Excerpt from a testimony etched in shroom-leather vellum, retrieved from the charred husk of a Gånghall by scavengers.

⸻

I didn’t mean to see it.
Didn’t want to.

But when time starts screaming, it drags you in.
The air goes thin—like memory pulling tight around your throat—then it fractures.
Like glass under boiling water.
You fall through yourself a little.

One moment I was in the canopy, scouting like I was told.
The next, I was looking down at me,
watching myself not breathe.

They had her laid bare on the altar.
Veins pulsing like she knew—
like her body felt what her mind hadn’t caught up to.

The chants were rhythm at first.
Pretty, even.
Like birdsong trapped in a death spiral.
Then came the line, drawn in a voice that belonged to none of them—
and all of them at once:

“Gången tar, men Gången ger.”
Gången takes, but Gången gives.

And I swear, the jungle flinched.
Leaves curled.
Insects dropped mid-flight.
My heartbeat skipped backward.

When the blade met her chest, it didn’t cut skin.
It cut sequence.

Her body stayed.
Her time… didn’t.

I watched her dissolve into events that hadn’t happened yet—
into memories that belonged to people who never knew her.

I saw her death ripple into a child’s tears,
three continents away.
I saw a predator die from hunger—
because prey it hadn’t hunted yet
no longer existed.

And when it ended,
they cheered.

Like they’d won something.
Like the hole they tore in time
was a gift.
A favor.

A genocide of a race
that suddenly
no longer existed.

I ran.
I ran so hard the bones
in my feet cracked like twigs.

But I don’t think I ever left that place.

I don’t sleep right.
I don’t age right.
I smell sulfur before the rain.
I hear the whistle and din before the sky lancers drop.

Sometimes I see people I haven’t met [yet]
look at me like we’re old friends—
and they’re terrified.

I’m terrified.

The cult thinks they made a pact.
They didn’t.
They’ve unleashed something foul.
Something twisted.

Something that bleeds both forward and back.
Something far beyond their understanding
or control.

And I’ve lived with it echoing through every
haunting second of the stolen life
I’ll never live—
that she will never live.

They call that chant a prayer.
But I know what it really is.

It’s a curse.