The lake had no name.
It was never on maps. No path led to it. No bird flew over it. But once every decade, someone would find it—not by traveling, but by breaking.
Like Kael just had.
He didn't remember falling. One minute, he was sprinting through the gray corridors of Sector 17, alarms howling, blood soaking through his sleeve. The next—darkness. Then: the lake.
Kael woke on the shore, coughing black fluid. The trees around him had no leaves—only thin sheets of glass clinking softly in the wind. The air was cold but didn't sting. And the sky above…
It was cracked.
Veins of silver lightning pulsed through it, like a shattered mirror stitched together by storms.
He sat up slowly, joints aching. His memory was blurred. He remembered running. A siren. A voice whispering, "Protocol breached. Candidate unfit." And then… nothing.
His hand throbbed. He looked down.
A mark was burned into his palm—five concentric circles, spinning slowly like gears.
That's when he noticed it: in the lake's center, half-submerged, ticking steadily…
A massive clock.
Not a structure. Not a monument. An actual, working clock face, 30 meters wide, set into the surface of the lake like it had grown there. Its hands moved slowly, backward. Not counterclockwise. Just wrong.
Kael stood. A whisper echoed in the trees—not carried by wind, but by thought.
> "You broke the symmetry."
He turned fast, but nothing was behind him. Only glass trees, swaying like they were listening.
> "One rule. One law. You opened the loop."
Kael staggered toward the water. It looked normal. Cold. Deep. But his reflection was… wrong.
It blinked before he did.
And then spoke.
> "This is not your first arrival."
Kael froze.
His reflection grinned.
> "You've died seventeen times."
> "You've run every cycle."
> "And you always end up back at the clock."
Kael stumbled back, heart pounding. "What is this place?"
The reflection tilted its head.
> "You were chosen for the Glass World Protocol.
But you broke before it finished installing."
> "Now you remember too soon."
Kael looked at the spinning mark on his hand.
The gears were turning faster.
And above him, cracks spread wider through the sky.
Then the clock in the lake rang out once.
A sound deeper than thunder. Older than time. It echoed in his bones.
And far beneath the lake, something massive began to move.
---
End of Chapter One