"To reach is to move."
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The morning greeted her with warmth. Golden light streamed through the window, catching on dust motes that floated lazily in the air. It was quiet. Peaceful. Everything was exactly as it should be.
But as Juno stepped out of bed, the feeling of wrongness coiled around her ribs like a tightening wire.
Something felt... off. The memory of yesterday was distant, blurred, slipping through her fingers like sand no matter how hard she tried to grasp it. She had spent time with her parents. They had laughed, they had eaten together, they had been happy. So why did it all feel like a half-forgotten dream?
The floor was cool under her bare feet as she walked to the bathroom. The wooden door creaked slightly as she pushed it open. Inside, everything was in place—the small sink, the neatly folded towels, the scent of lavender soap lingering in the air.
And the mirror.
She stopped. Stared. Something was strange about her reflection today.
Juno leaned forward, pressing her fingertips against the cool porcelain of the sink. Her breath fogged up the glass slightly as she examined herself.
Her skin looked smoother. Her hair, a little shorter. Her frame, a little smaller.
She looked... younger.
Her heart pounded in her ears. She reached up, hesitantly tracing the curve of her cheek. The reflection did the same. Her throat felt dry.
"I'm just tired," she whispered to herself, shaking her head. "It's okay."
Then she heard it.
"It's okay."
The words echoed back to her, but not from her own lips.
Juno froze. Her reflection had spoken on its own.
Her breath hitched as she stumbled back, gripping the edge of the sink. The blood in her veins turned to ice.
The reflection grinned. A sharp, eerie grin that was entirely unlike her own.
And then—it ran.
Not in place, not mimicking her movements—no. The reflection turned, twisted out of view, disappearing from the mirror as if it had broken free.
Juno's stomach plummeted.
Her whole body seized with a primal terror as she whirled around, expecting—what? That she'd find herself standing right behind her?
But the bathroom was empty.
The mirror was normal again, her reflection staring back, wide-eyed, breathless, horrified.
She swallowed, the hairs on her arms standing on end. Her fingers curled into fists as she forced herself to breathe, her lungs feeling too tight, too small.
"It was nothing," she whispered, barely convincing herself. "Just my mind playing tricks on me."
But she wasn't convinced.
Slowly, cautiously, she stepped out of the bathroom, her bare feet padding softly against the wooden floor.
She glanced around. "Mom? Dad?"
No answer.
The house was still. Too still.
A terrible weight pressed against her chest. The warmth from before felt like a distant lie. Juno moved through the rooms, glancing around with growing unease.
They weren't here.
Something is wrong.
She stepped toward the front door, pressing a hand against the wood, heart hammering as she opened it.
Cold air slapped her in the face.
Juno's breath hitched.
The sun—gone. The golden, sunlit streets—gone. The warmth of morning—gone.
Instead, she was met with a sprawling urban cityscape, rain drizzling in heavy sheets, neon lights flickering in the distance.
This wasn't her home.
Her heart lurched as she turned back.
But there was nothing.
No house. No doorway. No walls. Nothing behind her but an empty street.
She stumbled backward, pressing a trembling hand against her chest. "No, no, no—" her voice barely escaped in a whisper.
What... What was happening?
A heavy silence swallowed her, drowning out even the sound of the rain. The streets, once bustling, were devoid of life. At least, at first.
Then she saw them.
People. Walking. Moving. Their forms blurred under the streetlights.
Faceless.
Their features melted into blank voids, flickering in and out of existence like static, their bodies fading at the edges as if reality itself was rejecting them.
Juno's blood ran cold.
The world around her twisted, the buildings stretching too high, the streets warping under the dim glow of the neon lights. The rain poured harder, soaking into her skin, chilling her to the bone.
She was alone.
Alone. Again.
The streets of Aetherion stretched before her, but they felt... wrong. The rain slicked the pavement in an oil-sheen gloss, the reflections of buildings smudged and unfocused, like a painting smeared by careless hands. The faceless figures that had once moved through the city were gone now—nothing left but the occasional flicker at the edges of her vision, silhouettes melting into the shadows before she could look at them directly.
Juno stood in the middle of it all, the weight in her chest pressing down harder than before.
