The broken mirror didn't just show memories, it devoured them.
Ashen could feel it pulling at the edges of his consciousness, trying to drag out every fragment of the erased past. The boy who had been the first Hero candidate, the one who collapsed and died forgotten, his screams echoed in the glass like a wound that refused to heal.
But there were others.
Hundreds of them.
All the beta testers, all the failed experiments, all the inconvenient truths that the System had buried beneath layers of revised history. Their faces flickered in the cracked surface, each one a testament to the machine's ruthless efficiency in editing reality.
Riven's hand found his shoulder, grounding him before the vortex of memory could pull him under completely.
"Ashen," she whispered, her voice cutting through the symphony of the dead. "We need to leave. This place, it's not stable."
He nodded slowly, but didn't move. His eyes remained fixed on the mirror, watching as the faces continued to cycle through their eternal loop of suffering.
"Do you know what the worst part is?" he asked, his voice barely audible above the wind that had begun to pick up around them.
Riven waited.
"They're still screaming because they think someone might hear them. They don't know that the System made sure no one would ever listen."
A shudder ran through the ground beneath their feet. The temporal seams were widening, reality straining against itself as competing versions of history fought for dominance. In the distance, more statues were beginning to crack, their stone shells unable to contain the pressure of existing in multiple states simultaneously.
Ashen finally turned away from the mirror, but not before pressing his palm to its surface one last time. The Anathema flared, and for a moment, the screaming stopped. Not because the pain had ended, but because someone had finally acknowledged it.
"Let's go," he said.
They moved quickly through the field of statues, Ashen leading with the practiced efficiency of someone who had navigated this terrain in another lifetime. But the landscape was changing, reality shifting like quicksand beneath their feet. What had been a clear path in his memories was now a maze of contradictions, each step potentially leading them deeper into the System's attempt to reconcile irreconcilable truths.
"Tell me about the beta tests," Riven said as they climbed over a fallen statue, its face worn smooth by temporal erosion. "What really happened?"
Ashen paused at the crest of a small hill, looking back at the field they were leaving behind. "The System wasn't always automatic. In the beginning, it required manual calibration. The gods would select candidates, run them through trials, adjust the parameters based on the results."
"Like a game?"
"Exactly like a game. Except the players were real people, and death was permanent." He started walking again, his pace measured and deliberate. "The first hundred candidates were all failures. Too weak, too smart, too independent, too broken. The gods kept tweaking the selection criteria, looking for the perfect combination of power and compliance."
Riven stumbled slightly as the ground beneath her shifted, stone becoming sand becoming something that wasn't quite either. "And the boy in the mirror?"
"Candidate number seventy-three. Malakai Thorne. Twelve years old, selected for his pure heart and natural affinity for light magic." Ashen's voice carried the weight of someone reciting names from a memorial wall. "He lasted six hours before the pressure broke his mind. The instructors found him in his quarters, catatonic, clutching a training sword like it was the only real thing left in the world."
"What happened to him?"
"Officially? He never existed. The System retroactively edited him out of the candidate pool, redistributed his memories among the remaining testers to maintain continuity." Ashen stopped walking and turned to face her. "Unofficially? He died three days later. Malnutrition. His body forgot how to eat because his mind forgot how to want to live."
The wind picked up again, carrying with it the sound of distant thunder. But this wasn't weather, it was the System's processing power working overtime to resolve the cascading contradictions their presence was creating.
"How many others?" Riven asked.
"All of them," Ashen replied. "Every single beta tester was erased when the System went live. Their deaths were reclassified as statistical anomalies, their families' memories adjusted to believe they had never had children, their very existence scrubbed from reality."
"And you remember them all?"
Ashen nodded. "The Anathema doesn't just reject the System's current state, it preserves everything the System tries to delete. Every time it attempts to edit history, I become the repository for what was lost."
They crested another hill and found themselves looking down into a valley that definitely hadn't existed in Ashen's previous timeline. The space was filled with structures that seemed to phase in and out of reality, buildings from different eras and architectural styles occupying the same physical space without quite touching. It was like looking at a city built from overlapping photographs, each exposure capturing a different moment in time.
"Temporal confluence," Ashen muttered. "The System is trying to merge multiple timeline variants into a single stable state."
"Is that bad?"
"For us? Probably. For the System? Definitely." He started down the slope, careful to test each step before committing his full weight. "It means we're having a bigger impact than it anticipated. The cascade failures are accelerating."
As they descended into the valley, the air grew thick with an almost tangible sense of wrongness. The buildings around them flickered between states, sometimes solid enough to cast shadows, sometimes translucent as ghosts. Through the translucent walls, they could see people, or the memory of people, going about their daily lives in different time periods.
