[DANE]

  The battlefield smelled of ash. The mud sucked at his boots with every step. Smoke curled through the air in gray ribbons. The sky above was a bruised red, heavy with clouds. Dane was puzzled that his other half was still in the real world. This illusion was good, but it couldn't capture every detail. Wind whispered past broken helms and rusted steel, its howl threaded with echoes, and he heard some screams in the distance.

  Then he saw it: himself.

  Not a mirror image, it was as if the man in front of him had warped and twisted in his old age. His double stood only about ten paces away. The scar on his chin, his stance, even the twitch in his broken left knuckle —it was all there, mirrored by the doppelg?nger. Dane tightened his grip on the axe. It vibrated in his hand like a nerve about to snap, the spirits within chattering like teeth grinding bone.

  The other Dane smiled. "Still pretending to know what you are doing?"

  Dane didn't reply; instead, the echoes of his last words before sealing his men's fate rang through his ears. "It'll work because I said it will work."

  The sentence struck through his heart, and he barely reacted in time to parry the axe from his doppelg?nger, steel met steel. Sparks scattered like fireflies caught in a storm. The clang of metal shook through his body down to the marrow. Every impact sent tremors up his arms. The axe jarred against his palm, blistering his skin, tearing at the callouses that took years to rebuild. He gripped tighter.

  The double was faster, stronger, unburdened by the howls of ghosts. Every move was instinctive, with no hesitation or fear.

  But Dane had a lifetime of experience and a second brain to process its movements.

  Dane dropped low, feinted to the right, then reversed his grip and swung high, aiming for the temple. The shadow ducked, front kicking him square in the chest, and Dane flew back, gasping as air fled his lungs. He landed hard, ribs cracking under the force of his landing.

  "You owe them everything," the shadow said, circling like a predator tracing old blood trails. "You wear their deaths like armor. You think suffering is enough?"

  Dane coughed, spat black blood onto the ground. It steamed and hissed, burning away as if the stone rejected him. "I didn't ask for any of this."

  "You didn't have to." The double raised his axe. Its edge shimmered like obsidian cracked with starlight. "They followed. And you let them die."

  He charged. Rage rippled through his chest like wildfire in dry brush. The axe came down with enough force to crack the earth itself, but missed. Dane countered with his own strike, and when it landed, it drove the mimic into the ground, spraying mud and bone fragments like shrapnel.

  His shadow laughed in a low, hollow sound.

  "This isn't about redemption. It's about choice. Theirs. Yours. But you never trusted them to make the choice. You dragged them. You shackled them to your pain."

  He froze for a brief second, taking a slash to his left shoulder. He winced and shifted to his right, keeping the axe from bisecting him.

  A voice like honey and the sound of wind on the beech stirred. It was gentle, and tears came to his eyes before he knew who it was.

  "I chose to come with you, didn't I?" Ada said.

  He looked at his hands wrapped around the axe. The mad spirits grew silent, and the axe began to pulse with the sound of a drum and a glow of blue. Without the spirits whispering any longer, he realized that he could now think straight. He looked at the weapon, and they resumed speaking. "Dane, you have to kill yourself. It's the only way out."

  He let go of the mythic weapon.

  The blade struck stone with a hollow crack. The fractures spread like lightning across frozen glass. A soft explosion of steel shards sprayed all around, and it was gone.

  "You're right," he said. "They chose. I owe them nothing."

  The battlefield illuminated. Light consumed everything.

  Trial passed.

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  [MARA]

  The bar smelled like lemon wax and cheap bourbon. The floor creaked in the same places it always had. Her mother's laugh filled every inch like an old country song half-remembered, and golden light bounced off the cracked jukebox.

  She wrapped her fingers around the glass. The drink tasted like citrus and childhood summers, ice cubes clinking like wind chimes.

  The hallway door glowed. Thin lines of light spilled around the frame like a sunrise locked in a box. It pulsed in time with her heartbeat. She took a step toward it, but the urge left her as quickly as it came.

  Her mother poured another shot. "You always come back tired. Let it go. Just for tonight."

  Mara nodded. Her hands were steady. Her healer's gloves were gone, and the weight of a satchel was missing.

