The fog didn't just swallow sound. It chewed on it.
Cassian heard the square behind them stretch and distort as he pushed forward—Lyra's muttered curse, Maeric barking for people to stay close, someone sobbing. The noises elongated, pulled thin, then snapped off as if the world had cut the line.
For a heartbeat, he wasn't sure his feet were touching anything.
Then the ground steadied under his boots. Cobble, but not the same pattern as the square. The air was wet and close, beading on his eyelashes. The fog pressed against his face like damp cloth.
"Still alive?" Lyra's voice came at his shoulder, tight but steady.
"For now," Cassian said.
Someone bumped hard into his back. "Can't… see a thing," they muttered.
"Stay on my voice," Maeric called. His words came from somewhere behind and to the left. "Do not break formation. If you wander, I'm not pulling you back out."
The idea of Maeric refusing to try to save a stray was laughable. Cassian didn't point that out. He had other priorities.
He slowed his pace, letting his eyes adjust to… whatever this was.
It wasn't normal darkness. It wasn't even normal fog. The world felt… layered. The nearer fog, the stuff brushing his skin, was a thin, clammy veil. Beyond it, he sensed thicker bands, like curtains half-drawn across a window. Shapes moved beyond those curtains.
"If you're about to say, 'Don't look at anything too closely,' it's too late," Lyra murmured.
He almost smiled. "Then don't listen too closely either."
"Do you ever say anything comforting?"
"I don't see the value."
"That was rhetorical."
Something flickered to their right.
Cassian turned his head.
Through a thinner patch in the fog, he saw the square again.
Not the one they'd just left, not exactly. The angles were wrong. The leaning building he'd collapsed was still standing, uncracked. There were fewer "survivors" by the well. No Leena. No old woman. The ones who remained were different shapes entirely.
A group of people—Draft candidates, like them, but not them—fought at the square's edge. He caught a glimpse of a woman with a scar down her cheek, her cleaver swinging in a familiar arc. Sade, but younger, without the heaviness in her shoulders.
Fog creatures tore into them.
Cassian watched the scene for a moment. One of the candidates slipped. The ring broke. Monsters poured in. The Nightmare folded around them like a closing fist.
The vision smeared and vanished, swallowed by fog.
He kept walking.
"What did you see?" Lyra asked.
"Options we didn't choose," Cassian said. "Or that someone else did."
"Stop being ominous and be specific."
He opened his mouth to answer. Closed it as something flickered on their left.
Another square. Another variation.
This time the defenders held longer. Cassian saw a Maeric that wasn't his Maeric, battered and bleeding, dragging a wounded ally back toward the well.
No one stepped into the fog. No one even looked at it.
The monsters came in a third, heavier wave. The great fused giant stomped into view. There was no building collapse this time. Just a slow, grinding massacre.
The view shuddered, fractured into a dozen smaller images, then dissolved.
Lyra made a small sound in her throat. "Are those—"
"Echoes," Cassian said quietly. "Of other runs. Other groups." He didn't know how he knew that. He knew it the way he knew where to push on a cracked wall. "The Trial repeats. It's showing us its history."
"Why?" Sade's voice drifted from somewhere behind them. "To scare us off?"
"To show us the 'proper' choice," Cassian said. "Stay. Defend. Die."
Something in the fog seemed to twitch at that, like a muscle around a wound.
They walked.
Time became slippery. Cassian couldn't have said how long they were in the murk. Seconds, minutes—it blurred. The only anchors were the pressure of people at his back, the brushed contact of Lyra's shoulder against his, the rhythmic throb of pain in his ribs.
Twice he heard someone stumble. Each time, hands grabbed cloth, leather, arms, dragging the wobbler back into the loose wedge. Nobody wanted to be the one who fell behind and discovered what the fog did to strays.
Eventually, the texture of the air changed.
The fog softened in front of them, thinning into a gray gauze. A shape loomed beyond it—not a building, not a monster. A space. A circle where the ground was clearer, the air still.