A merchant hawking wares from a cart that was simultaneously empty and overflowing with goods.
A child playing with a ball that existed only every third bounce.
A woman hanging laundry that dried and rotted and vanished and reappeared in an endless cycle.
"They don't know," Riven whispered, watching the phantom residents continue their routines oblivious to their fractured existence.
"The System is trying to preserve as much as possible while editing out the contradictions," Ashen explained. "But it's failing. There are too many variables, too many timeline splits to reconcile cleanly."
They made their way deeper into the phantom city, following what appeared to be a main thoroughfare. The buildings here were more stable, suggesting this area represented a convergence point where multiple timelines agreed on basic details. But even here, the signs of strain were obvious. Street lamps that flickered between different styles of illumination. Cobblestones that were sometimes smooth, sometimes cracked, sometimes not there at all.
It was in the city's central square that they found the other regressor.
She was sitting on a bench that existed in at least three different time periods simultaneously, feeding pigeons that may or may not have been real. Her appearance was stable, unlike everything else around her, which immediately marked her as someone outside the System's direct control.
"You must be Ashen," she said without looking up as they approached. "I've been waiting for you."
"And you are?"
"Elena Voss. Timeline designation Gamma-7." She finally raised her head, revealing eyes that held the same hollow weight Ashen recognized in his own mirror. "I was a candidate in the third wave of regressors. Failed my mission, got erased, came back anyway."
Riven positioned herself slightly behind Ashen, hand resting on her staff. "How do we know you're not another System construct?"
Elena smiled, but there was no warmth in it. "Because if I were, I wouldn't remember this."
She rolled up her sleeve, revealing an arm covered in scars that seemed to writhe and shift across her skin. But these weren't random marks, they were words. Names. Dates. Fragments of erased history carved directly into her flesh.
"The System tried to delete my timeline completely," she continued. "Made it so I was never chosen, never regressed, never existed. But the Anathema doesn't let go easily. Instead of dying, I became a living repository for my entire timeline's history."
Ashen studied the scars more closely. Among the shifting text, he could make out references to events that had never happened, people who had never lived, victories that had never been won.
"What was your mission?" he asked.
"Same as yours, originally. Stop the Demon God, save the world, become the Hero." Elena's laugh was bitter. "But my timeline's version of Kaleid wasn't just a coward, he was actively working for the enemy. When I tried to expose him, the System intervened directly. Reclassified me as a villain, turned my entire party against me."
"And then?"
"I killed them all. Every single one of them. Including Kaleid." The scars on her arm pulsed, new words appearing and disappearing like a living tattoo. "But it didn't matter. The System just reset everything, brought them all back, and edited me out of the equation entirely."
"But you're here," Riven pointed out.
"Because the reset wasn't clean. There were witnesses, people who remembered fragments of what I'd done. The System couldn't erase me completely without creating paradoxes, so it tried to quarantine me instead." Elena stood up, the pigeons around her suddenly revealing themselves to be made of static and error messages. "Joke's on them. Quarantine just made me stronger."
A rumble echoed through the valley, and several of the phantom buildings flickered more violently. The System was becoming increasingly unstable, the cascade failures spreading like cracks in a dam.
"How many others are there?" Ashen asked.
"Of us? Seven, originally. But the System has been hunting us, trying to resolve the paradoxes we represent." Elena's expression darkened. "I'm the only one from the second generation still active. The others either found ways to hide completely or..."
"Or?"
"Or they found ways to die permanently. Turns out there are fates worse than regression."
Another rumble, this one strong enough to make the ground beneath their feet shift. In the distance, they could see portions of the phantom city beginning to collapse, buildings folding in on themselves as competing realities fought for dominance.
"The System's running out of processing power," Elena observed. "Too many paradoxes, too many timeline splits. It's starting to make mistakes."
"What kind of mistakes?" Riven asked.
Elena pointed to a nearby building that was flickering more rapidly than the others. As they watched, a figure appeared in one of the windows, a man in ornate robes who gestured frantically at something outside their field of vision.
"That's Archbishop Matthias," Elena said. "He's supposed to be in the capital right now, blessing the Hero's sword for the upcoming campaign against the northern territories."
Ashen felt a chill run down his spine. "He's dead. I killed him three months ago in my timeline."
"And I killed him six months ago in mine," Elena added. "But the System can't decide which version of his death is canonical, so it's defaulting to the pre-death state while it processes the contradiction."
The implications hit them both at the same time.
"If the System is having trouble processing individual deaths..." Ashen began.
"Then it's having trouble processing the larger timeline changes we've caused," Elena finished. "Which means..."
"Which means what?" Riven demanded.
Elena and Ashen exchanged a look that spoke volumes.
