There was nothing.

Not just darkness—nothing. No sound, no sensation, no weight of existence pressing against her skin. It was absence in its purest form. A void where even thoughts struggled to remain whole.

Yet, something watched.

The system flickered, a glitched-out husk of itself, struggling against the silence.

[System Alert: Anomaly Detected—ERROR—]

[You Are Being Watched.]

[All Timelines. All Juno Luminara of Reality. All Failed Echoes.]

[All of Them Are Looking at You.]

She couldn't see them. Couldn't hear them. But the weight of their shattered existences pressed down on her, an oppressive force of countless eyes in the abyss. Juno inhaled sharply—no, she tried. But there was no breath, no lungs to fill, only the aching knowledge that something was wrong.

[System Alert:—]

[—ERROR—]

The messages bled out of sight, swallowed by the void, and she felt it then. The weight. Her limbs—if they were even there—grew heavy, as though gravity had multiplied a thousandfold. But there was no ground beneath her, no surface to crush her against. Only sinking. Only descent.

Her arms—aching. Her legs—burning. Her chest—hollowed. She could feel the phantom sensation of her own blood trailing over her skin, but there was nothing to see, no proof of her wounds. She wasn't even sure she had a body anymore.

And then the pain became something else.

Not pain. Unraveling. As if something was peeling her apart, strand by strand. She couldn't scream. Her voice didn't exist here. She had never felt anything like it—an agonizing absence where her existence was supposed to be. The phantom ache deepened, pulling, twisting—

Her body was dissolving.

[System Alert: Your Timeline is Being Hijacked.]

And suddenly, she understood.

The rewind hadn't failed.

It had been stolen.

Something—no, everything—was reaching for her. Every fragmented Juno that had ever been erased, every self that had failed, every doomed iteration clawing for one last moment of existence. They weren't just looking at her. They were trying to take her place.

Her vision—if she could call it that—blurred. The black void devoured itself. It was endless. It was closing in. It was—

She closed her eyes.

Nothing changed.

Still darkness. Still drowning. Still—

A sound.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Juno opened her eyes.

A broken clock hovered before her, suspended in the abyss, its glass fractured, its hands unmoving. But she knew this clock. She had seen it before—where, when, she couldn't remember, but the familiarity struck deep, pulling at something lost in the layers of time.

The weight was gone. She was floating, light, no longer sinking into the void's grasp. There was no pain now. No unraveling. Only silence and the strange, peaceful stillness that came with it.

And then, the voice.

Not spoken. Not heard. But known.

"What worth do you hold, Juno Luminara? Now that you are the lone Juno of your existence, where all others are but echoes?"

The ticking grew louder, warping, stretching time itself into something tangible, something that brushed against her skin. The voice carried it, a current of inevitability woven into every syllable.

Juno's throat felt tight. She wasn't sure if she could even answer, but she forced her thoughts into words, uncertain, wary. "I don't understand what's happening."

A pause. Then, the voice—

"You felt it, didn't you? The void brushing against you. The corruption sinking into your existence. They reached for you. And now, they will not stop. Every stolen second, every reversed moment, every defiance of fate—what do you think the cost is?"

Her stomach twisted.

The cost.

She thought about the other versions of herself, the failures, the erasures, the ones that had never made it this far. Had she always been leaving them behind? Had they always been lingering, waiting for a moment to take her place? Was she only here because she had stolen existence from another her, a version that had just barely faltered?

She didn't know. And she hated that she didn't know.

"What does the end of things hold?" the voice asked, the ticking becoming erratic, broken.

Juno exhaled. Or she thought she did. Maybe she was just thinking too loudly in the silence.

She let the words slip out before she could second-guess them. "The meaning of all things."

The ticking stopped.

Then, a whisper, carried through the void like a breath of time itself—

"Thank you."

And then, there was only white.

There is no sky. No earth. No horizon to anchor reality in place. Juno Luminara drifts in a void of impossible colors—shifting spectrums that fracture, glitch, and twist in ways that defy comprehension. Her body—if she still has one—is weightless, yet she feels a momentum she cannot control, something dragging her forward at speeds that should tear her apart. But there is no wind. No sound. Only the colors, and the sense that she is plummeting toward something vast and unknown.

She tries to move, but nothing happens. She has no limbs. No voice. The sensation is unsettling, but not painful. It should terrify her. It doesn't. Instead, there is a calm detachment, a stillness in the back of her mind. A thought surfaces, unbidden.

Is this all just… me?

Her. Herself. Versions of Juno Luminara from every shattered timeline, every failure, every divergence in reality. The weight of them presses down on her, a formless presence she cannot see but knows is there. Countless failed versions of herself that crumbled before they could reach this point. And yet, she exists. Alone. The lone Juno of this moment.

But what of others?

Who is "others?"

