The corridor wasn't built for sanity.
Its walls were half-dissolved panels of storystuff—flickering scenes stitched together with nonsense causality and dreams that hadn't been dreamt yet. Each step forward was also a step backward, and sideways, and occasionally into someone else's unresolved trauma.
Time had given up trying to be linear and was now throwing a tantrum in interpretive dance, complete with sequined entropy and a chorus line of punctuation marks.
Rafael swore softly as he ducked under a hovering door labeled "Regret #3 (Do Not Open)." "I take it back. I'm very surprised. And extremely disappointed. Possibly aroused, but mostly disappointed."
Mira stumbled beside him, face pale. Her glyph-dagger spun slowly in her grip, reacting to the turbulent script flow around them. "This isn't a corridor. It's a narrative bypass. The Loom is rewriting itself by now. We're inside its errata, like a footnote dimension designed by a mad poet with a grudge against coherence."
Juno flicked a thread of null-energy from her fingertips, vaporizing a wayward question mark that tried to bite her. "More like a margin scrawled by a lunatic librarian on deadline. Who gave them access to metaphors?"
"Someone who probably shouldn't be in charge of a multiversal loom," Lira muttered, staring at a floating fishbowl containing a screaming sun wearing bifocals. "This thing's quoting Shakespeare and breakfast cereal slogans in the same breath."
The corridor shifted again. A staircase rotated horizontally and became a ramp to nowhere. A door tried to become a chair, failed, and sulked into a comma. Blinking commas floated past like jellyfish, nibbling at the edges of unfinished thoughts and partially rendered flashbacks. The very floor began to hum in rhyming couplets.
Ahead, Bryn slowed. Her eyes shimmered, reflecting not the corridor but possibilities. Her braid floated like it was underwater. "We're close to the memory core. I kinda feel the resonance. The battalion's timeline signature is getting stronger. It's like we're walking into the climax of a tragedy written by someone who hates foreshadowing."
A ripple passed through the corridor as if acknowledging her. Panels around them shifted—revealing flickers of war-torn battlefields, silent funerals, and one strangely moving image of Rafael in a chef's hat failing to make pancakes, being heckled by sentient spatulas.
"That's not mine," Rafael muttered. "That's slander. Or artistic interpretation."
The walls warped around a singular point. A glyph bloomed into existence midair—a spinning emblem of tangled threads shaped like a Möbius knot. It pulsed. Waiting.
Mira narrowed her eyes. "That's a failsafe key. The Loom is giving us a chance to leave. Or maybe a riddle with passive-aggressive implications."
"Or a test," Bryn said. "It wants to know if we're willing to risk contamination. Step past that glyph and we're bound to this memory sequence. We'll be players instead of spectators. Vulnerable to plot holes and thematic recursion."
Juno rolled her shoulders. "I vote yes. I hate being half-in anything. Especially cataclysms."
Rafael gave a lopsided grin. "We've rebooted the apocalypse, I don't know, dozen of time already, maybe? What's the worst that could happen—a next season? With guest writers?"
They stepped through.
Everything inverted.
Suddenly they were standing on the ceiling of a cathedral built from echoes. Choirs of faceless children sang backwards lullabies.
The sky was a storybook page turning in slow-motion, revealing constellations shaped like lost names and metaphors that didn't know they were metaphors.
The architecture was recursive, a prayer carved into spatial logic and sung in metaphor. Columns whispered forgotten scripts in pentameter note.
The stained-glass windows showed scenes from wars that hadn't ended—or hadn't begun. In the center of the space, a broken sundial ticked counterclockwise with each breath they took, each second dragging regret behind it like a wedding train.
The battalion waited there.
Frozen mid-charge, Ninth Echo Battalion was suspended in a moment stretched past breaking. Each soldier shimmered like a memory refusing to fade.
Their armor was cracked, their eyes unseeing, but every one of them pulsed with residual storylight. Their weapons flickered between forms; swords, rifles, feathers, regrets.
"They're stuck in recursive battle logic," Mira breathed. "Their last moment repeating endlessly. A closed loop. Like an unfinished sentence held hostage by conjunctions. We have to break the loop before the narrative consumes them entirely."
Bryn stepped forward, glowing brighter. Her mark flared, resonating with the glyphs in their armor. "Oren... hold on. I'm here. I remember you."
A ghost-voice echoed from nowhere and everywhere at once:
"Who walks the threads without weaving?"
Juno snarled, "We do. And we brought scissors."
The cathedral shivered.
Dozens of eyes snapped open. The battalion moved.
They surged forward, caught in their death-loop, blades raised, mouths open in silent screams. But this time—they weren't charging a memory. They were charging the interlopers.
Rafael reacted first, hurling a glyphbomb that exploded into a field of slowed time, catching half the battalion mid-lunge. The explosion smelled faintly of regret and roasted peanuts.
"They don't recognize us!" he shouted. "They think we're the anomaly!"
"Because we are!" Mira shouted back, slashing through the narrative bindings holding a soldier's memory in place.
He froze, blinked, and began to cry.
Juno punched her way through a warlock with flaming antlers (metaphorically), every blow unraveling layers of stored trauma. "Wake up! You're not ghosts! You're stuck in a rerun with bad writing!"
Bryn reached the heart of the frozen battle. Her voice rose like song and thunder. "Ninth Echo, STAND DOWN! I remember your names. Your stories. You are not forgotten."
The room shook.
Her command pulsed outward, igniting dormant glyphs in the soldiers' armor. They stumbled. Some dropped weapons. Others clutched their heads. The loop buckled.
And then—Oren stepped forward.
He was taller now than the memory-child from before. Glowing softly with storylight, he regarded Bryn with exhausted eyes. "You shouldn't have come. The cost is too high. We were left here for a reason."
Bryn didn't flinch. "We came anyway. I didn't leave you. Not then. Not now."
Oren looked past her, at the rest. At Rafael's cracked grin, at Juno's battle-smeared defiance, at Mira's brilliant anger, at Lira's quiet fury, a team of contradictions stitched into meaning.
He smiled.
"Then help us finish the story."
***