The Anchor was blue. Not metaphorically. Literally, blue. Sky-blue dirt, blue trees, cobalt air thick with particles that shimmered like frost on glass. When Kael stepped through the tether gate, he coughed—his lungs catching on oxygen that wasn't quite oxygen.
"Okay," Kael said aloud, scanning the terrain, "either this world has an obsession with cyan pigment or something's blocking the spectrum."
From behind him, Myra stepped out of the chronopoint shimmer. "The report says light is filtered through suspended crystalline dust. It amplifies blue. No reds. No greens. Which is why…"
Kael looked up.
There was no sky.
Only a massive mirrored dome reflecting the surface of the world back at them. He stared at the illusion of a world that seemed to hover above them, inverted. Upside-down forests. Floating rivers. A mirror of a mirror.
"Let me guess," Kael muttered. "They think they're the only ones. No sky, no stars, no idea anything exists beyond."
"Worse," Myra replied. "They forgot the concept of the sky. It's not in their language anymore."
Kael blinked. "They forgot... up?"
She nodded. "The last recorded reference was 300 cycles ago. Every cultural artifact that implied a world beyond the dome has either been erased or turned into mythology."
A new anomaly.
One that didn't scream, burn, or loop.
One that erased curiosity itself.
The people here, known as the Virelians, lived in concentric villages around the central column—a spiraling obsidian tower that reached toward the mirrored sky but never touched it. Kael and Myra disguised themselves using fragment camouflage and entered the village of Ture-Vah, where all records said the "Curse of Ascent" had first taken root.
The villagers were calm. Cheerful, even. They smiled with a serenity Kael found unnerving.
No one looked up.
Not once.
Even when a wind stirred the canopy and flakes of crystal dust swirled in spirals overhead—every Virelian kept their gaze level, grounded, contained.
"The forgetfulness is viral," Myra said under her breath, watching a group of children draw in the sand. "They used to teach astronomy. They had observatories. Now? Nothing. They believe anything above head-level is sacred absence."
Kael leaned in. "A cultural firewall. Someone—something—is rewriting this timeline by deleting wonder."
That's when he saw her.
A girl—maybe twelve Virelian years—staring directly up at the dome.
Wide-eyed. Silent. Unblinking.
Kael followed her gaze, expecting the mirrored world. But the reflection was... glitched. A shimmer, like an edit stalling in mid-render.
"She sees it," Kael whispered. "She sees through it."
The girl looked at him.
"You're not from here," she said, flatly.
Neither was the voice she spoke with. It was layered, multi-tonal, stitched with static. Something else was riding her thoughts.
Myra's eyes widened. "She's a conduit."
"I can't remember the word," the girl said. "The one for the space above. Can you give it back?"
A low hum shook the ground.
Above, a crack formed in the mirror dome. A hairline fracture.
The reflection twitched.
Kael grabbed Myra's arm. "Time to leave."
"But—"
"Look at her eyes," he said. "She's not just a conduit. She's recording."
The girl blinked once.
The fracture spread like lightning.
As the two ChronoKnots activated the tether to Anchor Exit, the girl spoke one last thing:
"You're Kael. Kaelen said you'd come."
They vanished into light just as the sky broke open.