The question gnaws at her, and with it, memory returns in pieces, scattered and raw. Selene, with her wild, star-born laughter and crescent daggers that carve constellations into the battlefield. Exos, silent but unshakable, his weapons an extension of his will.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

How could I forget them? How could I be so selfish?

They are the reason she cannot give up. They are the reason she broke the unspoken rule—the rule she had never known existed until the moment she shattered it. Killing herself had not erased her. It had brought her here. And for what?

If she meets them again—no, when she meets them again—she will know them, truly know them. Beyond battle. Beyond war. Beyond survival.

Then, without warning, the rush of color fractures. Light bends. And everything shifts.

—

Selene was twelve when she first learned that the stars could lie.

The world she knew was quiet, nestled in the celestial sanctuaries of the Astral Order, where golden-robed diviners traced the fates of kings and commoners alike. The city was built into the cliffs, towering white stone temples gleaming beneath the endless night sky, where the stars burned brighter than anywhere else in the world.

She had grown up believing in their guidance. Their laws. Their patterns. That the heavens held absolute truths, written in constellations older than time itself.

Then she met the girl.

She had been wandering the lower village, the sector where the commoners lived, when she found her. A starving child, no older than Selene, crouched by a crumbling fountain, her fingers trembling as she tried to drink from a cracked clay cup.

Selene had known, without hesitation, what to do. She had knelt, taken the girl's hands, and whispered the forbidden words.

"Show me your path."

The starlight that shone from Selene's fingertips had been soft, gentle—a delicate weaving of constellations threading through the child's fate. No coin had exchanged hands. No price had been demanded. It had been kindness, nothing more.

And for that, she was punished.

The great hall of her family's estate had been vast and cold, the mosaic floor depicting the great celestial cycles of old. The elders stood in judgment, their gold-threaded robes stiff with disapproval.

"You gave divination without payment," her uncle intoned, his voice a measured weight. "You interfered where the stars did not command it."

Selene did not argue. There was no point. The stars had commanded nothing. They had simply been there, and she had chosen to act.

The punishment was swift. A month confined within the temple, with no access to the stars, no contact with the outside world. A reminder that fate was not hers to tamper with. That mercy, without order, was chaos.

That had been the day she began to question the sky.

Because if the stars could be silent when a child suffered—if their will could be interpreted and twisted by those in power—then what did they truly stand for?

And what did it mean when she could no longer trust them?

—

Juno, weightless in the void, felt something shift. The memory was not hers, yet it flowed through her like a dream, like a fracture in time that had bled into her own mind.

The colors warped, twisted, and the void trembled.

It was all then white again.

—

The world was a battlefield long before Exos ever raised a blade.

His first memory was not of warmth or kindness but of steel—cold, unforgiving, and absolute. He had been born in the grand fortress of Khaelos, a place that was less a home and more a factory for war. The children of Khaelos did not cry; they sharpened their first daggers before they could even read, and they spoke the language of steel long before they ever uttered words of peace.

The House of Edges, his bloodline, was not built upon legacy or noble honor, but upon a single, unshakable truth: weapons were the only constant in the universe. Kings fell. Empires crumbled. But the blade remained.

Exos learned that truth at the age of six when his father placed a rusted short sword in his hands and ordered him to hold it for hours, his small fingers trembling under its weight.

"A weapon does not complain," his father had said. "It does not weep. It does not question. Be the weapon, or be the weak."

It was not a choice. It was a sentence.

By the time he was ten, he had already killed. A test. A lesson. A boy, not much older than him, who had failed to raise his guard in time. Exos had seen the light fade from his eyes, had felt the warmth of another life extinguish under his own trembling hands.

"You hesitated," his instructor had scolded him after. "Hesitation dulls the blade."

So he learned to stop hesitating.

By sixteen, he was a walking armory. Every weapon he touched became an extension of himself. Edgeling blood had always been cursed with an affinity for weapons, and Exos' gift was unlike any before him—every blade, every spear, every warhammer, and arrow bent to his will, floating around him like silent sentinels awaiting his command.

But power alone did not define him. It was the war that did.

The war that never ended.

When he was twenty, the skies split open, and monsters poured out. Creatures born of the Void, horrors that devoured armies in moments, razed entire kingdoms to dust. The great fortress of Khaelos fell in mere days. The war had not been of men versus men—it had been of existence itself against the tide of oblivion.

He fought. He fought until he could not stand, until his body screamed for rest, until his mind could barely comprehend the bloodstained wasteland before him. He fought because it was all he had ever known, because he had never been given another path.

But even he was not strong enough.

The walls fell. The kingdom burned. His people, the warriors forged in iron and discipline, were slaughtered like cattle. And when he stood at the last battlefield, surrounded by the dead, his blades cracked and broken, he heard the voice for the first time.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

It was not human. It was not mortal. It was something older, something deeper, something that saw past the confines of time and space.

