Kael woke up gasping.
Not like a nightmare—more like a reboot. One second he was nowhere, everywhere, scattered across too many possibilities. The next, he was here, drenched in sweat, blood on his hands, and glyphs burning across his palms like they were trying to carve themselves into the world.
His heart pounded, the world glitching at the edges.
Flicker.
White room. No daughter. Alone.
Flicker.
Burned skyline. Senna—older—bleeding glyphs from her eyes.
Flicker.
Liora, crying, whispering his name. "You weren't supposed to break."
Then everything collapsed into stillness.
A sharp intake of breath. Not his.
Kael's eyes snapped toward the doorway.
Aria stood there.
No mask. No armor. Just eyes full of fire and confusion.
"You looped," she said.
Kael blinked. "What?"
"I watched it. Your body twitched like a rollback mid-sequence. But no anchor. No signal. And these—" she pointed at his hands. "They weren't there before. Kael… you're fracturing."
He looked down.
The glyphs were deeper now. Not surface marks. Not skin-level tags.
Layered.
One on top of another. Recursive threads trying to overwrite each other.
"That's not just rollback," Aria said. "That's divergence layering. Future echoes."
Kael tried to stand. His balance wavered.
Behind her, Senna stirred on the floor, curled up beside a pile of scattered papers.
No. Not papers.
Drawings.
Dozens.
Spirals. Shattered loop diagrams. Some in crayon. Others in full glyph script.
One floated toward Kael on a light draft—he caught it absently.
It was a portrait.
Of him.
Eyes cracked with light. Glyphs pouring from his spine. A timer above his head.
00:12:41
"What… the hell does this mean?" he whispered.
Aria stepped closer. "It means you're not the only one seeing it."
Kael tried to speak.
Tried to lie.
But his lips trembled instead. He clutched his chest—pain searing as something inside him moved.
No. Not something.
Someone.
A version of him, dying.
He dropped to his knees and vomited across the floor—blood and light and fragments of code.
When he looked up, Aria didn't flinch.
She crouched beside him, her voice low.
"What are you becoming, Kael?"
He didn't answer at first.
Just looked at his hands.
Watched the glyphs twist, evolve, nest inside one another.
Like a recursive equation that didn't want to end.
"I don't know anymore," he whispered.
And somewhere, from outside time, something watched him back.
Kael sat by the sink, shirt discarded, glyphs crawling up his spine like lightning vines. Every breath came with the weight of choices he hadn't made yet — or had made already. The world flickered wrong around the edges, like the color hadn't fully reloaded.
Aria leaned on the doorway, arms crossed. "You didn't answer me."
Kael kept his eyes low. "I'm fine."
"You're bleeding rollback traces."
"Still fine."
Aria kicked a chair over and sat backwards in it. "You're syncing with timelines that haven't happened yet. That's not normal patch behavior. That's recursive logic… spiral layering. You know what that means."
Kael met her eyes. "No."
"Bullshit. You know exactly what I'm saying."
Kael's jaw tightened.
Before Aria could speak again, Senna wandered in, barefoot, dragging a crayon across the wall as she moved.
It didn't squeak.
The line she left behind didn't mark the paint.
It floated.
Aria's breath caught. "She's…"
Senna tilted her head, her voice soft like dreaming. "The spiral cracked again. Papa missed it."
Kael stood immediately, crossing to her. "What spiral?"
She handed him a new drawing.
It was a gate — but not a real one. It looked like a sketch of overlapping gates, threaded together by fractal lines that didn't obey physics. At the center… a cracked spiral.
"Senna…" Kael said carefully. "Is this something you saw?"
"No," she said, smiling. "It's something that hasn't happened yet."
Aria moved in close, taking the drawing from Kael's hand and unfolding it fully.
"What the—" She stopped.
One of the glyphs in the bottom right corner.
She recognized it.
Kael saw her face shift — from doubt to alarm.
"You've seen it before," he said.
"Not out here," Aria muttered. "This was in the restricted guild archives. Pre-Singularity. Before the system stabilized."
Kael frowned. "Rollback era?"
She nodded. "Barely even records of it. But this glyph — I remember it. It was used by the Choir. Not as a spell. As a warning."
Kael turned back to Senna, who was now drawing a spiral on the table with her finger — no ink, no chalk, just motion. And yet… it glowed.
"It's changing," she said again. "The spiral's falling apart."
Kael felt the weight in the room drop.
Like the world itself had paused to listen.
"What do you mean 'falling apart'?" he asked.
Senna looked at him like it was obvious. "It's not supposed to spin backward."
Kael's breath caught.
Aria knelt beside the drawing. "That spiral… it's not a countdown."
Kael looked at her.
She looked back.
"That's a bleed."
The word stuck in Kael's mind — and something behind his eyes pulsed in reply.