The corridor after the classroom felt like stepping backstage.
No desks. No heart-clock. No silent kids. Just a long, narrow passage of stone, lit from nowhere, stretching ahead in a straight line.
Behind us, the classroom door had become a blank wall. No handle, no seam. Just more of the Domain's idea of architecture.
Captain Dorn set an easy pace, fast enough to keep us moving, slow enough that the limping and half-carried didn't fall behind.
My body complained with every step. New balance, new center of gravity, new everything. My boots were the same, but the way my weight landed in them had changed. Each footfall came with a micro-adjustment my muscles hadn't been warned about.
You can have an existential crisis about this later, I told myself. Schedule it. Color-code it.
"Still you, right?" Arlen said softly beside me.
He'd insisted on walking, with two cadets hovering like spotters. His face was the particular gray of people lying about how much something hurt.
"Mostly," I said. "Some assembly required."
He barked a brief, pained laugh. "Voice doesn't match the packaging."
"Yeah, well. Tell the Domain to update its audio drivers."
I didn't know if I was joking for him or for me.
Ahead, Dorn's voice cut through the low muttering.
"Listen up," she said. "I am about to say something, and you are going to remember it exactly the way I say it when we walk out of here."
That when sat heavy.
"Official report," she went on. "We were pulled into a spontaneous low-order Domain. We encountered basic environmental anomalies and at least one entity. We neutralized it and followed an emergent path to the exit. No cadet exhibited unusual adaptation during the incident."
Someone almost tripped at that last part.
"No cadet," she repeated. "Exhibited. Unusual. Adaptation. Say it."
A shaky chorus followed. "No cadet exhibited unusual adaptation."
"Louder," she said.
They obeyed, voices echoing down the blank stone.
She glanced back at me.
The look said: you can argue with me later. Preferably when the organization that collects Law-bent people as lab equipment isn't in earshot.
"Captain," I said. "What pronouns do I put on the incident form?"
The question slipped out before I could stop it. Some warped survival instinct wanted to know if the Corps considered this a glitch or a feature.
She didn't break stride.
"Pick whatever keeps your head clear for now," she said. "Paperwork can fight us later."
I considered that.
He felt accurate inside my skull. She felt accurate if I looked down. They both felt like temporary labels stuck on a box the contents of which had started rearranging themselves.
"Sticking with 'he' until reality sends me a memo," I said.
"Fine by me," Dorn said. "As long as you keep the useful parts."
"Those would be?"
"The parts that break the room instead of you," she said.
The corridor walls changed.
Not abruptly. It started as a shimmer at the edge of my vision. The smooth stone rippled, and faint marks appeared—lines, curves, smudges of darker gray.
Writing.
It slid into focus as we walked.
Words crawled along the walls like ink remembering it was supposed to be on a page. Most of them were too distorted to read properly, bleeding into each other. A few broke free long enough for my eyes to catch them.
SCENE ONE
REWRITE
FAILED DRAFT
RETCON
"Anyone else seeing subtitles?" Arlen muttered.
"Eyes forward," Dorn said. "Domains love attention. Don't feed it more than you have to."
Too late. The text knew it had my focus.
A new word began to form ahead of us, letters dragging themselves out of the stone one by one. B. E. O. L—
My chest tightened.
"Beol…" I whispered.
The word fizzled out, the last letters smearing into nothing like the board in the classroom. The Domain had given me a glimpse and then slammed the notebook shut.
Dorn's head tilted fractionally, like she'd heard the shape of the sound more than the actual syllables.
"You recognize that?" she asked.
"Just saw it in there," I said. "On the board. Before it changed its mind."
"Then it matters," she murmured.
"How?" someone behind us whispered. "It's just… letters."
"In some Domains, names are levers," she said. "Call the wrong thing by the right name and it stops being background."
The corridor bent around a corner.
We followed.
The text grew denser. Sentences formed and broke apart as we passed. Snatches of something almost like narration floated up.
…cadet, designation REN, JACE, assigned to…
…exercise collapsed into live scenario…
…outcome variance: HIGH…
My skin crawled.
"Captain," I said quietly. "I think it's… writing about us."
"Domains echo," she said. "They reflect whatever's inside them. Us included."
"Echoes usually aren't this specific," I said.
"Welcome to your first day as an exception," she said dryly.
We walked in silence for a while after that.