Cassian stepped through the last curtain of fog and into the clearing.
The difference was immediate.
Sound snapped back into focus. He heard his own breathing, harsh and uneven. The ragged breaths of the others. The muted hiss of the fog just beyond the ring of open ground, circling like a wall of ghosts pressing their faces to glass.
The ground here was smoother, the cobbles more even. Lines were carved into them—circles within circles, faint sigils etched in overlapping patterns. The markings weren't Church script, or Magus diagrams. They were older, their geometry wrong in a way that made Cassian's eyes ache if he looked too long.
At the clearing's center stood a figure.
No, not stood. Existed.
It was roughly human-shaped if a human were drawn by someone who had only heard the word in passing. Its body was made of layered silhouettes, stacked and slightly off-set, like a dozen people occupying the same space but out of phase with each other. As Cassian watched, the outlines shifted, swapping places. A broad-shouldered shadow slid in front of a narrower one, then was eclipsed by a hunched form clutching something to its chest.
Faces swam in the silhouettes' edges. None were fully visible for more than a heartbeat.
Eyes, mouths, cheeks, all misaligned.
The figure's head tilted in their direction. Several heads did, overlapping, their outlines jittering.
When it spoke, its voice had layers. Deep and high, male and female, old and young, all warped by distance.
"You were meant…" it said, and five voices said "meant" at once, some late, some early, "to stay."
The air around Cassian's Mark tightened.
Lyra swore under her breath. "That's new."
The figure took a step forward. Its movement dragged its layered shadows slightly out of sync, then snapped them back.
"…to wait," it continued. "To die with the left. The lost. The abandoned."
Maeric lifted his sword. "Who or what are you?"
The figure cocked its head again, as if tasting the question.
"I am… this pattern's Warden," it said. "I am the loop's spine. I am the echo of every choice made here. I am the answer to the question: 'What happens if you try to leave?'"
Its voices smiled without its outlines moving.
"No one leaves."
Behind Cassian, someone took an involuntary half-step back.
Cassian didn't.
He studied the Warden.
Its layers weren't random. There was a rhythm to their misalignment. A fraction of a pause between certain shifts, a flicker where two silhouettes tried to occupy the same angle and failed. His new sight slid along those points like fingers over splintered wood.
There were breaks there. Cracks.
The Warden's head turned, centering on him.
"You," it said. The word bounced between registers, not all of them friendly. "Deviation."
Cassian's grip tightened on his sword.
"You left," the Warden went on. "You left them. You were not meant to see the fog as door." Its voices layered "door," "wound," "mouth." "You were meant to see it as wall."
Lyra edged slightly closer to Cassian's side. "I don't suppose you're here to congratulate us on thinking outside the box," she said.
"Reward is available," the Warden replied. "Reset. You may return. Try again. Save them all, if you can. The pattern will adjust. The next ring will hold longer. The next fall will be sharper. Each attempt more… refined."
Cassian felt the offer as a pressure in the air. It wasn't speaking only in words now. The Trial's logic pressed against his mind, laying out paths.
He saw—briefly, in impressions rather than images—what it meant.
Squares where they held for twice as long. Three times. Where they pushed the monsters back again and again, their bodies breaking, their Shards burning, their sanity thinning. Where they saved four survivors, then six, then lost ten trainees, then two, then one.
He saw Maeric thriving in those loops, his light burning cleaner, his sense of purpose sharpened. He saw himself, in some of them, standing at the well until his legs gave out, watching ashes fall from a sky that never really changed.
He saw the Shroud drinking it all in, smiling without a mouth.
"No," he said.
The Warden's outlines rippled, like thrown stones hitting a pond.
"Refusal recorded," it said. "You would… break the loop."
"Yes," Cassian said.
"We break it by cutting you," Sade added, flexing her hand around her cleaver.
The Warden laughed.
