The bending starts before he even reaches the next Hall.
Kael notices it in small things first — his own hands, when he looks down at them, seem to be a half-second behind where they should be, like he’s watching himself through water that isn’t there anymore.
The dark curled around his fingers from the last Hall flickers, doubles, resolves back into one shape only when he stops looking directly at it.
𝐻𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝐼𝑙𝑙𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛, the System says.
𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑒𝑒 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑡 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑, 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑎𝑔𝑒.
“That’s not helpful.”
𝐼𝑡’𝑠 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒.
𝐻𝑒𝑙𝑝𝑓𝑢𝑙𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑔𝑢𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑒𝑑.
The space ahead of him opens into somewhere that looks, unmistakably, like the mission board room back at the Guild — same worn stone floor, same board covered in parchment, same torches guttering in their brackets.
Kael’s stomach does something ugly at the sight of it.
He doesn’t trust it for a second.
That doesn’t stop it from looking exactly right.
“Kael Ashworth.” The Guildmaster’s voice, from behind the board, same as it was the morning of the ceremony.
“A-rank adventurer, as of this morning.”
“You’re not real,” Kael says immediately, before the man’s even fully turned around.
“I already did this part. I already know how it ends.”
The Guildmaster’s face doesn’t so much drop as rearrange, features sliding into something looser, something with too many teeth in it.
“Do you, though?” Not the Guildmaster’s voice anymore.
Something underneath it, patient, amused.
“You know how one version ends. There are others.”
The board behind him shifts.
The parchment on it rewrites itself in real time, ink crawling across the page like insects, and where the Ashwood Pass mission notice was a second ago, there’s a different notice now — Kael’s own name on it, except the mission listed is one he’s never seen, never taken, and the pay listed at the bottom is obscene.
“This isn’t what happened,” Kael says.
“No,” the voice agrees.
“But it could have. If you’d read the board a little slower. If you’d taken the job two stalls down instead. If Sorin had asked you to get that drink somewhere else first.” The room flickers, and for one disorienting second Kael sees himself — another him, healthier, both eyes intact, laughing at something in a tavern that never existed, in a life that never happened.
“There are a thousand versions of that morning where you don’t die in Ashwood Pass at all. I can show you every one of them, if you’d like. Some of them are quite good.”
Kael’s jaw tightens.
“Why would you show me that?”
“Because it’s true. All of it. Every version I show you is a real thing that could have been you, just as much as the one that actually happened.” The voice doesn’t sound cruel saying it, which is somehow the worst part. Read the latest chapters at g.com.
“That’s the trick of this Hall, if you want to call it a trick. Nothing I show you is a lie. I just never tell you which true thing you’re looking at.”
The room dissolves and reforms, over and over, faster now — the tavern, the Pass, his mother’s kitchen again, a version of the goddess’s grey nothing where she sends him somewhere else entirely, a version where he never gets certified at all and dies an old man in Varn’s Hollow having never touched a sword.
Each one flickers past looking exactly as real as the last one.
Kael’s eyes start to ache from trying to hold onto which one he’s actually standing in.
“Stop,” he says, and his voice cracks on it.
“I could.” The voice sounds almost kind about refusing.
“But that wouldn’t teach you anything, would it?”
𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑒𝑦𝑒𝑠, the System says, quiet, urgent in a way it rarely bothers to be.
𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑖𝑡𝑠 𝑠𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦.
𝐼𝑡 𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑎𝑡.
Kael squeezes his eyes shut.
It doesn’t help as much as he’d hoped — he can still see the flickering shapes somehow, a pale afterimage burned in behind his eyelids, insistent, patient, waiting for him to open up again.
“It’s still there,” he says, teeth gritted.
𝑌𝑒𝑠.
𝐶𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑒𝑦𝑒𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑐𝑡.
𝐼𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑖𝑡.
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑠𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑎𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑜 𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛.
“So what am I supposed to do? Never open my eyes again?”
𝐼 𝑑𝑜 𝑛𝑜𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑎 𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑜𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢.
A pause, longer than usual.
𝐼 𝑠𝑢𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠, ℎ𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟.
Kael doesn’t like the sound of that at all, and he likes it even less when he opens his eyes anyway, because staying blind forever was never actually an option, and the shifting room is waiting for him exactly where he left it, patient, endless, offering up truth after true, useless, unbearable truth.
“You want me to pick one,” he says slowly, working it out loud.
“That’s it, isn’t it. You’ll keep showing me every life I could’ve had until I decide one of them is the one I actually want. And then what — you trap me in it?”
“Something like that.” The voice, for the first time, sounds almost approving.
“Most people pick eventually. It’s easier than the alternative.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Admitting none of them matter as much as the one you’re actually living.”
Kael stands very still in the middle of a room that keeps refusing to stay one room, and thinks about that.
Thinks about the version of himself laughing in a tavern that never existed, and how easy it would be to want that instead of this — instead of broken ribs, and a burned hand he doesn’t have yet, and a goddess’s patient, sorrowful eyes, and a Marquis he’s never met who thinks he already got away with something.
The tavern version flickers closer, clearer, like it can tell he’s looking a little too long.
In it, Sorin’s still alive too, obviously, still grinning, still terrible at holding his drink, and for one long, aching second Kael lets himself actually want it — not the power, not the revenge, just that. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
A friend.
A drink.
A life where nobody ever needed to say the word wyrm out loud.
Then he makes himself look away from it on purpose, which is somehow harder than anything the guardian or the fire or the dark managed to make him do.
He doesn’t want easy.
He never really has.
“Fine,” he says.
“Show me all of them. I don’t care. None of them are the one that happened, and the one that happened is the only one I have to actually finish.”
The voice doesn’t answer right away, and the shifting room, for the first time, seems to hesitate — flickering slower, the tavern and the kitchen and the Guild hall all bleeding into each other at half speed, like it doesn’t quite know what to show him if he won’t pick.
“Then you’ll need new eyes,” it says finally.
“Ones that don’t get tricked by what’s true. Only one is available to you.”
Kael feels it before he understands it — a pressure behind his left eye, sudden and total, and pain that arrives late, almost as an afterthought, like his body needs a second to catch up to what’s happening.
He doesn’t scream, though it’s a close thing.
He goes down on one knee instead, hand pressed hard against his own face, and when he finally manages to look up through the one eye still working, the shifting room is gone.
𝑇𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑒, the System says, and for once it doesn’t sound flat at all.
𝐹𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝐼𝑙𝑙𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑.
𝐼 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑠.
“Little late for that.” His voice comes out ragged.
Where his left eye used to be, there’s a cold, faint light instead, steady, unblinking, and when he looks around the empty Hall with it, he can see — not more clearly, exactly, just truer.
No shifting.
No maybes.
Just what’s actually there.
He stays on one knee a while longer than he needs to, getting used to a version of seeing that costs this much.
Somewhere ahead, past whatever this Hall used to be, he can already feel the next one.
Emptier than the void.
Hungrier, somehow, than the fire.
He gets up anyway.
He’s starting to think that’s the only trick he actually knows.