From the world of Quantum Weave, where magic is forgotten nanotechnology and failed spells leave reality fractured.
The meadow exists. Does not exist. Both.
I stand in three places: beneath the silver birch where frost still clings to bark-wounds, at the streamâs edge where mist rises in geometric spirals, and somewhere elseâa meadow that was or will be or refuses to decide.
The others moved past this place long ago. I remember their hoofprints in snow that hasnât fallen. I remember their scentâmusk and fear and the green tang of new grassâeven though they never came this way. Even though theyâre here now, grazing just beyond the shimmer-line where reality forgets how to be singular.
I am always fleeing. I am always still.
When the wolf comesâand it comes, has come, is perpetually arriving through the thornwoodâI blink. Not my eyes. All of me. The space where I stand folds, and Iâm elsewhere: the same meadow, but the wolf is ten heartbeats behind, ten heartbeats ahead, circling something that isnât quite here.
It howls at all my positions. The sound fractures into harmonics that shouldnât exist.
My eyes see too much. The morning is blue-gold and verdant. The morning is iron-grey and dying. The morning is crystalline, geometric, a lattice of light that tastes of copper and distant thunder. I flick my ears toward the sound that hasnât arrived yet, the cracking branch that exists in probability only.
There is pain in the seeing. Four hundred paths fork from this momentâI graze, I bolt, I stand frozen, I dissolve into the shimmering between-space where the world canât decide whatâs real. I experience all of them, each layered over the others like frost on glass, each certain itâs the only truth.
The grass I eat is fresh-bitter. Is rotted. Is crystalline fiber that cuts my tongue. Is not there at all.
I cannot leave. The boundary is exactâwhere the shimmer-line fades, where reality congeals into single-truth, I hurt. The solidity of elsewhere is poison. Here, in the fractured zone, in the space that canât make up its mind, I am home and exile both.
The wolf stops circling. Stares at me with eyes that split into prismatic shards. Itâs pack-hungry and alone-desperate and not-here-at-all. Its growl reverberates across the probability branches, and I knowâin the way I know anything anymoreâthat it sees what I see. Multiple prey. Multiple futures. Multiple failures.
We are both trapped in the threshold.
I blink again. The wolf lunges at where I was-am-will-be. Its jaws snap on empty air full of snow that isnât falling. I stand three trees distant, watching it worry the nothing-space, whimpering at the taste of paradox.
Somewhereâsomewhenâthe others are safe. They reached the forestâs edge where the world is kind enough to be singular. Where grass is only grass. Where hunger is only hunger. Where now is only now, and not this eternal, branching, recursive trap.
I lower my head to graze on probability.
The stars above wheel through their circuits, and I see them in daylightâpinpricks of light bleeding through the dome of reality where itâs worn too thin. They hum. Everything hums here, a resonance just below hearing, just above forgetting.
I am not alone. There are others like me, scattered through the shimmer-zonesâdeer who stood too long where the world breaks. I see their afterimages, their echo-selves, trails of translucent bodies stretching across might-be meadows. We donât touch. Canât touch. Each of us is our own probability collapse, our own uncertain truth.
The sun sets. The sun rises. The sun holds its position at zenith, burning through three seasons at once.
I flicker.
I remain.
The threshold keeps me, and I keep the threshold, and neither of us knows anymore where the boundary lies between observer and observed, between what fractures and whatâs already broken.
The meadow exists.
I exist within it.
Both statements are true, false, and something syntax cannot capture.
The wolf circles.
I am always fleeing.
I am always here.
In the world of Quantum Weave, when spells fail catastrophically, they create Corrupted Weave Zonesâplaces where the quantum electromagnetic field canât decide on a single state of reality. This phase deer is trapped in perpetual superposition, experiencing all possible states simultaneously. It exists between. Forever.
Learn more about the Quantum Weave universe.