still resetting. The city was still returning to the same day.
The vehicles, the buildings, the objects, and every detail of the scene remained trapped in repetition.
But Parker House was different. It had a pause. And that pause was mine.
I looked at the Ascendant on the tea table a few meters away from me.
I still needed Qetsiyah's blood. I still needed to choose the right moment. I still needed to make sure that my escape wouldn't lead me to a future I didn't want.
But now I had time to do all of that. Not just repeated time. Accumulated time.
I smiled. "Finally," I murmured. "After almost two years… One thing that remains."