Silence in the corridor wasn't like normal quiet. Our footsteps landed without echo. Our breathing sounded like it came from somewhere slightly behind us. The air had that thin, stretched quality of a room being used for something other than what it was built for.
My head throbbed where the Law had taken its last cut.
I tried to remember my own face from this morning again. The boy-version. It came, but fuzzed at the edges, like a picture you'd stared at too long. The new shape of me felt… closer. Not more right. Just more present.
Arlen bumped my arm with his elbow.
"You good?" he asked.
"That's a very broad question right now," I said.
"Scale of 'fine' to 'I'm being eaten by invisible spiders'," he said.
"Firmly in 'this is above my pay grade'," I said. "You?"
"I have a hole in my skull and a fake charm welded to my hand," he said. "Ten out of ten experience so far."
"Glad we're both thriving," I said.
The corridor widened.
Not much, just enough that the air felt less compressed. The writing on the walls here pulled itself into neater lines. Paragraphs.
Dorn raised a hand. We slowed automatically.
The next section of wall wasn't just scribbled. It had been… cleaned. The stone was smoother, the lines sharper. Someone—something—had made an effort.
A block of text sat at eye-level, more legible than anything else we'd seen.
THIS DRAFT: 72-C / SURVEYOR INTAKE
ENVIRONMENT TYPE: COMPOSITE DOMAIN (URBAN / INSTITUTIONAL)
PRIMARY THREAD: REN, JACE (ZONE 17–LOWER)
LAW EXPRESSION: CONDITIONAL NARRATIVE BIAS
STABILITY: FRACTURED
REVISION POTENTIAL: HIGH
I read it twice before my brain accepted that the words weren't going to scramble.
Conditional narrative bias.
My Law, apparently, had decided it wanted to sound like a thesis.
Behind me, someone whispered, "What does that mean?"
"It means," Dorn said slowly, "our new Cadet Ren has a knack for turning 'what if' into 'this is how it went.'"
"That's not…" The protest was halfway out of my mouth before I realized I didn't have a better description yet.
Backpack trip. Creature opening. Classroom outcome.
"Feels more like I keep paying to move the goalposts," I said.
Dorn's gaze stayed on the wall.
"Laws like that usually don't appear out of nowhere," she said. "Something in you resonated with the Domain. Or the Domain was built around something in you."
The second option sat in my stomach like a stone.
"You think this whole thing is… about me?" I said.
"That's the worst-case assumption," she said. "Plan for that and we're not surprised if it's smaller."
Arlen made a face. "This draft," he repeated. "Makes it sound like we're in some kind of… rewrite."
"Domains branch," Dorn said. "They're not always clean snapshots. Sometimes they're failed versions. Scenes that didn't stick."
I stared at the word DRAFT.
"Wait," I said. "If this is draft seventy-two of something, what happened to the first seventy-one?"
"Probably the same thing that happens to most rough work," she said. "They get thrown away. Or eaten."
Someone gulped audibly.
Further down, another, smaller line had been etched under the main block, scratched in different handwriting.
BEOLRYVE // LAW: BROKEN STORIES
This time the word stayed clear.
Seeing it properly sent a cold ripple down my arms.
"Beolryve," I said, carefully.
The Domain didn't glitch or scream. The corridor didn't fall apart. Nothing immediate exploded.
The letters just sat there, etched and patient.
"Captain?" I said.
Her jaw tightened a fraction. "I've seen that word in reports," she said. "Never in the field."
"What is it?" Arlen asked.
"A Concord label," she said. "For a class of anomaly they don't like to talk about. The ones that don't just break physics. They break causality. Sequence. Story."
Her eyes flicked to me, then back to the wall.
"Broken-stories Law," she said. "That's the tidy translation they use when they have to say it out loud."
"Good," I said. "Hate that."
"You and me both," she said.
My pulse picked up.
"So this Domain is… Beolryve?" I asked. "Or built on it?"
"If this inscription is right," she said, "we're inside a pocket organized by that Law. And it thinks you're worth centering."
Primary thread: Ren, Jace.
I wanted to peel the letters off the wall and throw them into the fog.
"Does Concord know I'm… whatever this is?" I asked.
"Not unless somebody tells them," she said.
"You're 'somebody'," I pointed out.
"I'm currently busy making sure two dozen children don't get turned into creative metaphors," she said. "My report can… emphasize different aspects."
The idea that her silence could keep me out of a lab for a while longer was both comforting and terrifying. Comforting, because she'd chosen it. Terrifying, because it implied she'd had reasons to choose otherwise before.
