The landscape shifted from the mechanical fury of the Clockwork Cleft to something eerily still.
They stood before the Scar of Symmetry—a vast canyon where the world was split in perfect mirror. The left half shimmered with verdant life, blue skies, and birdsong. The right was a deadland: gray, twisted, and silent. A razor-straight line divided them, and even clouds avoided the boundary.
"That's unnatural," Beatrice muttered, eyes squinting at the perfect edge.
"That's the point," Stanley said. "This scar was carved by a failed attempt to unify competing timelines. Now it stabilizes itself by repelling imperfection."
Rafael stepped forward. The system hummed in warning.
[ZONE STABILITY FRACTURED. PERSONAL REALITY ANCHOR REQUIRED.]
Brick exhaled. "Anyone care to translate that?"
"You step in without being anchored, you get rewritten or ejected," Clara said, double-checking her boots.
"Or you explode into butterflies," Calyx added helpfully. "That happened to someone in the some thread."
Rafael activated his threadspear. Its tip glowed with stabilizing code. "Then we tether. We cross together."
***
As they passed through the threshold, each of them felt a sharp chill. The world seemed to hesitate, as though unsure how to define them. Beatrice flinched as her staff flickered between versions—wood, steel, bone.
Stanley's book, that suddenly appeared in his hand some moments ago, began whispering equations he didn't recognize in voices that might have been his.
"We're definitely not welcome here," Juno said dryly.
The air grew dense. A high-pitched tone filled the scar. Suddenly, a rift tore open in the mirrored sky. From it poured waves of mirrored wraiths, twisted reflections of the team, moving in inverted patterns.
"Oh no," Lira whispered. "It's us."
The wraiths dropped silently, landing in perfect formation. Their skin was pale, etched with recursive glyphs. Their eyes shimmered with raw calculation.
Rafael faced his double. The copy had sunken eyes and moved with rigid purpose. It wielded a corrupted spear, dripping glitch matter.
The real Rafael charged. Their weapons clashed with a thunderous crack, feedback loops spiraling off each strike.
Behind him, Brick and his duplicate locked fists, each growling like engines (you know, 'cause they kinda are). Their blows caused temporal echoes, repeating three times before settling into the timeline.
Clara's mirrored self was feral, moving like a beast, her blade serrated and twitching. Lira's twin wept black tears as she fired entropy arrows with impossible precision. Clara ducked one, only for it to loop back around—thankfully caught by Beatrice's staff mid-deflection.
Beatrice clashed with a null-version of herself who smiled too calmly. "This is like looking into a terrible metaphor!" she shouted.
Stanley's opposite conjured silent spells with burning sigils. Their clash set the air alight with logic flames and paradox frost.
Juno found her double last—silent, cold, perfect. They circled, and then struck. Blades clashed, and shadows burst into ribbons. The reflection was clinical, brutal, unnervingly efficient.
But Juno grinned. "I'm not perfect. I'm real."
She disabled her double with a gut-level feint and drove a blade into its chest. The mirrored form collapsed in shards.
The others struggled. Stanley's calculations raced. "They're adaptive! Our attacks are being mirrored and improved. We need to disrupt their sync!"
Rafael snapped orders. "Calyx, disrupt feedback fields! Lira, suppress sniper lanes! Clara, regroup left! Brick, anchor center!"
They moved as one. Lira's magical arrows blazed with inverted entropy. Calyx detonated glitch bombs mid-air, fracturing timelines just enough to delay the copies' reactions.
Brick caught his double mid-charge and headbutted it through a flickering paradox gate. Stanley manipulate the terrain beneath his counterpart, causing it to collapse into recursive feedback.
Together, they executed a collapse maneuver, funneling the mirrored versions into a paradox sink. The ground folded inward like a spatial Möbius strip. Brick delivered the final slam, sending waves of mirrored dust into the void.
The scar shivered.
A voice echoed across the canyon.
"Why do you resist convergence?"
A central spire rose from the canyon floor like a needle threading realities. Time spun backward and forward around it.
Stanley gasped. "That's not just a controller. That's the Scar's seed. The source of the symmetry algorithm."
Rafael pointed. "One thing. It screw us, or we screw it."
***
They advanced. Every step toward the spire grew heavier, time looping in fragmented bursts. Clara took a step and tripped, but in the next loop, caught herself before falling. Brick blinked and was in two places at once, then compressed into one.
Beatrice used null energy to stabilize the path. Calyx reinforced their anchors. Stanley chanted a recursive prime loop under his breath.
At the spire's base, the air trembled. The seed emerged—an orb of pure reflection, a microcosm of the world split, glowing with impossible symmetry.
It spoke in chorus: "You were fractured. You chose instability."
"We chose freedom!" Rafael growled.
He hurled the spear. It shattered mid-flight against an invisible feedback loop.
The orb retaliated with echoing pulses. Each pulse invoked a memory—trauma, guilt, failure. Rafael saw his sister again, reaching out before she was erased. Clara heard the scream of the first version of herself she abandoned. Lira remembered watching her world end.
But they held.
Lira unleashed a chain of entropy bolts, disrupting the pulses. Clara launched forward with a war cry, slashing arcs of anti-symmetry. Brick hurled Stanley through a short-range gate to bypass the distortion fields.
The orb's surface cracked. Juno blinked across three shadows, each landing a precise dagger strike. Beatrice countered the reflection pulses with harmonic inversions. Calyx inverted the gravity field beneath it.
Stanley reached its heart and inscribed a recursion glyph, bypassing the logic core.
It cracked again.
Rafael, with all his weight, caught the falling spear, now pulsing with shared energy. He drove the point through the heart of the seed.
The world wobbled. Then balanced.
Half the scar healed. The dead side breathed again.
***
They collapsed in the recovering field. Grass was growing on ash. The air was cleaner. Life cautiously tested the boundary.
Juno exhaled. "Next time, let's fight something that doesn't reflect my existential crisis."
Brick raised a hand. "What if the next place is inside our minds?"
"Don't jinx it, dumbass!" Clara hitted his head.
Stanley blinked at the horizon. "Next stop's worse. I recognize those spires."
"Where to?" Rafael asked, rubbing his shoulder.
"The Heart of the Archive," Stanley said. "And it remembers everything."
***