CiriCrossover origin story

Act I — The next room is not next

Ciri tested the doors carefully. One led to the kitchen as it had been an hour earlier. Another opened onto the same hallway during a rainstorm that had not yet begun. The antique door showed a room full of furniture covered in white sheets, including a chair the locksmith insisted he had never owned.

The effect was confined to the house. Windows opened onto the present. The front gate behaved normally. Somewhere inside the door’s carved frame, a damaged mechanism was folding nearby moments together instead of connecting spaces in the usual order.

Ciri could sense the distortion, but sensing a knot did not immediately tell her which strand to pull. Her first attempt to close the loop sent a spoon through the kitchen three times. The locksmith watched it land in his cup and asked whether this counted as progress.

She asked him to stop making tea for a moment. He replied that she had said that yesterday too.

The house was getting worse. Each repeated arrival left another overlap behind. If they kept opening doors without understanding the pattern, the small errors could accumulate until there was no stable sequence left to restore.

Ciri drew a map on the table. The locksmith put a cloth beneath it, apparently still hopeful about the furniture.

Act II — The mistake already made

The map revealed one consistent point: the room behind the antique door always appeared empty except for covered furniture and a tall standing mirror. The mirror reflected the house as it was now, regardless of which moment the room itself belonged to.

Ciri crossed the threshold and uncovered it. The frame matched the door. They had been part of a pair, designed to hold a passage steady from opposite sides. Separating them had left the door searching for an anchor and borrowing nearby moments whenever it failed to find one.

The solution seemed obvious. Bring the mirror into the present and reconnect the pair.

Then she found a note in her own handwriting taped to its back: DO NOT CARRY IT THROUGH THE DOOR.

The locksmith, waiting in the hallway, asked whether the writing was helpful. She said it was irritatingly brief.

She spent the next several minutes resisting the temptation to assume that a warning from herself must be incomplete. The house had already supplied enough evidence of what happened when confidence moved faster than observation. Instead, she examined the window. It opened onto the present, just like every other window in the building.

They would have to lower the mirror outside and bring it in through the front entrance. It was heavy, awkward and entirely without dramatic elegance. The locksmith produced a rope. Ciri suspected that some future version of herself was enjoying this far too much.

Act III — The ordinary way out

The mirror cleared the window with less room to spare than either of them preferred. Halfway down, the locksmith sneezed, the rope slipped and Ciri discovered that solving a temporal anomaly could still involve shouting instructions about left and right.

They carried it through the front door together. No lights flashed. No impressive sound announced their success. The house simply stopped repeating itself. A spoon remained in its drawer. The clock moved forward once and continued doing so.

Ciri placed the mirror beside the antique frame. The passage steadied, then closed. Its carved surface became ordinary wood, beautiful and currently uninterested in ruining breakfast.

The locksmith asked about the room full of covered furniture. Was it his future? A possibility? Someone else’s house entirely? Ciri said she did not know. He considered this answer, then decided that not knowing was preferable to having the furniture arrive without warning.

Before leaving, she wrote the note she had found and placed it where the loop required. She added a second line: USE THE WINDOW. Then she crossed it out. Apparently, she was capable of becoming exactly as annoying as the person she had spent the morning criticizing.

The locksmith offered fresh toast. This time she accepted it sitting down.

Outside, the predicted rain began. Ciri pulled up her collar and chose the road for the first part of her journey. Walking had its disadvantages, but it rarely expected her to solve yesterday before lunchtime.