“Vaara!” Vaski’s bark cut through the simulation chamber before I could slip toward the exit. “Report to the Scrivener’s Vault at first light. You are on parchment sorting. Indefinitely. Consider it… a re-education in humility.” Parchment duty. My former self, the Empire’s greatest Pathfinder, would have laughed. My current self simply sighed. It was exactly what I deserved for showing an ounce of competence. Porter-level stupidity was the only real shield in this damned academy. Now, the old man expected me to sort through crumbling Echo-sheets and dust-choked data-slabs. Fine. More time to avoid Jalo, avoid Senja, and most importantly, avoid the depths themselves. The Scrivener’s Vault was less a vault and more a catacomb of neglected records. Rows upon rows of towering, skeletal shelves clawed at the dim ceiling, laden with centuries of fortress history, maze research, and enough bureaucratic drivel to petrify a Stone Crawler. The air hung thick with the scent of dried glue, mildew, and the faint, metallic tang of decaying Echoes. Perfect. No one ever came here. No one ever looked. I was ostensibly tasked with re-cataloging the “Spire Anomaly Index,” a euphemism for administrative failures to categorize the shifting terrain. It was mind-numbingly tedious work, precisely the kind of soul-crushing drudgery I’d perfected. But under the guise of shifting ancient data-slabs, my fingers traced along hidden cracks in the shelving, seeking out the faint hum of an overlooked passage. Kivi, like all brutalist strongholds, had its secrets. And some masonry seams, an old scout never truly misplaced. Hours bled into days. My official progress crawled, punctuated by exaggerated yawns and stretches. My *real* work, however, was a silent scavenger hunt. I sifted through buried reports, discarded memos, and even the rambling field logs of long-dead scouts. I was searching for anything, anything at all, that hinted at a timeline anomaly, a tear in reality, or a compass needle spinning against true north. Most of it was useless. Dry, academic observations on Echo decay rates or increasingly wild theories about the deeper sectors. But then, tucked away in a sub-folder labeled “Uncategorized Temporal Flux Readings,” I found it. A series of heavily blacked-out reports, dating back to before my first death. The title, scrawled in faded ink, read: *Phenomenon of Temporal Erosion – Core Sector Gamma-7.* A knot tightened hard behind my ribs as I read. Gamma-7. That was the sector housing the pit. The place Jalo was destined to burn out. The report detailed paradoxical distortions, localized time dilation, and something chillingly referred to as “anti-Echoic resonance.” More damningly, the last few paragraphs were almost entirely blacked out, save for a few stray words: “…singular entity… timeline… rectification…” I leaned closer, squinting against the bad lantern light, trying to decipher the faint indentations under the ink. My fingertips skimmed the brittle paper, tracing the press of old nibs. And then, the silence fell. Not the comforting lull of the basement stacks, but a sudden vacuum. It swallowed the creak of settling beams and deadened the distant hum of the facility's power conduits. Pressure clamped behind my eardrums as the ambient draft died. Dust motes, previously drifting down the shafts of pale window light, stopped dead in midair. Suspended like grit in amber. The gray daylight warped around the edges of the cedar uprights, bending the grain into sharp angles. A drop in temperature hit my spine before I could turn. No bootstep, no scrape of stone. Just an abrupt vacancy where warm air used to be. I pivoted, hand dropping to the bare canvas belt at my hip. The Shard of Absence occupied the center aisle. It stood seven feet tall, an angular silhouette carved from faceted, colorless glass and hollow shadow. Its planes reflected neither the lantern nor the window slits, drinking in the room's illumination without casting a shadow of its own. Where a face should have rested, a smooth facet showed only black pitch. My ribs seized; the air in my throat felt thin as high mountain frost. It glided forward without stirring the suspended dust. A segmented arm lifted, edges shearing through the stale air like razor-honed quartz. A long, faceted finger leveled straight at my sternum. Then a strike like cracked crystal echoed inside the bone behind my ears. *“Anomaly detected. The timeline requires excision.”* The cadence was dead, flat, and perfectly sharp. It had tracked me across a lifetime. The lethargy I used as armor peeled away like rotting bark. Cold sweat broke across my collarbone. This thing was no wandering beast; it was an executioner dispatched to snuff out an unauthorized pulse. I didn’t offer excuses. I shoved off the desk with both heels. In my previous tour through Kivi, I had mapped every forgotten bolt-hole built into the foundation. I threw my weight against a section of oak paneling beside the tax ledgers. The hidden latch snapped back, releasing a narrow gap barely wide enough for a scrawny porter. Behind me, the glass appendage flexed. That sharp ring split through my skull a second time, louder, and frost crackled over the paper folios on the desk. The chill bit through the coarse linen of my tunic. I squeezed through the opening, scraping raw skin on rough mortar, and dragged my legs clear as the air behind me collapsed with a hollow pop. I tumbled out into a dead storage closet two tiers below, gasping against the tang of turpentine and dry lye. I slammed the utility latch shut and slid down against the rough brickwork, my ribs rattling against my chest wall. I had put three courses of load-bearing stone between us, but the phantom frost on my nape still burned. How had it traced me into the belly of the Kivi fortress? And how many seconds remained before it found the scent again?

Echoes of an Anomaly