2025-08-21 21:56:05
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Ash N Echoes
The guns were quiet. Too quiet.For the first time in three days, no silver doubles stalked the barricades, no resonance surged through the courthouse stones. The haze had withdrawn, but not retreated—its glow still pulsed beyond the perimeter, like the rim of a storm that had only paused to breathe.Jason should have felt relief. Instead, the silence unsettled him more than the battle.***Ghost weightHe crouched by the broken fountain in the square, running calloused fingers through stagnant water. His hand shook. Not from exhaustion—at least not his own. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman’s tremor rippled through the net, and his muscles echoed her weakness as though it belonged to him.Jason squeezed his fist until his knuckles whitened. Still, the quiver stayed.Yara approached, her steps stiff, her eyes hollow. She stopped a pace away, arms crossed as though bracing against a gale.“I woke up,” she said flatly, “with Callen’s nightmare in my skull. Every detail. His father shoutin
The Mirror Siege
The haze learned their shape.At first it was subtle—ripples in the net, echoes of voices repeating an instant late. Jason thought it was just fatigue, the resonance looping too tightly. But then Yara’s voice cut across the square:“Jason! Behind you!”He spun, blade raised.And saw himself.The figure stepped out of the silver light with perfect poise: his stance, his scars, his blade even angled the same way. The copy smiled with his smile, but wider. Too wide.Jason froze. The net did not. It carried both presences equally—two Jasons, both tethered. And for one terrible moment, even Jason felt the doubt: Am I me?***Splintered trustThe courtyard erupted in shouts. Across the barricades, silver doubles stepped forward, each one a flawless reflection. A soldier cursed as he stared down his own mirror, trembling. Another screamed when her double raised a rifle faster than she could.The net buckled. Panic surged in through Jason’s chest like a flood. Which thread belonged to whom? W
The Net Of Memory
The first thing Jason noticed was the silence.Not outside—the haze still pulsed with its low resonance, the barricades still rattled with rifle fire—but inside, in his own head. A silence that wasn’t absence. A silence filled with presence.Memories lapped at the edges of his thoughts like waves against a breakwater. Not his own: flashes of kitchens long since burned, streets he had never walked, voices calling names that weren’t his. He staggered against the courthouse wall, hand pressed to his temple, but the visions didn’t stop.They weren’t intrusions. They were threads.> A child tracing stars in chalk on cracked stone.A lover’s hand brushing hair from a fevered brow.A soldier whispering a prayer in the mud before dawn.Each moment hooked into him, tugged him, wove him into something greater.Callen’s voice rasped through the square, amplified by the jury-rigged speakers:“Stay steady! Don’t fight the flow—anchor to it!”***Shared weightJason lifted his gaze. Around him, the
Ashes Of The Real
The fires didn’t burn out.They were swallowed.By morning, the river sector was gone. Not collapsed. Not bombed. Gone. The bridges ended in nothing but a haze of silver light, like the whole district had been folded out of existence.Jason stood with Yara and Callen on the cracked embankment, staring at the void where warehouses, homes, and thousands of lives had been. In its place, faint shapes shimmered—people walking streets that no longer existed, their movements repeating like actors on broken reels.Callen’s voice was hoarse. “It’s not destruction. It’s replacement. They’ve started rewriting land the way they rewrite people.”Yara spat into the dust. “Then they’re not taking districts. They’re taking reality.”Jason didn’t answer. He kept watching the false riverfront shimmer and breathe, as if daring him to step in and admit that this—this reflection—was now the truth.Behind them, soldiers whispered in disbelief. Some swore they saw family members waving from the mirage. Othe
Ashes Of The Real
The fires didn’t burn out.They were swallowed.By morning, the river sector was gone. Not collapsed. Not bombed. Gone. The bridges ended in nothing but a haze of silver light, like the whole district had been folded out of existence.Jason stood with Yara and Callen on the cracked embankment, staring at the void where warehouses, homes, and thousands of lives had been. In its place, faint shapes shimmered—people walking streets that no longer existed, their movements repeating like actors on broken reels.Callen’s voice was hoarse. “It’s not destruction. It’s replacement. They’ve started rewriting land the way they rewrite people.”Yara spat into the dust. “Then they’re not taking districts. They’re taking reality.”Jason didn’t answer. He kept watching the false riverfront shimmer and breathe, as if daring him to step in and admit that this—this reflection—was now the truth.Behind them, soldiers whispered in disbelief. Some swore they saw family members waving from the mirage. Othe
The Mirror Offensive
The city didn’t sleep anymore.Every district pulsed with fractured light, the splices blooming like wounds that refused to close. By the fourth night, it wasn’t just noise—it was rhythm. A heartbeat that didn’t belong to the city, but something outside it, something vast pressing inward.Jason stood at the balcony of the command post, staring across the skyline. Shattered towers blinked in and out of different lives—whole one moment, crumbled the next. Survivors huddled in courtyards, shielding their eyes from visions of their own dead walking the streets.He hadn’t slept in forty hours. Neither had Yara, though she looked ready to burn another forty if it meant stabbing the heartbeat into silence.Callen staggered into the balcony, rig strapped across his chest, cables twitching like veins of light. His voice cracked.“They’re aligning tonight.”Jason didn’t look away from the skyline. “How many?”“Seven. East, south, and river sectors. They’ll converge in less than an hour.”Yara’s