It was a horrible sound, like pages tearing and bones splintering mixed together.
"You cannot break the loop," it said. "You are the loop. You are stories of how things end. This is where you belong. In the square. At the well. With the ones that are always left."
It stepped forward.
The fog pressed closer, forming a tight ring around the clearing, as if eager to see.
Maeric raised his shield. "If it's the spine," he said, "we cut the spine."
"That's the plan," Cassian said.
He didn't bother with a rousing speech. They didn't need courage. They needed angles.
The Warden moved faster than it looked capable of.
One moment, it was ten paces away. The next, it was there, arm—arms—lashing out. Its limb was a blur of overlapping shadows, each strike arriving a heartbeat apart, impacting shield, cloth, flesh.
Cassian ducked under the first sweep. The second clipped his shoulder, the impact cold and hot at once. For a dizzy second, he felt not one blow but several—echoes of strikes that had hit him in other runs, other lives. His vision doubled. Then his Path burned those phantom impacts away, focusing on the single bruise blooming now.
He slashed at the Warden's side.
His blade met resistance—not like flesh, not like stone. It was like cutting through bundled reeds and fog at once. The strike went in shallow, meeting only one silhouette's outline. The others flickered, adjusting.
"Don't just swing," he snapped. "Watch the gaps—when its shapes don't line up!"
Maeric grunted as a blow hammered his shield, driving him back a step. "A little more detail would be helpful!"
The Warden's arm split into three at the end of the swing, each hand lashing toward a different target. One smacked the scar-knuckled man in the chest, sending him flying. Another brushed the edge of Lyra's baton. For a heartbeat, her arm blurred, repeating the same blocking motion twice, then snapping back into sync with herself.
She gasped. "That is not—"
"Echo displacement," Cassian said. "Don't let it make you replay."
"Right, I'll just politely decline that experience, then," she snapped.
Sade barreled in low, cleaver aimed at what passed for the Warden's knee. Her blade bit deeper than Cassian's had. For an instant, one of the silhouettes that made up the leg went dark, winking out entirely. The Warden staggered, then shifted the weight of its other layers, regaining balance.
Where Sade's cut had landed, the outlines didn't perfectly overlap anymore. A gap.
Cassian's Ruin-Sight flared.
"There," he barked, pointing. "Left side—half a step behind the knee. Hit that spot when it stutters!"
Maeric adjusted without argument.
The Warden lashed out again, this time with both arms, trying to sweep them all back at once. Cassian ducked under the nearer limb and saw, for a heartbeat, the place where the silhouettes misaligned—a tiny hesitation in the swing where one layer was late.
He stepped into that hesitation and thrust.
His sword sank much deeper this time. The resistance was still unnatural, but the blade slid through more than one silhouette, cutting several layers of the Warden at once. Its voices glitched, a chorus of pained syllables colliding.
"Again!" he shouted. "Time your strikes to the stutter!"
The fight became a brutal rhythm.
The Warden would swing. Its layered body would ripple, some silhouettes lagging. Cassian would call the timing. Sade and Maeric would hit those moments, their strikes carving away fragments of the Warden's stacked selves.
Not everyone kept up.
One of the other candidates misjudged the pattern. He stepped forward too early, raising his spear.
The Warden's arm blurred around the spearpoint, ignoring the half-hearted block. Its hand—hands—closed around the man's head.
For a heartbeat, he was in two places: standing in front of them, head crushed, and standing at the square's edge, spear planted, watching monsters come.
Then both images shattered.
His body dropped bonelessly to the cobbles, eyes empty. A faint, translucent impression peeled off his skin, drawn toward the Warden's chest. It sank into the layered silhouettes and vanished, adding a new outline to the stack.
The Warden shuddered.
"More loops," it sighed, almost content. "More ways to fail."
Maeric's teeth bared. "You'll choke on them," he growled.
He lunged on Cassian's count, sword biting into the weak point in the Warden's chest. The outlines there flickered, half of them extinguishing.
