The transport shuttle that deposited Aderic at the edge of the Northern Front was a rusted, shuddering beast, its internal acoustics a symphony of rattling plates and pressurized gas. As the loading ramp hissed open, the environment outside hit him with the force of a physical blow. The air was thin, tasting of ozone and pulverized stone, and the sky was a bruised, permanent twilight, choked by heavy, soot-stained clouds.Aderic stepped onto the cracked tarmac, his boots crunching against the debris of a war that refused to end. He stood before the gates of Fort Halvyr, a jagged scar of concrete and reinforced iron embedded into the side of a dead, frozen mountain. It looked less like a military outpost and more like a mausoleum.The path leading to the entrance was a graveyard of history. Scraps of uniforms fluttered in the biting wind, caught on the rusted spikes of perimeter fencing. There were tanks, half-buried in the silt, their barrels pointed toward an enemy that hadn't been s

Aderic did not head for the exit. The weight of the deception—the terrifying knowledge that his own hand had authorized the purge of his own life—pulled at his heels like leaden chains. He turned away from the main gate, his footsteps soft against the oxidized steel grates. He needed to talk to someone who didn't view reality through the prism of a military mandate. He needed the infirmary.The medical bay was located in the deepest sub-level of Fort Halvyr, a damp, subterranean cavern where the air smelled aggressively of ozone and rot. As Aderic pushed through the heavy, sliding doors, he was met by the hum of ancient medical scrubbers, their rhythmic clicking the only sound in the room.Odrienne Falk stood at a central workstation, her back to him. She was hunched over a holoscreen that displayed a pulsing, irregular waveform. She didn't look up when he entered; she seemed to be waiting for him."You’re the one who caused the tremor in the command deck," she said, her voice dry and

Aderic didn’t wait for the echoes of his own footsteps to die down before he breached the command deck. The air inside was thick with the scent of ozone and the sterile, metallic tang of an overclocked processor. Commander Kesthra Morcant was where he had left her, still staring at the flickering map, her posture rigid, her hands hovering over a console that pulsed with a rhythm faster than a heartbeat.He didn't bother with a salute. He didn't have time for the theater of rank. He crossed the floor in three long strides, his pulse hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against his ribs. He slammed the leather-bound ledger onto the console, the heavy, archaic volume skidding across the sleek surface and knocking over a data-pad."Read it," Aderic said, his voice barely a rasp. He was still vibrating from the run, his lungs burning with the sharp, freezing air of the fort’s lower levels.Kesthra glanced at the book, then at him. Her eyes narrowed, the scar on her cheek pulling taut as she

The white light did not dissipate so much as it peeled away, layer by agonizing layer, like skin being stripped from a wound. Aderic hit the ground hard, his breath driven from his lungs as the crystalline floor of the valley shattered into a million shards of dead code. He scrambled to his hands and knees, his vision swimming with the afterimage of the void.Beside him, Kesthra was already upright, her boots sliding on a surface that no longer felt like stone. It was ash. Cold, gray, suffocating ash that rose in choking plumes with every movement."The valley," Aderic wheezed, pushing himself to a standing position. "Where did it go?"The simulation was gone. The battlefield of competing eras had been wiped clean, leaving behind a silence so absolute it rang in their ears. They stood in the center of a crater, but it was not a crater born of recent artillery. It was a scar of ancient, oxidized earth, ringed by the skeletal, blackened remains of a city that had been reduced to slag ne