Every Loop Costs a Friend

Chapter 5 - The Things We Cannot See

Chapter 5 · 857 words

Morning light.

Soren woke to morning light through a window he recognized. For one perfect second he was nowhere. Just light, warm and ordinary.

Then his body came back. All of it, at once. The ache in his shield arm. The raw skin on his palm where the strap had bitten through. The phantom sensation of something tearing through his chest.

His hand went to his sternum. Skin, unbroken. He pressed harder. Ribs, intact. His heart was beating under his palm, fast and hard, but the chest was whole.

He sat up.

The bunk room was the guild's standard issue. Narrow bunks in rows of six, a window at the far end, the stone walls painted the institutional gray that the guild used everywhere to avoid favoring any particular rank. His equipment locker was beside the bunk, the same locker, the same latch that stuck if you didn't lift it first.

He opened it. His gear was inside. Shield, short sword, supply pack, the second-hand jacket with the fraying collar. Everything clean. Everything undamaged. The raw place on his palm was gone. The skin was smooth, unmarked, the blister never having formed.

Soren sat on the edge of the bunk and put his head in his hands.

He remembered dying. He remembered the wound, the cold, the gray light going out. He remembered Sabine's face. He remembered Kael falling, the clean wound, the confusion in his eyes. He remembered the corridor, the silence, the things that killed without being seen.

He remembered the tower.

The duty roster was posted outside the bunk room door. Soren walked to it in his undershirt, barefoot on the cold stone, and read the date.

Seven days before the tower appeared.

He read it again. The same date. The same month. The same year he remembered from before the expedition. He pressed his finger against the parchment, the physical contact the only confirmation his eyes would accept.

"Nightmare," he said aloud. His voice sounded normal. The corridor echoed the way it always echoed. Someone in the common hall was laughing.

He went back to the bunk room and dressed. His hands were steady. His chest didn't hurt. His equipment fit the way it had fit before the expedition, before the training, before the tower. Everything was exactly as it had been.

He walked to the common hall. The smell of breakfast hit him. Oatmeal, weak coffee, the faint grease of fried bread. His stomach growled. He hadn't eaten since before the expedition. He wasn't sure if that was still true. He wasn't sure what was true.

Sabine was at the far table, eating. She looked up when he approached.

"Morning, Ashfall."

The same voice. The same face. The same flat assessment that had shifted, on the day he remembered, into something like respect. But that hadn't happened yet. Not in this timeline. Not here.

"Morning."

"You look like hell."

"Didn't sleep well."

She shrugged and went back to her oatmeal. Soren sat down across from her and stared at her face. She was alive. She was here. She was eating breakfast and complaining about his appearance and existing in every way that mattered.

Kael walked in, carrying a tray. He nodded at Soren. "You're on perimeter today."

"I know."

"Good. We need someone who holds position."

Soren watched him sit down, watched him eat, watched the scar through his eyebrow shift when he frowned at something on his tray. Kael was alive. Kael was here. Kael remembered nothing.

The tower wasn't here. Soren looked out the common hall window at the sky above the merchant quarter. Blue sky, clear and empty above the rooftops.

He ate his breakfast. The oatmeal tasted like oatmeal. The coffee tasted like bad coffee. Everything was exactly as it should be.

"Something wrong?" Sabine was looking at him.

"No."

"You're staring at the sky."

"Just checking the weather."

She gave him a look. The one that meant she didn't believe him but didn't care enough to push. Then she went back to her breakfast.

Soren finished eating. He stood, carried his tray to the wash station, and walked to the assembly point for the morning assignment. His hands were steady. His chest didn't hurt. His body was whole and his equipment was clean and the world was exactly as it had been before anything happened.

He told himself it was a dream. A vivid, specific, impossibly detailed dream. He told himself this because the alternative was something he couldn't function under. Not yet. Not without more information.

The assignment board listed his team. Perimeter support, eastern quadrant. Team designation Nine-Initiate. Ashfall, Solise, Varden.

The same assignment. The same team. The same everything.

Soren read the board and felt the gap opening between what he knew and what the world was showing him. He knew the tower would appear. He knew what was inside it. He knew what it did to the people who walked through its entrance.

And no one else knew anything.

He stood in the courtyard, in the morning light, in the world that was exactly as it should be, and he waited.