The Warden retaliated by… changing strategy.
Up until now, its blows had been straightforward—brutal, heavy, overwhelming. This time, when its arm whipped toward Lyra, it didn't just strike.
The limb split into dozens of hands, each carrying something.
Faces.
They weren't fully formed, just impressions, but the effect was immediate. A child's face, smeared with tears. An old woman's, lips cracked from begging. Leena, mouth open in silent plea.
The hands pressed those faces toward Lyra, toward Maeric, toward anyone within reach.
"You left us," the voices wept, layered and distorted. "You left us. You left us."
Guilt slammed into the ring like a physical force.
Lyra flinched. For a heartbeat, her feet froze. Her baton dropped an inch.
Maeric's sword wavered.
Cassian felt the pull too.
He saw Leena's fingers slipping from his sleeve. The old woman's eyes. The way the others had clung to the well. His own hand, prying theirs away.
"Coward," one of the pleading voices hissed. "Monster."
The Warden pressed closer.
"Return," it urged. "Reset. Try again. Be better this time. You want to be better, don't you? You don't want to be this."
It pushed with guilt, with an ache that wasn't entirely fabricated. Some of that pain was real. Some of it was theirs.
Cassian's shoulders tensed.
Then something in him—something small and ash-colored and stubborn—caught fire.
Ember of Ruin, his Path whispered. You do not rewind for shame. You learn from it or you burn it.
He took that guilt, that ache, and treated it like any other crack.
He followed it to the point where it would break.
"Look at them properly," he snapped, voice cutting across the layered accusations. "They're not asking for you. They're asking for anyone who will feed the loop."
Lyra's eyes flicked to his. The faces pressed closer, their mouths opening wider.
"If you go back," Cassian said, "you don't save them. You just give them more versions of your death to eat."
He met Leena's eyes—or the Echo's imitation of them.
"If you're real enough to hear this," he said softly, "you deserved more than a well and a promise that never arrived. But I'm not your priest."
He swung.
His sword cut through the reaching hands, severing several faces at once. They split not like flesh but like wet paper, flapping and dissolving. The severed limbs recoiled, taking the worst of the guilt-pressure with them.
The Warden screamed.
It was an awful, static-laced sound. Its outlines jittered wildly, losing cohesion.
"Now!" Cassian roared. "Chest—where Maeric hit it! All together!"
Maeric moved without hesitation.
Sade too. Lyra, teeth gritted and eyes wet, stepped into range and drove her knife into the gap right above where Maeric's blade had bitten.
Their strikes landed in near-perfect unison.
The Warden's chest ruptured.
Light—if it could be called that—poured out. Not bright, not golden. It was ash-colored, gray and red, like embers flaring when a wind hit them.
The Warden staggered back, silhouettes peeling off its body one by one. Each shadow that fell detached with a little sigh, dissolving before it hit the ground.
"You were meant…" it tried again, voices fracturing. "…to… stay…"
Cassian stepped in close, ignoring the way the remaining outlines flickered around him. For a heartbeat, he stood inside its shape, his body overlapping with a dozen faint impressions of other bodies.
He saw flashes as they passed through him:
Men and women standing at wells. Children huddled against walls. Candidates dying over and over. Hands reaching, always reaching.
"No," he said quietly. "I was meant to leave."
He drove his sword straight through where the Warden's heart would have been if it had one.
The world convulsed.
The Warden burst—not into gore, not into fog, but into Shards.
They exploded outward in a halo, spinning like debris caught in a slow whirlpool. Most were small, no bigger than fingernails, shards of gray and black and faint sickly white. A handful were larger, pulsing faintly, orbiting an empty space in the air where the Warden had stood.
At the center of that space, something coalesced.
It was not as big as the Shard from the pinned giant, but it was… heavier.
A crystal, the length of Cassian's index finger, hung there, rotating slowly. Its surface was not fractured like the other Shards. It was smooth, but inside it, rings turned. Tiny circles of darker material spinning within the crystal, grinding silently.
