A Sky That Repeats
Following a clue embedded within the Archivist's vision, Cael and Mireth travel into the Myrren Heights, where an ancient ruin rests at the peak: an abandoned Astral Observatory.
The oddity strikes Cael first.
"Didn't we just pass that ridge?"
"And that star—wasn't it there a moment ago?"
Mireth notices too: birds fly in loops, clouds form and unform, and their footsteps leave marks… then vanish.
The entire zone is caught in a localized time loop.
A Room Without Exit
Inside the Observatory's dome, the strange warping intensifies:
A telescope points at the same quadrant of sky, even as the sun rises and sets in moments.
Chalkboard writings erase and rewrite themselves.
A lantern burns backwards—wax uncandling into its wick.
Cael finds a series of Void-aligned glyphs etched into the inner dome, tied to the stars. These match fragments the Archivist showed him—a puzzle made of celestial glyphs.
"We're not just here to observe," Cael mutters. "We're part of the machine."
The Time Echoes
As Cael adjusts the telescope, he sees a version of himself. Then another. And another.
Each performs slightly different actions—writing alternate glyphs, failing, succeeding, screaming in silence.
"These are… future maybes," Cael realizes.
"No," Mireth whispers. "These are ghosts of possibilities you already rejected."
Suddenly, one echo turns toward him. It shouldn't be able to.
It writes a glyph of pure Void—and the loop fractures.
Breaking the Loop
Mireth screams. The dome begins collapsing inward—but not physically. Moments fold in on themselves.
Cael, desperate, stabs the bone quill into his own palm and writes a counter-glyph in blood and Essentia across the Observatory floor.
"Not reversion. Not preservation.
I choose remembrance."
The loop shatters.
Time resumes. The stars move freely. The ghosts vanish.
And in the telescope's lens, now aimed correctly, Cael sees a location encoded in starlight—coordinates to a long-lost Fracture Seed, a remnant of the first reality break.
Mireth's Silence
As they leave, Mireth doesn't speak. She looks troubled.
Finally, she says:
"When we were trapped in that loop… I saw myself hand you over. I saw myself turn away."
"You didn't."
"No. But it felt… easy."
Cael doesn't answer. But that night, he doesn't sleep. He just watches the stars shift for real—for the first time in days.