"Why help?" I asked, before I could stop myself. "Wouldn't it be easier to hand me over and let the Concord label it and file it and poke it with sticks?"
Dorn's face went still for a second.
"When I was your age," she said, "a captain made the opposite choice. I didn't like how that story went."
That shut me up.
She lifted her improvised weapon, resting it back on her shoulder.
"We're not done," she said. "Move. The sooner we're out of Beolryve's throat, the better."
We pushed on.
The corridor narrowed again, the writing thinning out until only occasional words appeared: EXIT, FAILURE, RETRY.
The air grew heavier, like wading through a dream that didn't want to be left.
My head throbbed in time with my heartbeat. The Law had gone quiet for now, but it never felt entirely gone. More like a presence waiting just off to the side, listening.
A weak laugh bubbled up from the middle of the group.
"Hey, Ren," one of the cadets said. "If this is all about you, can you… maybe ask the Domain for a cafeteria next? I'm starving."
"Yeah," another muttered. "Hero privileges."
Their voices were light, but the looks they threw me weren't. Curiosity. Wariness. A little fear. People staring at a bomb that hadn't decided which way to explode.
"I'll see if I can get craft services to unionize," I said. "Right after we don't die."
Dorn didn't shut them down this time. She let the noise roll and fade.
The corridor ended.
No door. No wall. Just… open space ahead, cut off by a threshold like the edge of a stage.
Dorn raised a hand and we stopped.
Whatever lay beyond that line wasn't visible from here. The air at the edge shimmered, hiding the next room like a heat mirage.
"Positions," she said. "Same as before. I go first. If the floor turns into teeth, you pull back and pretend you never liked me."
"That's not funny, Captain," someone whispered.
"Good," she said. "I wasn't trying to be."
She stepped through.
For half a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then her outline vanished into the shimmer.
Silence.
"Is that… good?" Arlen whispered.
Before anyone could answer, her voice came from beyond the threshold.
"Ren," she called. "Get up here. You need to see this."
My stomach dropped.
"Why is it never 'hey, anyone'?" I muttered.
I moved.
The closer I got to the threshold, the more the air grabbed at me. Not physically. Attention-wise. Like a pair of eyes on the other side were tracking just me.
I stepped through.
The shimmer broke over my skin like lukewarm water and was gone.
The new room was small.
Four walls. No windows. No furniture. Just a single structure in the center: a pillar of the same stone, waist-high and perfectly smooth.
On the pillar rested a book.
It was the only object in the room that didn't look like it had been grown by the Domain. Real paper. A solid cover, dark and worn at the edges. No title on the front, no markings on the spine.
Dorn stood a few paces back from it, arms folded, jaw clenched.
The rest of the cadets trickled in behind me, forming a worried half-circle.
"What is that?" someone asked.
"That," Dorn said, "is either the trap or the key. Possibly both."
Words had been carved into the pillar just below the book, the letters deep and clean.
BEOLRYVE
LAW OF BROKEN STORIES
Under that, in smaller script:
CURRENT SUBJECT: REN, JACE
My name on the stone made the world tilt.
The Law inside me stirred, recognition and resistance tangled together.
"It has your name on it," Arlen said helpfully.
"Thank you for that crucial analysis," I said.
The book sat there, innocently. No glowing. No ominous whispering. Just… waiting.
"Captain," I said. "Please tell me we're not about to do the obvious thing."
"We are absolutely not all going to stand here until we starve while it stares at you," she said. "So yes, we're probably about to do the obvious thing."
"You want me to open it," I said.
She didn't deny it.
"The Domain has already centered you," she said. "The longer we pretend it hasn't, the more chances it has to get creative. If this is a way to the exit—or a map—we need it."
"And if it's a way to rewrite me from scratch?" I asked.
"Then you don't let it," she said simply. "You've already bent it twice. That's twice more than most people get."
The cadets watched me.
The protagonist label on the wall in the corridor. The conditional narrative bias line. My name under the Law's title.
It was a neat little arc, if you liked your arcs terrifying.
The Domain wanted me to touch the book.
Fine.
We'd see who was writing who.
I stepped up to the pillar.
The book looked older up close. Not rotted, not fragile. Just… used. The corners were softened. The spine had that familiar slight inward curl of something opened and closed many times.
I set my hand on the cover.
The moment my skin touched it, the room fell away.