  Outside, time was a glacier, cold and unmoving, eternal. Inside, warmth clung to her skin like bathwater turning tepid, resisting the chill of return. She moved toward the hallway. Each step dragged like she was walking through syrup. Her chest tightened. The door grew distant with every stride, like the dream knew she was trying to leave.

  Her mother's voice deepened a reverberation beneath the words. "Stay. Be loved. You've earned that much."

  The lights flickered. Behind the bar, a sigil burned. Her veins lit up in response, glowing threads weaving across her forearm, pulsing in sync with the bar's neon.

  She blinked a few times.

  Each one was heavier than the last.

  "I can't save them anymore, can I?"

  "No," Khronos replied, the voice layered and eternal, wearing her mother's mouth like a mask. "But you can rest."

  She stepped towards the door once more. Then she turned around with a smile and sat next to her mother at the bar.

  Trial failed.

  [JASON]

  Snow piled against the windows in lazy drifts, muffling the outside world in a hush that felt like forgiveness. The radiator hissed quietly, breathing warmth into the room. Jason sat at the old Amish table, his father's pride, a monument to simplicity and function. His fingers worked on the pen, dismantling it piece by piece. It was his father's pen and meant to be passed down to the next Doctor in the family.

  His parents sat across from him, sipping tea. Jason had a memory pop up to the forefront of his mind; he had already disassembled this pen. His father had broken the paddle he kept in the closet for discipline the last time. Why was he so calm watching him now?

  Then he saw the math in them. Saw the code that rendered them. Every word was a variable: every gesture, a line of corrupted syntax. The room hummed like a faulty simulation.

  "I need clarity," he said.

  His mother reached out, trying to pull him in for a hug, something he hadn't had since before the collapse.

  He caught her wrist. He pressed a glowing crystal into her palm. It was a containment shard that pulsed softly with pale blue light—holding the final memories of a childhood from a lifetime ago.

  "I know you're not real. I know you're not my mom. But this is goodbye. It is holding me back."

  They dissolved into static.

  Jason opened his eyes.

  Trial passed.

  He laughed loudly and raggedly. He doubled over. His chest burned. His hands trembled. But no tears came.

  Just more sick laughter.

  [AMELIA]

  She stood in the Hall of her House, but it was burning now.

  The marble was cracked, blackened with soot. Flames licked the pillars where honor had once stood. The banners that had danced in breathless air now twisted in fire, their sigils dissolving into ash.

  Her father knelt before her, his armor scorched, crown askew, and voice bleeding and raw.

  "Please. Save them. You're the only one left who can."

  Behind him, her clansmen clung to the ruins. Proud men and women reduced to ghosts in gilded armor, their voices cracked with desperation. "The House can stand again," they begged. "We only need you to lead."

  Her father's hand reached for hers.

  She looked down at it for a moment, then past it. To the wreckage. To the throne that still stood, untouched amid the flames, gleaming like a lie preserved in amber.

  "No," she said, voice steady and eyes cold.

  "I will not save the House."

  She turned her back on them.

  "I will tear it down. And when the fire dies, if anything is left, we will rebuild."

  The Hall roared with the crackle of flames. Glass shattered from the stained windows as the roof gave way, fire swallowing the last of the past. Her father's voice was lost in the wail. She walked through the flames without looking back.

  Trial Passed.

  [DOORWAY TO THE 50TH]

  Dane awoke with blood in his throat and frost on his lashes. The telepad's runes flickered beneath him with a pale, sputtering light, like a heartbeat too tired to keep rhythm.

  Jason knelt beside the array, fingers twitching, muttering equations that bled into madness. Dane had just now noticed that the man had armor underneath his clothing. He decided to let it go. Jason wrote in the snow, symbols that seemed to form some equation.

  Amelia stood nearby. Her armor was ash-flecked, sword hanging low.

  Mara's lifeless body lay on the floor before them. She looked as though she had passed away peacefully. Then a stream of purple light filled her chest, and her eyes opened. The color had changed; Dane couldn't remember what they were before, but now the two opals stared at him. Eyes that matched his own.

  Dane rose slowly, limbs stiff, throat burning.

  In his hand, the handle of the shattered axe.

  He didn't have time to unravel this mystery; whatever awaited him on the other side of the door probably knew the answer, so he stepped towards the door on the other side of the gate.

  The fiftieth floor awaited.