by Vaths0
Volume 1 of The Chrono-Resonance Saga
PROLOGUE: The Render Error
The Observer did not sit, so much as he occupied a heavy silence carved out of the gap between stars. There was no floor, no ceiling. Around him, the concept of reality had been stripped away, peeling back the universe's skin to reveal its marrow: raw, streaming data.
Floating shards of golden hard-light drifted in orbit around his throne. They weren't just screens; they were windows into infinite lies. Each one played out a different universe, a scripted tragedy, a simulated joy.
With a motion that felt weary—ancient—the Observer severed the air with his hand. To his left, a pane of light dissolved into digital mist. It had shown a detective, Raghava, slamming a case file shut.
"Truth found," the Observer said. His voice didn't just vibrate the air; it ground against the silence like tectonic plates colliding deep underground. "Useless. We do not need Truth. We need Time."
He turned his gaze away from the successful simulations. He looked for the broken one.
There. A screen flickering with static, bleeding heavy grey pixels into the void. It was a jagged world, dark and unpolished. A place where the cosmic code had snagged on a nail and was unravelling in a loop.
Sector: Vernaxis.Status: High Latency.Gods: [CONNECTION LOST]
"Look at them," the Observer whispered, leaning forward, his eyes reflecting the static. "Poor things. They think the stuttering rain is just a storm. They think the shadows lagging two seconds behind their bodies are just... tricks of the light."
He didn't just zoom in; he willed the perspective to collapse. The view plummeted from the stratosphere, crashing through layers of digital atmosphere until it focused on a single, insignificant bio-signature shivering in a rain-slicked alleyway.
A boy.
Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Ribs showing through a wet shirt. He looked tired—not the sleep-deprived kind of tired, but the soul-deep exhaustion of a thing that has been deleted and rewritten too many times. He was vibrating, a frequency of desperation so high it threatened to crack the rendering of the reality around him.
"The Illusion is thin here," the Observer noted, watching a raindrop freeze in mid-air near the boy's face, suffering a texture error before liquefying again. "The paint is peeling off the walls of the universe. And you, little thief... You are the only one holding a scraper."
The Observer raised a finger. A god would have intervened. A hero would have saved the boy. The Observer did neither. He simply reached into the code and tapped the glass, highlighting the boy's neural signature in red.
"Wake up, Arin Vale," he rumbled, the ghost of a smile touching his lips. "The buffer is ending."