"It means the System is breaking down completely," Ashen said quietly. "And when it collapses entirely, it's going to take reality with it."
The rumbling was getting stronger now, and more of the phantom city was beginning to dissolve. But this wasn't the controlled editing they had witnessed before, this was catastrophic failure. Buildings didn't just fade, they imploded into impossibilities, their matter and energy unable to exist in the fractured space between conflicting realities.
"We need to get out of here," Elena said, standing and brushing static-pigeons off her coat. "The confluence zone is about to collapse, and we don't want to be here when it does."
"Where do we go?" Riven asked.
Elena pointed toward the edge of the valley, where the hills rose up toward what appeared to be more stable terrain. "There's a safe house, or what passes for one in this mess. Other regressors have been gathering there, trying to figure out how to fix what we've broken."
"You mean what the System broke," Ashen corrected.
"Does it matter at this point?" Elena shot back. "Blame doesn't fix paradoxes."
They began moving toward the hills, but their progress was slow. The ground itself was becoming unreliable, solid one moment and intangible the next. Several times they found themselves sinking knee-deep into earth that couldn't decide whether it was dirt, sand, or empty air.
As they climbed, Riven asked the question that had been weighing on all their minds.
"If the System collapses completely, what happens to everyone else? The people who aren't regressors, who don't have Anathema protection?"
Elena and Ashen didn't answer immediately, but their silence was answer enough.
"They get erased along with everything else," Ashen finally admitted. "When the System fails catastrophically, it doesn't just lose the ability to maintain reality, it actively destroys anything it can't process."
"Then we have to fix it," Riven said firmly.
"Fix what?" Elena laughed bitterly. "The System is a divine construct, woven into the fabric of reality itself. We're not engineers, we're glitches. Our very existence breaks it further."
"Then we find another way," Riven insisted. "There has to be something."
They had reached the crest of the hill, and from here they could see the safe house Elena had mentioned. It was a modest structure, probably a hunting lodge or hermit's retreat in more stable times. But unlike everything else in the area, it appeared completely solid, completely real.
"How is it stable?" Ashen asked.
"Null zone," Elena explained. "A pocket of reality that exists outside the System's influence. We found it by accident when one of the other regressors was trying to hide from a purge cycle."
As they approached the lodge, Ashen could feel the change in the air. The oppressive weight of the System's constant processing, the subtle pressure that had been a constant presence since his regression, suddenly lifted. For the first time in months, he felt like he could breathe freely.
The door opened before they could knock, revealing a figure that made Ashen's heart stop.
It was another version of himself.
Not a System construct or a mimic, but an actual alternate timeline variant. This Ashen was older, more scarred, and wore robes instead of armor. But the eyes were identical, carrying the same weight of accumulated pain and stubborn determination.
"Timeline designation Alpha-1," the other Ashen said by way of introduction. "You're later than expected."
"You're me," Ashen managed.
"One version of you. The one who chose magic over swords, subtlety over confrontation." The older Ashen stepped aside to let them enter. "Also the one who figured out how to kill gods permanently."
The interior of the lodge was larger than the exterior suggested, space folded and expanded through techniques that had nothing to do with the System's reality manipulation. Several other figures were seated around a large table covered in maps, diagrams, and what appeared to be fragments of divine code rendered in physical form.
"Welcome to the last free place in existence," Alpha-1 Ashen said. "Now let's talk about how we're going to save the world by destroying everything that made it possible."
Elena moved to join the others at the table, but Riven hung back, staying close to Ashen.
"This is insane," she whispered.
Ashen nodded. "Completely. But it's also our only chance."
He looked around the room at the assembled regressors, each one a walking paradox, each one carrying the weight of erased timelines and impossible memories. They were the System's greatest failure and its most dangerous enemy.
And they were running out of time.
Outside the lodge, reality continued to collapse, one contradiction at a time. But inside, in this small pocket of preserved space, the greatest rebels in the history of existence were planning their final rebellion.
Against the gods themselves.
The weight of truth, Ashen realized, wasn't just about carrying the memories of the erased. It was about accepting responsibility for what came next. They had broken the world by refusing to accept their assigned roles in its narrative.
Now they had to figure out how to put it back together.
Without a System to guide them.
Without gods to judge them.
Without any guarantee that they would survive the attempt.
But as he looked around the table at faces marked by the same determination that had carried him through regression after regression, Ashen felt something he hadn't experienced in either timeline.
Hope.
Dark, desperate, probably doomed hope.
But hope nonetheless.
The revolution wasn't just beginning.
It was about to reach its climax.
And for the first time since his regression began, Ashen wasn't sure who would be left standing when the dust settled.
But he was absolutely certain that the truth, whatever the cost, was worth fighting for.
Even if it meant destroying everything to preserve it