"This is familiar."
The words left her lips before she could even think them. Her breath hitched, and her fingers curled into her damp sleeves. Her heart pounded as she turned in slow circles, watching the rain pool in the gutters, watching the buildings stand too still, too breathless. It felt like something was waiting.
Then, she ran.
Her boots struck the wet pavement, sending icy splashes up her legs, soaking into the fabric of her pants, but she didn't stop. The air was thick with the scent of rain and asphalt, clinging to her skin like something alive. Her pulse thundered in her ears, in time with the rapid beat of her footsteps. She ran as if she knew where she was going. As if her body remembered something her mind had yet to grasp.
Buildings twisted in her periphery, their shapes wrong—too tall, too thin, their edges flickering like half-formed thoughts. The alleys stretched unnaturally, their dark mouths yawning wider the further she ran, like the city itself was breathing, shifting, watching.
Then she saw it.
The orphanage.
Her breath hitched as her momentum faltered. It loomed before her, wedged unnaturally between modern structures that should have swallowed it whole. But it remained. An aberration. A relic of a time she had long buried, pulled from the depths of her past and forced into the present.
The wooden facade was worn, splintering at the edges, its walls cracked like an old wound that had never truly healed. The windows stared back at her, hollow and dark, empty sockets in a corpse long forgotten. The sign above the door still bore its name—though the letters seemed warped, rearranging themselves when she tried to focus.
Juno swallowed.
Why am I here?
Her lungs burned from the run, her legs ached, but a deeper exhaustion settled in her bones—one not from running, but from remembering. Aetherion's underbelly had been cruel, but this place had been worse. Here, cruelty had come with the softness of whispered lies and the promise of safety, wrapped in a cage she hadn't realized she was trapped in until it was too late.
Her fingers twitched. She could almost feel the ghost of a hand gripping her wrist, yanking her back inside, the door slamming shut behind her.
Her breath came unsteady.
No system. No rewind. No Chronosword. No way to fight.
The realization settled over her like a slow, creeping fog. I shouldn't be here. And yet, she was. Drawn by something unseen, something pulling at her chest, as if this place had never truly let her go.
She exhaled shakily and took a step forward. Her fingers hovered over the brass door handle, the metal worn and cold under her touch. She hesitated. Every instinct screamed at her not to enter.
Then—
"Juno."
Her breath stalled.
The voice was warm. Familiar.
Wrong.
Slowly, she turned.
They were standing there.
Her parents.
She stiffened, the world tilting beneath her feet. Her mother, eyes gentle, lips curved in a soft, knowing smile. Her father, standing beside her, his expression unreadable, as if carved from something older than time.
"Come home, Juno," her mother whispered.
Home.
Her fingers clenched around the door handle.
No.
No, this wasn't right. They were gone. They had been gone for years. This wasn't real. This couldn't be real.
Juno shook her head, her throat tightening. "You're not—"
Then they twitched.
A flicker. A glitch in reality.
Their skin darkened. Their limbs stretched. Their bodies melted into something fluid, shifting like ink spilling into water. Their faces slipped away, features dissolving, peeling back to reveal nothing but emptiness.
And then their eyes opened.
Too many eyes.
Hundreds—no, thousands—of crimson orbs blinked open across their formless flesh, staring, unblinking, piercing into her mind. Their mouths stretched wide, impossibly so, filled with jagged, uneven teeth, not built for speaking but for devouring.
The air thickened. The world groaned under their presence.
The Void Lords of Silence and Deception.
Juno staggered back, her spine pressing hard against the orphanage door, her breath coming in ragged, uneven gasps.
They should not be here. They should not be here.
The air itself felt diseased, thick with something ancient, something wrong. A pressure bore down on her, suffocating, warping the space around them. The buildings flickered, warping at the edges, like reality itself was being rewritten.
She clenched her jaw, her fingers digging into the wooden door behind her.
"Why?" she choked out. "Why do you keep coming back?"
The Void Lords did not answer. They only watched.
The weight of their gaze settled over her like chains, pressing, pulling, suffocating. Shadows curled at their feet, stretching toward her, reaching. Her legs trembled. Her body screamed at her to run.
