When we returned to the temple-lab, the others celebrated the way survivors do—quietly, carefully, as if joy itself might alert whatever hunted us.
I didn't celebrate.
I sat with my back against cold stone, the ignite shard on the table across from me, and I watched my own hands like they belonged to someone else.
I have always been misdirection. Not because I enjoy deception, but because it is safer to be misunderstood than to be known. In a world where truth gets punished and lies get rewarded, being a mystery becomes armor. I learned to give opinions when needed, to appear passive in a world forever changing, to hide bright things under suppressed shadows. �
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But the shard didn't allow misdirection.
It pulled at my mind the way gravity pulls at a falling body. It reminded me of every world I've ever been—worlds where I was worshipped, hunted, erased, adored, enslaved, and crowned. The weight of possibility pressed against my ribs until breathing felt like an argument.
A guardian came to stand beside me—storm-water eyes, the same woman who'd spoken first about the Outer Spires.
"You're thinking too loud," she said.
"I'm thinking," I corrected.
"That's louder than most."
I almost smiled at that. Almost.
Then the familiar sensation returned: the tightness in the chest, the crushing pressure that wasn't quite pain but wasn't quite anything else either. It was the thread—old as my oldest memory—pulling me toward something I didn't want to admit I was already moving toward.
Fate.
Or whatever name you give it when the universe has an opinion about your life.
I looked at the ignite shard again.
Desire can be a thousand suns.
And it only takes one touch to burn.
The temple-lab didn't sleep. It listened.
It listened to the winds outside, to the shifting probability-map in the central chamber, to the guardians' footsteps as they moved like cautious thoughts through the halls. It listened to me too—because I wasn't just resting. I was trying to decide who I was going to be.
In my home world, I was always told—directly or indirectly—that my worth was only what people could see. That my difference made me an outcast. That being "colored" meant I should expect lesser treatment and be grateful for crumbs that other people called kindness. I learned to swallow anger and call it maturity. I learned to pretend the pain was imaginary because the people causing it refused to acknowledge it. � �
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But Zianttra didn't care about my home world's excuses.
Zianttra demanded a choice.
The old guardian with the carved-wood face found me before dawn. He didn't knock. He didn't need to.
He stood in the doorway and said, "There are always three wars inside mankind."
I didn't answer. I waited.
"One within the self," he continued. "One within the group. One against the world."
I exhaled slowly, because I'd said words like that to myself before—years before—when I was trying to survive my own thoughts. �
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He stepped closer and lowered his voice. "Galvan wins by turning those wars against each other. They make you fight yourself until you can't fight them. They make groups turn on each other until no group can resist. They make the world feel too big, too cruel, too inevitable, until you accept their rule as the natural order."
I stared at him. "And how do we stop that?"
He pointed—not at the map, not at the ignite shard—but at my chest.
"You stop believing the present is the only place you can act."
That struck like an insult.
Because my whole curse—my whole advantage—was that I could see past and future like pages in a book.
And yet I had always refused to show the present.
I had always refused to live in it.
"Tell me," the old guardian said, "why you won't look at now."
Because now is where pain is.
Because now is where responsibility sits.
Because now is where you can't hide behind prophecy and call it wisdom.
I didn't say any of that aloud.
I only said, "I'm tired."
He nodded as if that was the most honest thing I'd offered all week.
"Good," he said. "Then you're ready."
They trained me differently than they trained the others.
Not because I was special.
Because I was unstable.
On SRX they called me Minac—a self-evolving consciousness whose body barely keeps up. If the body fails to match the mind's growth, the system breaks. Sometimes that break is called madness. Sometimes it's called death. �
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The Galvan Empire understood that too well.
They didn't just conquer cities—they pruned minds. They closed windows. They turned awareness into a threat and then strangled the threat at its root.
They had done it to me once already. Fourteen years old, summer idleness, a tall creature with wrong legs, a wolf-scaled head, and metallic horns like engineered antlers—six on either side—speaking in an inaudible sound that made fear sprint through my thoughts and slam shut a door I hadn't known existed. �
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That wasn't random.
It was reconnaissance.
Now, to fight them, I had to reopen what they'd tried to close—and reinforce it so it couldn't be shut again.
So the storm-eyed guardian taught me something that sounded like psychology but felt like spellcraft:
Habits are doors.
A cue. A reaction. Repetition until automaticity.
You don't defeat an empire by screaming at it—you defeat it by changing the defaults it relies on. �
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We built a training loop around that truth.
Cue: the surge of dread when I sensed Galvan influence.
Reaction: instead of retreating into misdirection, I grounded into my body—breath, pulse, sensation, now.
Reward: a split-second of clarity where the probability threads stopped buzzing and became readable.
At first, it barely worked.