"You wield death," the voice had said. "But do you understand it?"

Exos had not answered. He had nothing left to give.

So the voice showed him.

A blade unlike any other. Not forged of steel, nor iron, nor any earthly metal. A blade carved from his very soul. His pain. His loss. His despair. A blade that was him, and yet beyond him.

The Aspect of Weapons had chosen him.

"What will you become, Exos?"

He did not answer with words.

He answered with war.

War of blood. A war of red.

How does it come that he fights alongside two of the most unlikely person he'll be with?

How? Juno asked herself.

The red became blue.

The blue became dark.

The black became everything.

—

Time fractures like glass, but memory shatters like a mirror. You don't pick up the shards; you bleed through them.

Juno's eyes snapped open.

A breath—shallow, confused—left her lips, and the world around her settled into a distorted, muted clarity. She was lying on damp stone, the texture rough against her palms. The air smelled ancient, heavy with the scent of wet earth and something metallic, like the ghost of rusted iron. Overhead, the sky stretched impossibly vast, a serene blue enclosed by a dome of perfect glass. The sun hung frozen at its zenith, an unnatural glow without warmth, as if time itself refused to move.

She sat up, her fingers instinctively going to her temple. The last thing she remembered—

No. The last thing she remembered wasn't hers.

Fragments of memories, images, sensations that didn't belong to her flooded her mind—

A battlefield bathed in violet light. Exos standing alone, surrounded by weapons that weren't his but were him, an endless arsenal bound to his soul. The weight of chains wrapping around a child's wrists. Selene laughing in the dark, her voice broken and hysterical as a constellation collapsed behind her. And then—

Nothing.

Juno exhaled sharply, pushing herself to her feet. Her clothes were the same: her constellation-stitched leather jacket hanging loosely over her shoulders, her arcane-patterned cargo pants still secured with belts lined with hidden blades, her steel-toed boots carrying the silent-symbol engravings meant to mask her steps. But something was wrong. The world around her was vibrant, full of movement—lush vines curled over jagged rock formations, crystalline pools reflected the light like shattered diamonds, even the distant trees rustled in an unfelt wind—but everything was drained of color. It was like existing in a painting that had been washed clean of pigment, a dreamscape stripped of its hues.

[System initializing—ERROR—ERROR—ANOMALY DETECTED]

Juno's pulse quickened. The system was barely holding together, but she was here. Wherever here was. And she was alone.

At least, she thought she was alone.

Then, she heard the footsteps.

Soft. Unhurried. Purposeful.

Juno's body went rigid. Her instincts screamed at her before she even saw it—

A figure at the edge of her vision.

She turned, and her breath caught in her throat.

It was her.

Or something wearing her face.

A perfect mirror image of herself stood just beyond the curve of the stone path, half-hidden behind a pale, lifeless tree. The reflection smiled—not friendly, not reassuring, but knowing. Like it had been waiting.

Juno's muscles tensed. She took an involuntary step back. The other her tilted its head, and then—

It disappeared.

No sound. No movement. Just gone.

Every nerve in Juno's body screamed RUN.

She bolted.

Her boots slammed against the ground as she twisted through the winding terrain, vaulting over twisted roots and jagged ledges. The world blurred past her—monochrome trees reaching like skeletal fingers, pools of glassy water reflecting her distorted face, cavern walls curling high above like the ribs of a beast. She didn't know where she was running, but she knew what she was running from.

A flicker of movement above—

She barely had time to react before another version of herself was crouched in the high branches, eyes burning with something furious, something hungry.

It moved.

Juno threw herself forward just as the doppelgänger lunged, a blade flashing in its grasp—no, not a blade. A fractured piece of reality itself, edges warping and splitting the air apart like fabric. It carved through the space where she had been a second ago, leaving behind a trail of static.

[STATUS: CRITICAL DANGER—UNKNOWN ENTITY DETECTED]

Juno's heart pounded. This wasn't just a test. This wasn't a dream.

This was a hunt.

And she was the prey.

She twisted mid-air, her wristwatch flaring to life with unstable energy.

[Chronoenergy Unstable—Activation Risk HIGH—Rewind in Progress]

Her mind raced through possibilities. If she was in another dimension, if this place was some kind of constructed nightmare designed to pit her against herself—then the rules weren't hers to make. But that didn't mean she couldn't break them. She just had to figure out how.

Something whispered in her mind, a voice not hers but still familiar.

"Survive. Outrun yourself. Outthink yourself. Outfight yourself. Or die."

Her reflection's smile burned in her memory. The version in the trees, eyes full of hatred.

And somewhere out there, she knew there would be more.

The hunt is on and the game is deadly.

The Timeline Cull had begun.