Salem's eyes snapped open, and for a fraction of a second, the world made sense. Then the fraction passed, and everything unraveled.
He wasn't in the city, the carnival, or the void. He was somewhere in-between, a liminal space that stretched infinitely in all directions yet felt suffocatingly close. The air smelled of ozone and ink, thick enough to taste, carrying the faint hum of fractured time. Shadows moved against physics, twisting into forms that might have been people—or perhaps memories of people.
"Perfect. Welcome to the Nexus," said a voice dripping with amusement.
Salem spun around. A figure hovered above the ground, cloaked in something that looked like stitched fragments of night and memory. Its face shifted with each blink—older Salem, younger Salem, even a version with glowing cracks across his skin, screaming silently.
"Who—what—" Salem stammered.
"All and none," the figure said smoothly. "I am every version of you that failed, and every version that hasn't yet. You can call me… Nexus."
Salem blinked. Every instinct screamed to run, yet the fragmented gravity of this place held him in place, like quicksand made of light and shadow.
"Why am I here?" he demanded. "What do you want from me?"
"Observation first. Chaos second. Survival third," Nexus replied. "And you, dear Salem, are the main event."
The floor beneath him—or what he assumed was the floor—rippled like liquid mercury. Reflections of himself stared back, some screaming, some laughing, some silent. The air shimmered, revealing countless doors, each floating and spinning midair. Some were open; others were barred with glowing runes.
"Pick a door," Nexus said. "Each leads somewhere. Each could kill you. Or not. That's part of the fun."
Salem's stomach twisted. A sick part of him wanted to analyze, calculate, plan. Another part wanted to throw himself blindly through one of them. He knew neither choice guaranteed survival.
"Do I have a choice?" he asked, voice tight.
"Technically," Nexus purred. "Practically? Only the illusion of choice remains."
The nearest door swirled with a strange mist, and from inside, he glimpsed a city on fire. Figures ran in reverse, screaming backwards, voices echoing out of order. The next door revealed a snow-filled wasteland, where shadows moved independently of their owners. The third was darker still—a void where echoes of himself screamed from every direction simultaneously.
Salem's pulse raced. "I… I don't even know what to do!"
"That's the point," Nexus said. "The Nexus isn't about knowing. It's about surviving your own indecision."
A sudden jolt shook him. Figures began emerging from the mists between doors—shadow hunters. They were faster, more precise than before, moving like liquid over broken time. Their footsteps left trails of erasing light, and with each step, a fragment of reality dissolved.
"No…" Salem muttered, backing away.
One shadow hunter lunged. Salem grabbed a floating shard of glass—or was it metal?—and swung blindly. The hunter vanished into nothingness, leaving only a lingering whisper:
"You're not supposed to be here."
Salem's hands trembled. The shard pulsed, absorbing light from the fractured space. He realized it wasn't just a weapon—it was a tether. A lifeline to a timeline where he could survive.
"Then I'll use it," he whispered, teeth clenched.
He slashed at the next hunter, and the Nexus itself seemed to shiver. Time cracked audibly, like snapping glass. One wrong move, and he would be erased not just from this reality, but from every possibility.
"Clever," Nexus said, voice smooth as oil. "But remember—every action ripples."
Salem twisted, ducked, and leaped through the nearest door—the one leading to the snow wasteland. Ice and wind lashed at him, biting and sharp, and for a fleeting second, he felt alive. Then the ground beneath him split, and he was pulled into a new corridor of fractured timelines.
Voices overlapped: his own, those of versions that had lived and died, others he didn't recognize. One of them whispered urgently:
"They're coming. You can't run forever."
He stumbled, skidding to a halt in a mirror-lined hallway. Every reflection showed a different Salem—one crying, one screaming, one smiling with eyes too hollow. He backed away, only to realize that his movements were mirrored in reverse in some reflections. The world was fracturing, folding, and bleeding into itself.
"I have to… I have to keep moving," Salem muttered.
Nexus appeared again, hovering above a fracture in the hall. "Forward is a concept. Time is a concept. Chaos is everything. Do you understand yet?"
"I'm trying," Salem hissed.
"Trying isn't enough. Not here."
The air shimmered. Suddenly, he was no longer in the hall, but standing in a city that was both his and not his. Skyscrapers twisted upward and downward simultaneously. Vehicles floated like balloons, tethered to fragments of reality. Crowds walked backwards and forwards at the same time. And in the distance, a Ferris wheel from the Clockwork Carnival spun slowly, each carriage containing versions of himself and faces from skipped days.
"What now?" he shouted.
"Now," Nexus said, voice dropping into a growl, "you choose, Salem Grey. You either step into the collapse willingly, or be dragged through it screaming."
The shadow hunters appeared again, circling him like predators. He gripped the tether shard tighter. Every beat of his heart felt like an echo multiplied infinitely. Every breath, a fractal. Every thought, a loop within a loop.
"I… I'll fight," he growled.
"Good," Nexus purred. "But the game has only just begun."
Suddenly, a rip in the sky opened—larger than anything he'd seen. Through it, glimpses of his past and future collided: the July revolution, the chaos of skipped days, the first hints of COVID-19 in an alternate past, the skeletal carnivals, shadow hunters, Ferris wheels, and countless Salem Greys screaming silently.
"No…" he whispered. "Not all of it… not yet…"
But the rip widened, pulling him in. The shadow hunters lunged, the Nexus grinned, and the air itself screamed in fractured harmonics.
Salem's last thought, as the world began to dissolve into shards of time and space, was simple:
> I will survive. Somehow.
And then—a single, deafening line of text appeared across the rip, glowing in impossible colors:
"EVERY TIMELINE WILL BE ACCOUNTED FOR. CHOOSE, OR BE ERASED."
The world went black.