Looking at it felt like looking down the throat of some mechanical beast.
This one, his instincts told him, was not about [Fear] or [Abandonment] alone.
This was [Loop].
[Cycle].
The Nightmare shuddered.
The fog walls around the clearing convulsed, recoiling as if someone had kicked them in the stomach. The sound of the bell came again, but it was barely recognizable now—a cracked, warbling chime that faltered halfway through its own toll.
The Shards started to fall.
"Grab what you can!" Sade shouted. She lurched forward, scooping a handful of smaller shards out of the air like a butcher catching coins.
Maeric hesitated only a fraction, then joined her, snatching one medium-sized Shard with a grim, determined set to his jaw. He kept his eyes off the central crystal, as if knowing deep down that this one wasn't meant for him.
Cassian walked toward it.
The central Shard pulsed as he neared.
The tiny rings inside it spun faster, then slowed, then matched the rhythm of something inside his chest. The ember of his Path flared in answer, like recognizing like.
"Of course," Lyra muttered behind him. "Of course that one would be yours."
He reached out.
His fingers closed around the crystal.
This time, the contact didn't feel like ice and fire. It felt like friction.
For a heartbeat, his skin tried to move at a different speed than his bones. His perception stuttered. He saw the clearing twice—one version where he had not reached for the Shard yet, one where he had—then the images slammed back together.
The crystal burned into his palm, then… sank.
Not into his flesh, not visibly. It sank deeper, past skin and muscle and bone, into the ember in his chest. The sensation was like dropping a gear into a machine whose teeth had been waiting for it.
The rings inside the Shard locked into the rings he'd seen in the ash-place sky.
Something in the Nightmare's fabric tore.
He heard it as a thought, not a sound:
TRIAL: "THE ONES LEFT BEHIND" — CLEARED.
SURVIVORS: 8/15.
PATTERN DEVIATION: LOGGED.
The world around him began to come apart.
The fog walls peeled away like scraps of burned parchment. The cobbles underfoot lost color, then texture, becoming outlines, then nothing. The air thinned, then thickened in a different way.
For a heartbeat, he was nowhere again.
Then he was standing in the ash-circle place.
Ash underfoot, ash falling around him. The sky above, those vast ring-lights turning, grinding. Only this time, they turned a little out of sync. A hair. A fraction.
An error.
"You again," the stone-voice said. Impersonal, grinding. Subject 7-Λ. Anomaly persistence threshold exceeded.
The rings shuddered.
"You are not supposed to be here," the voice went on. "Not like this. Not yet."
Cassian looked down.
At his feet, in the center of the ash circle, the ember that represented his Path burned brighter. The new Shard—the tiny, grinding loop—had sunk into it. Ash around him stirred, drawn into the glow.
"Get used to disappointment," he said.
The whisper-voice chuckled, pleased, somewhere at his back.
Iteration continues, it crooned. But not the way you wanted, little engine.
The stone-voice snapped:
Correction routines escalating.
Then the ash-place dissolved.
Cassian slammed back into his own body.
He staggered.
An arm caught him before he fell. Lyra's.
He blinked.
The fog was gone.
The clearing was gone.
He was standing in the sigil-etched circle of St. Hollow's ritual chamber again. The crystal overhead flickered, dimmer than before. The carved lines on the floor glowed a low, exhausted gold.
People gasped around him. Someone threw up. Someone sobbed. A body lay crumpled near the circle's edge, Mark dull.
"Return complete," the young priest said shakily. He looked as if he hadn't expected it to work quite like that. "By the Final Dawn's grace… you're back."
Lyra's grip on Cassian's arm tightened. "Yeah," she said, voice rough. "But something's different."
Cassian agreed.
He could feel the Shard inside him, grinding softly in time with his heartbeat.
The Nightmare might be over for now.
The loop, however, had only just started noticing him.