2025-08-05 23:30:45
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The Shattered Clock
The plaza didn’t sleep that night. Not because of hunger, or cold, or the fear of Ravens regrouping. It was the air. It carried that rhythm still—the faint rise and fall, as though somewhere deep in the bones of the city, the breath of another world hadn’t fully exhaled.Jason stayed awake with it. He stood at the perimeter wall, watching the broken skyline. Each flicker of fractured light made him feel as though he were being watched back.By dawn, he didn’t need Callen’s warning to know something new had stirred.The hum was different. Not the ocean breath they’d faced before. This was thinner, sharper. Almost like the ticking of glass teeth.And it was close.***They found the anomaly at the edge of the plaza itself. No need to scour half the district this time. It had already come to them.Where a collapsed clocktower once sprawled in rubble, the stones had shifted. Not by hands. Not by time. They had simply… rearranged themselves. As though something remembered their shape diffe
The Gate That Breathes
The plaza had gone still after the Raven lieutenant’s fall, but Jason knew stillness was only the skin of the wound. Beneath it, something pulsed.At first he thought it was the memory of battle—his heart still pounding, his muscles still tense with the echo of choices. But then he heard it. Not the crack of guns, not the clatter of blades.A sound like breath.It drifted across the ruins in a faint exhale, rising and falling with uncanny rhythm. The kind of sound no ruin should make.Yara noticed too. Her hand dropped to her blade, eyes narrowing. “Tell me you hear that.”Jason nodded grimly. “I hear it.”Callen’s shoulders hunched as though against a weight. His rig hissed softly, half-repaired but sparking with occasional jolts. “That’s resonance. A gate isn’t closed—it’s thinning. And not like before. This one’s… moving.”The plaza survivors shifted uneasily, eyes darting to Jason as though waiting for him to name the fear creeping through their bones.Jason didn’t give them fear.
The Banner Of Cinders
The plaza was a wound cut open by silence.Hundreds of eyes darted between Jason’s team and the Raven lieutenant, the air heavy with the weight of a city’s future condensed into one standoff. Smoke curled from broken stone, from shattered spire, from the wreck of what once held the city together. The lieutenant’s scorched armor gleamed faintly in the firelight as he raised a broken blade, pointing it at Jason like a curse.“There!” his voice cracked raw with fury, “These traitors ended the Ravens’ reign. They killed your brothers and sisters. They destroyed the engine that could have lifted us above the chains of ruin!”A surge of voices followed him—rage, grief, the desperate clinging of those who needed an enemy more than truth.Jason’s pulse pounded, but his stance held steady. He kept his rifle level but unfired. “The engine wasn’t salvation. It was the end of everything. You felt it—every collapse, every tear in the sky. Do you think the mastermind cared for you? He used you, all
Ashes And Echoes
The city no longer screamed.It whispered.Smoke drifted between the skeletal towers, thin and gray, carrying the acrid tang of melted steel. Fires burned here and there but without fury, as though exhausted by the war. The ground itself was quiet—no more shuddering pulses, no more impossible seams splitting across the horizon.Jason limped through the ruins, every step a reminder that survival wasn’t mercy—it was a sentence. His body felt carved from pain, but he kept moving. He had to.Behind him, Yara walked stiffly, one arm strapped against her ribs with torn cloth, her eyes scanning every shadow. Callen followed in silence, his rig hanging from one shoulder like a broken relic.The Severed Wing had lived. Somehow.But Jason wasn’t sure the same could be said of the city.***They reached what had once been an avenue, now a scar. Entire blocks had collapsed into a yawning trench, choked with rubble and twisted girders. Here and there, survivors picked through the wreckage—civilian
Into The Maw
The closer they drew to the engine’s heart, the less the world resembled anything Jason could call reality.The scaffolding warped into spirals, beams curling back upon themselves, ladders twisting into Möbius strips. Light no longer traveled in straight lines—it bent, refracted, broke apart into prisms that floated like ash.Jason gritted his teeth as his boots struck a stair that shouldn’t have existed yet carried him upward. “Stay focused. Don’t look too long at what doesn’t make sense.”Callen stumbled behind him, sweat streaming down his pale face. “You’re asking me to ignore the fact we’re walking through equations that shouldn’t solve.”“Then treat it like a broken puzzle,” Jason snapped. “Step. Breathe. Keep moving.”Yara brought up the rear, blades drawn, eyes locked on every flickering shadow. “If either of you start seeing cracks in the air whispering your name, say it out loud. I’ll know if you’re lying.”Jason almost smiled at that. Almost.***They emerged into a chamber
Through The Cracks
The city was no longer a city.It was a wound.Jason stood on the rooftop, breath ragged, staring at the skyline unraveling in impossible geometries. Streets folded upward into the sky, rivers bent sideways, and towers dissolved into spirals of dust that rebuilt themselves in looping patterns.But it wasn’t just matter shifting.It was space.The air rippled with fractures, like glass under strain. Thin seams of light split across the horizon, widening slowly, each one bleeding shadows.Callen’s scanner warbled with broken static. “These aren’t distortions anymore. They’re thresholds. The engine’s… opening doors.”Yara’s eyes narrowed. “Doors to where?”Jason’s gut was already answering. “Nowhere we want to see.”***The first seam tore open above a collapsed avenue. Light spilled outward, then bent inward, pulling with a hunger that made the buildings groan. Shapes flickered inside—outlines of streets that weren’t theirs, skies that burned a different color.And then something steppe
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