Even after hours of marching through the Cradle Expanse, the air clung to Sarah’s skin like soot-drenched cloth. It stung her throat and turned her breath into vapor. The sky above was thick and copper-colored, dimming the daylight and making her squad uneasy. Every step forward felt like trespassing into a graveyard of forgotten futures.Behind her, six Guardians moved in silence—eyes sharp, weapons humming softly with elemental charge. This was supposed to be a retrieval mission. Simple. In and out.But nothing had been simple since the Eclipse began early.“Are we getting closer?” she asked without turning.“Signal’s erratic,” said Kel, her second-in-command. His voice was muffled by the filter-mask, but the static that followed wasn’t equipment failure. It was the shard. “It’s pulsing. Reacting to… something.”Sarah stopped.They were standing at the edge of what looked like a crater—but it wasn’t. The ground was glassed, melted into a dark concave basin at least three hundred met

Joey had only been gone for twelve minutes.Or at least, that’s what the Bastion logs claimed.Twelve minutes ago, he had stepped into the outer net chamber to recalibrate the southern threadlines—routine maintenance, nothing more. He’d passed through the field bridge, checked in over comms, even cracked a joke about how the Weaver “probably wasn’t hiding in the ductwork.”Then: static.Then: silence.And now, Joey stood in the hall again, suit intact, eyes alert, like he’d never left.Except no one called him back.And he wasn’t quite Joey.Samuel was the first to intercept him, already halfway down the corridor when he saw the man standing by the threshold.“Joey?” he asked cautiously.The man tilted his head.Same tousled hair. Same stance. Same half-smile.But the eyes—they were just a little too still. Too

In the heart of the Cradle—a memory-stilled forest tucked between two fractured timelines—a child wandered barefoot through the blackened trees. Leaves hung in place mid-fall. The wind moved without sound. Nothing in the forest aged. Nothing died. Time here was paused.And yet, the child moved freely.Small. Pale. Genderless in form, wearing only a wrap of dusk-gray cloth. On their chest: the spiraling mark of the Gatekeeper, etched like a birthright into their skin.No one remembered placing the child here.No one remembered naming them.But everyone who came too close forgot something they couldn’t afford to lose.Sarah, flanked by Lin and a red-eyed Samuel, reached the Cradle just before the second skyquake.Her shard pulsed hard enough to bruise.“This is where it happened,” she murmured.Lin glanced sideways. “Where what happened?”“Where my mother planted the first paradox,” Sarah whispered.The air was impossibly still. Light stuttered. Samuel’s eyes flicked upward to the sky-c

The corridor was silent, save for the soft pulse of the emergency lights. Sarah moved carefully, her fingers trailing the wall, her shard still flickering from the chaos at the ridge. She wasn’t sure why she’d come down here — the lower levels of the Bastion were sealed, memory-locked since the first Wave.But the shard pulled her. Not through flame. Through grief.Room B-17. Her mother’s old chamber.Except it wasn’t.The moment she stepped inside, the light shifted. Everything became thinner, quieter — like sound had been tucked under glass. Dust didn’t settle here. No time passed.And in the center of the room stood Kael.Her breath caught.He wore the old uniform — burnt red sash, blade across his back. He looked… unchanged. His expression unreadable, his hair slightly windblown as if he’d just returned from patrol.“Kael?” she whispered.He didn’t answer.But he smiled.“I watched you climb the cliff once,” he said. His voice was softer than she remembered. “You were thirteen. Th

The Bastion’s war table hadn’t been used in months.Dust lined its edges. Old energy signatures flickered faintly along its curved interface, echoing long-erased battle maps. It was built to track enemies—Void incursion zones, Ashborn troop lines, shard anomalies.Tonight, it displayed Earth itself.Not the Earth they remembered.Not the Earth they had fought for.The globe was fraying. Threadlines glowed red across the surface—unraveling. Symbols blinked where entire cities once stood. Others spun erratically, overlapping. Multiple realities clashing for space, like two ghosts trying to possess the same body.Joey stared in silence.Lin sat with a heavy shawl around her shoulders, pale but awake.Sarah stood stiffly across from Samuel, arms folded.Nobody had spoken in five minutes.Until Joey said softly, “We’re already losing it.”Samuel said nothing.Sarah’s voice came next, hard-edged: “Not yet.”Joey turned to her. “What would you call what just happened? We opened a hole in the