They moved in silence through the dead marsh, the unnatural stillness pressing against their skin like a second breath.
Time no longer flowed in one direction.
Kara noticed it first: a bird reversing in flight. Its wings beat forward, then backward, until it vanished altogether. The trees seemed to grow and shrink as they passed them. Shin stepped over a root only to find it had been there a second ago—and wasn't there now. Even Yazdrin, usually silent and unshaken, began to scan their surroundings more frequently, one hand always resting on his blade.
Karos said nothing. His grip tightened around his sword, the dagger on his waist pulsing stronger with each step.
Whatever was ahead, it wasn't just powerful. It was unnatural and it felt wrong.
The terrain grew more unstable, the mist thickening, coiling its way around their ankles like hundreds of tiny serpents. Eventually the ground began to slope downward, turning into a trail of broken stone and twisted vines that marked the way to dark a cave that opened before them like the maw of a sleeping beast.
At first it was just shadow and stone; But after several paces, the path gradually widened into a broad cavern lit by a faint, shifting glow—blue ethereal light one second before shifting to soft, radiant glows of gold; it was as if the very air itself couldn't decide what era it belonged to.
And then they saw it.
The temple.
Carved into the cave's rock wall stood the temple's great doors, now lying broken and shattered across the cold stone floor. What was once a monument to worship now stood empty and lifeless, a sign of the collapse. Its arches were bent inward, its sigils flickering between languages—some familiar, some lost to history, and others not yet invented.
But it wasn't the temple itself that made them stop.
It was the bodies.
Dozens of them. Maybe more.
They lay strewn across the stone steps, over the broken tiles of the courtyard, slumped against cracked pillars and broken doorways. Some were twisted in pain, others curled in fetal positions. All in various stages of decomposition—from fresh corpses with blood still pooling, to skeletons bleached and brittle.
And all of them… were moving.
Kara froze. "Spirits?"
"No," Karos said grimly. "Look closer."
One of the corpses—an armored soldier—let out a strangled gasp and clutched at his gut before falling forward, dying in agony.
Then, after three heartbeats, the wound closed.
He gasped again.
Clutched again.
Fell again.
Shin took a shaky step backward. "They're stuck in a loop… reliving their deaths."
"They're not aware of it," Yazdrin murmured. "To them, they are dying for the first time. Over and over."
Kara knelt beside a woman in a tattered mage's robe, her eyes wide with fear even as blood poured from her mouth. The elf touched the woman's hand—and felt warmth.
"She's alive," Kara whispered, voice trembling. "She's… alive right now."
Then, the woman died again, and her body ebbing and flowing, eyes snapping open in repetitive terror.
Karos stepped forward carefully. "They died at the gate. Whatever they were trying to stop, it trapped them here in their last moments. A place of worship reduced to a cold, empty tomb. They're tethered to it."
"Or by it," Yazdrin said, eyes narrowing. "A trap meant to feed on failure."
The four of them moved past the looping corpses in silence. None dared to speak. The only sounds were the gasps, groans, and cries of the dead dying for the thousandth time.
Through the shattered doors the temple opened into a hollowed sanctum.
The walls shimmered. Not with light—with time.
They pulsed in waves, showing flashes of history: kings and queens walking the halls, then refugees, then fires. The stone beneath their feet changed under every step—mosaic, marble, bone.
At the center of the chamber floated a Core—a sphere of swirling light and shadow, tethered to the floor by chains of temporal energy. It pulsed like a heartbeat, fast and full of urgency.
The dagger in Karos' hand began to vibrate, glowing brighter.
"We found it," he said.
"No," Kara whispered. "Whatever is here, it found us."
A ripple tore through the chamber. The air fractured and from the Core emerged a figure, shifting and unstable, wrapped in memory and decay.
A feminine voice, not spoken aloud but more of a whisper hanging on the edge of their minds that echoed like a distant memory, reached out to them. It was light and gentle, tinged with concern and fear as her voice seemed to fill the entire room.
"You are too late." the voice was dissonant like it was spread across multiple people.
The figure's face was a blur of lives. Its limbs bent like broken reflections. And its eyes—impossible to look at directly—reflected not just the present, but every moment that could have come to pass.
" Help, please. I am Astrin, the priestess of this temple. This temple needs to be cleansed. Continue my vigil, finish what I started. Deep within the cave there is...."
Two voices begin to speak in unison, layered on top of each other like a haunting echo. The words overlapping imperfectly, creating a ghostly, dissonant effect—one voice slightly delayed, the other sharper, more urgent. As the echo continued to build, the second voice growing stronger, rising in clarity and dominance. The first voice that called itself Astrin began to fade, dissolving into the background like mist, until only the singular voice remains—clear, commanding, and absolute.
"I am but a memory, an echo of lost time," it said before fading. "My bindings fail. My memories consume me. And soon… I will consume you." The voice and presence faded, became silent.
Karos raised his blade. "Release your hold on this temple. Let the dead go." he demanded.
There was no immediate response, only the distant disembodied whispers as a stale air began to lightly blow through the chamber.
"I cannot," the voice answered. "They are a part of me, and I am a part of this wound. To sever me… is to sever the thread of time itself."
The figure collapsed into the orb, floating for a few moments before the orb fell to the hard stone floor, glowing with a faint red hue it sat, radiating.
"Looks like we need to put it back." Kara said, looking over at the orb, briefly skeptical before bending over with a soft grunt. She strained to lift the orb from the ground, her muscles still sore from the fighting a few hours before.
The orb hummed in her hands, radiating a small amount of heat at first. As she continued to peer at, the sphere began to grow hotter, its light red surface deepening to a blood red crimson.
"Put it down now! It's going to..." Karos began to shout, moving towards her with a hand outstretched. Before he could reach Kara, the core erupted with a blinding flash as it released its stored energy, fire rapidly filling the room and engulfing the party, as an ear rupturing explosion echoed through the empty and worn stone halls.