At first, no one noticed.
Merchants still sold fruit under colorful awnings.
The eastern templars practiced their formations with perfect discipline.
And children recited rhymes about the three moons as if they had learned them all their lives.
But I felt it.
Something was misaligned.
—
We walked through the city, and the details began to creak.
A woman greeted Sera with a frozen smile.
Exactly the same smile another woman, on another corner of the market, had given her minutes earlier.
Same gesture. Same tone. Like a repeated line of dialogue.
The temple's stained glass… showed different scenes every time we looked back.
And then there were the shadows.
Tiny inconsistencies that didn't cast real shadows, or moved without a source of light.
—
Sera sensed it too.
"It's like the world… is improvising."
"Because it is," I replied, touching a wall that flickered briefly, like a poorly rendered image.
"We forced a correction. The system filled in the blanks. But it doesn't know how to handle something it didn't write."
—
That night, at the inn, something worse happened.
A woman sat next to us in the common room.
She wore simple villager's clothes, dark skin, kind smile.
"Are you enjoying the city?" she asked.
"Very much," I said. "Do you live here?"
"Always have," she said.
And then, without being prompted, she repeated:
"Are you enjoying the city?"
Sera and I froze.
"You just said that," I told her.
"Always have," she repeated. Same intonation. Same smile.
—
The woman turned her face toward Sera.
"The priestess must not go to the cellar," she said, in a deeper voice.
And then… snapped back.
Like a puppet rewinding into its previous position.
—
The entire inn went silent.
Every patron… froze.
Only the crackling of the fire could be heard, and even that didn't sound real.
Sera clung to my arm.
"This isn't a city. It's a patched memory."
—
We left without looking back.
And as we walked out, we noticed the most disturbing detail:
The night sky now showed only two moons.
—
> "Consolidation error: Forced node detected."
"Narrative collapse threat in 72 hours."
> "Priority: Conceal the origin. Or the world will consume it."