Fractured Thoughts

Silen stood frozen in the tunnel, one hand pressed to the damp stone wall as if it were the only thing anchoring him to existence. The lantern at his feet burned low, its flame steady in a way the world was not. Around him, the tunnel breathed—subtle shifts in shadow, a hum too precise to be natural, the faint sense that something unseen was recalculating him.

His thoughts no longer arrived in a single line. They came fractured.

A city on fire.
A quiet map spread across a table years ago.
Maren’s voice, steady and impatient, telling him to focus.
A blue-white glow that felt older than the war, older than the city itself.

For a moment—maybe longer—Silen could not tell whether he was standing, dreaming, or being rendered.

The walls shimmered, just once, like an image refreshing itself. The sensation passed through him like vertigo, and he clenched his jaw, forcing breath back into his lungs. He had felt this before. The slipping. The sense that reality was thinning, not breaking, but bending—offering too many versions of itself at once.

He lowered himself against the wall, eyes shut, fighting the instinct to surrender to it.

“No,” he whispered, though he wasn’t sure who he was speaking to. “Not now.”

He thought of Maren.

That was the constant. The one thing that did not fragment.

He remembered her moving ahead of him through dust and shadow, lantern raised, already choosing the harder path because someone had to. He remembered the maps, the arguments, the shared silences when words failed and resolve took their place. If this world was unstable—if it was lying to him—then she was the proof that something real still existed within it.

Or beyond it.

Silen opened his eyes.

The tunnel had settled. The flicker was gone. Stone was stone again. Rusted cables lay where they always had. But the certainty that something was wrong did not leave him. If anything, it sharpened.

He rose slowly, testing his limbs. They responded. Pain was still pain. Gravity still held him. Whatever the truth of this world—simulation or ruin or something in between—it had not erased his will.

And it would not erase his purpose.

“I’m coming,” he said aloud, the words grounding him. “I’ll find you.”

He lifted the lantern and stepped forward, deeper into the underground maze. Each step felt like defiance—not just against the enemies hunting them, but against the very fabric of the reality that seemed intent on blurring his edges, softening his resolve, convincing him to stand still and accept confusion as fate.

Silen refused.

If this world was broken, he would move through the cracks.
If it was false, he would still fight within it.
And if Maren was somewhere ahead—lost, hiding, or waiting—then no flicker, no fractured perception, no unseen system would stop him from reaching her.

The tunnel swallowed him again, and Silen walked on.