My mind is like three people talking at once. Each voice thinks it's the leader. One wants rest, one wants control, one wants to burn down everything that ever mocked me and call it justice. �
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But the guardians didn't tell me to silence the voices.
They told me to chair the meeting.
And for the first time in a long time, I did.
Chapter 5 — The Outer Spires
We struck the Outer Spires on a night when Zianttra's sky looked bruised—purple-black bands across the horizon, stars like punctures in a stretched skin of reality.
The Outer Spires weren't towers the way my home world imagines towers. They were structures that felt grown rather than built—stone threaded with metallic veins, arches like bones, surfaces etched with origin-script that made my eyes ache if I stared too long.
And inside them—
Anchors.
Not one.
Many.
A lattice.
Galvan wasn't installing a single heart into Zianttra.
They were installing a nervous system.
The storm-eyed guardian crouched beside me in the shadow of a cracked pillar. "If they finish linking the anchors," she whispered, "Zianttra becomes a standardized world. Predictable. Controllable."
A world can survive conquest.
It cannot survive being rewritten into a machine.
I felt the ignite shard in the pouch at my waist like a small sun trying to hatch.
And I realized something that sickened me with its simplicity:
Galvan's true weapon wasn't force.
It was narrative.
They didn't just tell worlds who ruled them. They told worlds what was possible, what was "normal," what was "reasonable," until resistance itself felt like insanity.
It reminded me too much of my home world.
Systems designed for separation and self-implosion. Masses kept docile by distraction. Truth treated like a threat. �
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I swallowed the bitterness.
"Where's the core?" I asked.
The old guardian pointed upward.
"Pinnacle chamber," he said. "The first anchor. The one that teaches the others how to behave."
We moved.
Quiet. Fast. A handful of people against an empire that believed inevitability was the same thing as right.
The deeper we went, the more the air vibrated. Not sound—instruction. Like reality itself was receiving orders.
And then we saw it.
The pinnacle anchor wasn't a pillar. It was a ring suspended in midair, dark metal braided with luminous channels. It rotated slowly, and with every rotation I felt a tug in my thoughts—as if the anchor was trying to "simplify" me into something easier to manage.
And standing before it—
The horned thing.
Not a memory.
Not a dream.
The same engineered antlers. The same wrongness. The same sub-audible voice that wasn't voice.
Fear hit me like a physical shove.
The window inside my mind trembled.
I felt it starting to close again.
The storm-eyed guardian's hand tightened on my shoulder. "Stay with us," she hissed.
But the horned creature turned its head slightly—as if hearing her words through layers of space—and I knew, with a cold clarity, that it wasn't here for them.
It was here for me.
It spoke without speaking.
And in that sound-beneath-sound, it delivered a message that didn't feel like language so much as it felt like design documentation.
You were not supposed to recover.
You were not supposed to remember.
You were not supposed to become present.
My vision doubled—past and future flickering like broken film.
I saw the chamber as it was.
I saw the chamber as it would be after Galvan won—anchors linked, Zianttra's wild probability tamed into a cage.
I saw the chamber as it would be if we destroyed the ring recklessly—energy spilling, worlds budding wrong, chaos birthing monsters that would make Galvan look merciful.
And I saw myself—
Standing at the crossroads, as usual.
Observing, as usual.
Waiting, as usual.
The old guardian's words came back:
Three wars.
One within the self.
One within the group.
One against the world.
If I lost the war within myself, it wouldn't matter what strategy we had. I would fold. I would retreat. I would let the empire become "inevitable."
I stepped forward into the open.
Every instinct screamed at me to hide.
Every habit I'd built in my home world—misdirection, passivity, emotional suppression—reached for the wheel.
And I did something small that changed everything:
I chose a different default.
I chose breath.
I chose sensation.
I chose now.
For the first time in I don't know how many lives, I didn't run into prophecy.
I didn't run into memory.
I didn't run into the safety of "later."
I stood in the present like it was ground I deserved to occupy.
The horned thing tilted its head again.
Its metallic antlers caught the anchor's glow and threw it back like a threat.
Then it moved.
Too fast.
It crossed the chamber in a blur and slammed a hand against my forehead.
The moment it touched me, I felt it trying to close the window.
Not gently.
Not like a door.
Like a guillotine.
I heard myself laugh—raw and bitter.
"Fuck that," I whispered.
And I pushed back.
Not with muscle.
With understanding.
With the fabric of reality I'd been studying in secret while people thought I was lazy, sitting, watching TV, "doing nothing." �
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The window didn't just reopen.
It widened.
And for one bright, terrifying instant, I saw what the Pruner truly was:
Not a beast.
A tool.
A Galvan instrument designed to enforce mental ceilings—to keep evolving minds from reaching origin-law comprehension.
And tools can be repurposed.
Or broken.