I told myself it wasn't my responsibility.
I told myself I didn't care, because caring makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability is the first place evil sinks its teeth.
I told myself a lot of things.
But truth has a voice that doesn't need volume.
And I could already see the shape of what would happen if no one stood in the way.
I could see the past and the future like pages in a book.
And the future was turning black.
So I went.
Crossing into Zianttra wasn't like SRX. SRX was clean—sharp, technological, precise. Zianttra felt ancient, like stepping into a myth that still had blood on its hands.
The sky was layered—clouds like torn fabric, stars like holes punched through reality. The air tasted of iron and incense. In the distance, mountain ranges rose like sleeping beasts, and everywhere there was the sense of something watching: not a single creature, but the world itself, alert and uneasy, as if it knew it was about to be rewritten.
That's where I met the others.
The guardians.
Not all of them were warriors in the obvious way. Some were scholars. Some were healers. Some were simply stubborn souls who'd survived the kind of loss that turns fear into fuel. A few were like me—people who didn't fully belong in any one world anymore, because we had seen too many to pretend any single one was the truth.
We gathered in a place that looked like a temple from the outside and like a laboratory on the inside—old stone carved with symbols that resonated like music when you touched them, and in the center, a map that wasn't a map.
It was a living diagram of probabilities.
Lines of light branched and rebranched. Whole civilizations flickered in and out like candle flames. The guardians didn't speak at first. We watched.
Then a woman with eyes like stormwater—too calm, too deep—said the words that made my stomach tighten:
"The Galvan Empire has taken the Outer Spires."
Someone else added, "They're not just conquering. They're restructuring. They're installing origin anchors."
Origin anchors.
Tools to pin a world into a shape that serves the empire.
The first time I heard that, my mind went back to my home world—the way systems are designed to keep people docile, distracted, exhausted. The way the truth is treated like a threat. The way positivity becomes "naïve" if it isn't profitable. The way people are taught to hate each other so they never look up and notice who's holding the leash.
Different world, same mechanism.
The empire's rise wasn't only happening in Zianttra.
It was happening everywhere, in different disguises.
And it was happening in me too, in the part of me that wanted to surrender, to lie down, to rest for eternity before my hand was forced.
A guardian—older than the rest, face lined like carved wood—turned toward me.
"You've seen them before," he said.
He didn't ask it as a question.
I didn't answer with words. I answered by remembering the metallic horns and the sound beneath sound and the way fear slammed a door in my mind.
The old guardian nodded once, as if that confirmed a calculation.
"They've been pruning you," he said. "Testing what you can perceive. Making sure you can't see the angles that matter."
"And if I can?" I asked.
"Then you become a problem they have to eliminate."
I laughed, but it came out bitter. "That's been my whole life."
He studied me like he was looking at something beyond my face. "Your home world taught you to doubt your worth," he said. "Zianttra will demand you decide it."
That night we moved.
Not with an army.
With a handful of people and a plan that felt too small against something so large.
But I had learned long ago: power isn't only size. It's placement. It's knowing where to press.
We followed the tremor in the probability map to an old ruin outside the city—stone arches half-swallowed by vines that glittered faintly, as if the plants had absorbed a trace of magic. Beneath the ruin was a chamber where the air was cold and dry and the silence felt weighted.
And there, in the center, was an origin anchor being installed.
It looked like a pillar of dark metal, threaded with veins of luminous energy. It pulsed in time with a rhythm I recognized—like a heart trying to synchronize with a body that didn't want it.
A Galvan engineer knelt at its base, hands moving with quick certainty. Two soldiers stood nearby, helmets shaped to accommodate horn-like protrusions—not natural horns, but attachments, ceremonial and functional at once.
I felt my mind flash with possibilities.
Attack and die.
Wait and lose the anchor.
Retreat and condemn the city.
And under it all, the old internal war: the part of me that wanted to care, the part of me that wanted to be free of caring, and the part of me that whispered that none of it matters because the universe is vast and we are small.