But she had nowhere left to go.
She turned her head, staring at the door behind her. The place she had once escaped. The place she had sworn never to return to.
A choice.
Juno clenched her jaw, fingers tightening around the handle.
The Void Lords stepped closer.
The shadows surged.
If she didn't move—
No.
No, she wouldn't let them trap her. Not again.
...
"Mother."
"Father."
"Or whatever you are."
The words left her lips, steady, even—but inside, something threatened to crack. Juno stood there, fists trembling at her sides, her body taut with the weight of everything pressing down on her. The memories that weren't hers. The warmth that wasn't real. The love that had never truly existed.
She forced a smile, a soft curve of her lips—gentle, almost apologetic, as if she could still offer something human to what had long since stopped being anything close to it. But she knew the truth. Knew it deep in her marrow, in the cold logic of her mind, in the sharp intuition that had kept her alive for so long.
This was not her family.
This was a construct. A fabrication. A cruel echo crafted to make her hesitate.
And hesitation, in a game like this, meant death.
The false warmth coiled around her, insidious, like phantom hands reaching—grasping—trying to keep her from slipping away. A part of her wanted to let them. The same part that still ached for a childhood that had never been kind to her, the part that longed for what could have been if the universe had been less cruel.
But she had already made her choice.
"Thank you for the short time you gave me."
A deep inhale. A swallow thick with something unspoken.
"But I have to live. I have to move forward."
Then—
Silence.
Juno opened her eyes.
The figures before her twitched. Not in rage. Not in sorrow. But in something far worse—disbelief. Their bodies glitched, moving through fragmented motions, limbs lagging behind them as if time itself had momentarily forgotten how to carry them forward. The mist that formed their bodies pulsed and contorted, baring jagged teeth in soundless snarls.
Their eyes—those horrible, crimson orbs embedded in the depths of the shifting void—burned with something close to recognition. As if, in this moment, they understood something they hadn't before.
That she would not be deceived.
Juno took a step forward.
The world groaned. The air around her warped. Something unseen pulsed through the space between them, bending, twisting, vibrating like a thread pulled too tight, seconds away from snapping.
It felt fragile. Everything felt fragile.
Like glass stretched too thin.
Like reality itself was ready to shatter.
She lifted a hand. Her fingers barely brushed against their shadows. The warmth was gone. What was left was a hollow cold, not just the absence of heat, but the absence of existence itself.
Her lips parted, the words simple, final.
"Goodbye."
The moment they left her mouth, the world cracked.
It was not the sharp, sudden sound of something breaking—it was deeper, more terrible, like ice splitting over a vast, frozen sea. The figures convulsed, their elongated limbs jerking violently, their forms spasming as if something unseen was ripping through them.
Then they fell—not backward, not away, but into something else.
Juno watched, unmoving, as their bodies were flung toward the darkest corner of the street. But they did not hit stone. They did not strike the ground. They struck nothing.
And that nothing rippled.
A distortion.
A glitch.
A jagged fissure split through the air, a tear in the fabric of the world itself. The street flickered, for the briefest of moments, as if existence itself had hesitated. The sky warped. The buildings around her stretched and contracted, their edges distorting, flickering between states of being—here, then not here.
For a split second, even Juno's own body flickered, as if the error was unraveling her too.
Then—stability.
The world settled.
The void swallowed what remained of the false figures, consuming them into silence.
Juno exhaled, slow and deliberate. She let her hands lower to her sides, her fingers unclenching. Steady now. Steady. She turned her back on the distortion, on the broken remnants of whatever illusion this had been.
And faced the doors.
The orphanage loomed over her, just as it always had.
A wooden giant, aged and weathered, riddled with memories she had never wanted to confront. The dark grain of its surface bore marks of small, restless hands—scratches, carvings from nameless children who had once stood where she stood now. Some had vanished into time. Others had never left at all.
Juno reached out, palm pressing against the heavy iron handle.
The cold seeped into her skin.
She hesitated.
Just for a breath. Just long enough to acknowledge the trembling in her bones, the whisper at the back of her mind that told her—once you step through this door, there is no turning back.
Then—
She tightened her grip.
And pushed.