Explore a world where Javanese mythology meets modern bureaucracy. Follow Sri Dewantara as she battles reality distortions, the shadowy Department of Anomalies, and the awakening of an ancient terror in this Javanese Gothic urban fantasy.
Arc 2: The Crossroads Gambit
The glossary of cultural terms are ordered alphabetically at the end of the book.
Chapter 1 — The Flowers Never Lie
The morning started the way most mornings had for the last six months — with Sri lying still under her thin blanket for a full minute after waking, doing nothing but breathing, running a private checklist through her head before she let herself move.
Day twelve since she'd agreed to go to the network meeting. She could hear the neighborhood waking up outside — a motorbike coughing to life two houses down, someone's rooster deciding it was late enough to start, the thin clatter of Bu Marni unlocking her kiosk shutter down the lane.
Ordinary sounds. The kind of sounds that meant the world outside her window still believed itself to be an ordinary place.
She sat up slow and reached for the small mirror propped against her water glass — not to check her hair, but to check the field.
[MORNING DIAGNOSTIC] Reality Distortion Field: Idle (Sleep State) Containment Integrity: 91% Note: Field integrity naturally drops during REM cycles. Recommended: full suppression check before leaving the sleeping area.
Ninety-one wasn't bad. It wasn't great either.
Some mornings she woke up at ninety-eight, tight and controlled, like she'd spent the whole night holding her own breath without meaning to.
Other mornings, like today, she woke up loose at the edges, the field having drifted while she dreamed, and she had to spend a few minutes pulling it back in before she trusted herself to walk past anything that could catch fire, grow legs, or start breathing on its own.
She'd learned the hard way that dreams didn't stay in her head anymore.
Two months ago she'd had a nightmare about drowning and woken up to find the water glass by her bed had gone from half-full to overflowing, the extra water sitting in a perfect circle on the floor that hadn't spread like spilled water should. She'd mopped it up before Cokro woke up and never told him.
She sat cross-legged on the mat and did the pull-in, slow, Sena had taught her back when he still had enough of himself left to teach things properly instead of just delivering warnings through train windows.
Breathe in, gather. Breathe out, hold. It took her about four minutes most mornings. Today it took six, because some part of the field kept snagging on the leftover fear from a dream she couldn't fully remember, something about a door that wouldn't stay shut.
By the time she was done, her chest ached faintly, the specific ache of a muscle that had been clenched too long without her noticing.
[PERSONAL STATUS] Vitality: 182/185 Power Capacity: 4,180/4,200 Mental Strain: Low Note: Morning containment routine complete. Cost: 20 capacity. This is the price of admission before your day has technically begun.
She got up, folded the mat, and went out to check the garden before anything else — before breakfast, before her phone, before she let herself think about the meeting or the countdown or any of the larger things sitting at the edge of her life like weather she couldn't outrun.
The garden was small, really. To anyone who wandered in without knowing better, it would have looked like an odd but harmless backyard plot — some flowering shrubs, a strange twisted tree in the corner, a patch of grass that looked a little too uniformly green.
Sena had built most of it in the first month after her awakening, back when he still had the strength to shape living things with his own hands instead of just his voice. He'd called it a warning system disguised as landscaping.
Sri had thought that was overly dramatic until the first time it actually saved them a full day's warning on something that would have otherwise walked straight up to their door.
She started her circuit at the fractal bed, she did every morning, crouching low to look at the blossoms without touching them yet.
The Mathematics Fractals were the workhorses of the whole garden — a dozen small flowers whose petals grew in branching, repeating patterns, each one a little copy of the whole flower nested inside itself.
Sena had explained once that they worked by mirroring the shape of local probability: the more stable and ordinary the day ahead looked, the more perfectly symmetrical the petals stayed. When something was coming, the pattern glitched first, subtly, a petal growing one branch too many or one too few, visible only if you knew to look. Color came second, and by the time color changed, whatever the flowers were sensing was already close.
She checked each bloom in turn. Twelve flowers, twelve small mirrors of the day ahead. Eleven of them sat pale purple, calm, symmetrical, boring in the specific way she'd learned to appreciate more than almost anything else in her life.
The twelfth was red.
She'd get to that. She always saved the worst news for after she'd checked everything else, a habit she wasn't proud of but hadn't managed to break.
She moved on to the Temporal Lilies next, three of them planted in a loose triangle near the base of the spiral tree. These ones didn't warn about danger exactly — they warned about time itself doing something it shouldn't. Their petals opened and closed on a slow, steady loop, each full cycle taking almost four seconds if nothing was wrong.
Sri had once spent a whole bored afternoon timing them with her phone's stopwatch, back before any of this had started feeling like a job. If the cycle sped up or slowed down even slightly, it meant something nearby was pulling at the fabric of cause and effect — an echo, a loop, a fragment of some other timeline bleeding through.
She'd only seen them glitch once, the week after the Vault incident, when for about ten minutes they'd opened and closed so fast their petals blurred, and later that same night she'd seen one of her own possible other selves standing at the tree line, watching her through the dark.
Today they moved at a steady four seconds. Fine. Boring. Good.
Last stop was the patch of grass Sena had planted almost as an afterthought, though it had turned out to be the most sensitive of all of them, the closest thing the garden had to a smoke detector.
Ordinary grass didn't do anything. This grass, when something got close enough and wrong enough, started to breathe — rising and falling in slow, wet pulls, like the whole patch had grown a single set of lungs shared between every blade. It wasn't subtle. It also wasn't precise.
It couldn't tell her what was coming, only that something was, and it reacted to almost anything with enough strangeness in it, which was why she'd spent two exhausting hours the night before last coaxing it back into being ordinary grass after her own bad dream had apparently leaked out through her skin while she slept.
This morning the grass lay flat and still, un-breathing, indifferent. One system quiet. One system on alert. That was the trouble with running three different alarms instead of one — they never agreed with each other, and she'd learned not to trust any single reading on its own.
She went back to the red flower last, she always did, crouching down to actually look at it properly instead of just registering its color from a distance.
[ENVIRONMENTAL WARNING] Fractal Warning Bloom: Status Change Previous: Yellow (Threat at Distance) Current: Red (Threat Has Your Exact Coordinates) Note: This color only shifts when something knows precisely where you are standing — not merely that you exist.
She crouched and touched a petal. Warm, like it had been sitting in direct sun, except the flower grew in the shade of the spiral tree, where sunlight never really reached.
Something in her chest hummed back at her — the part of her mother that was still folded into the amulet since the accident in the in-between. Not words. More like a note held too long, the kind that if you listened close enough sounded like careful.
"I know," Sri said under her breath. "I feel it too."
She hadn't told her father yet. Hadn't found the moment, mostly because Pak Cokro was in the kitchen fighting with the gas stove, which was lighting on one side only, and to him that was a more solvable problem than a flower turning the color of an open wound.
"Sri! Go get gas from Bu Marni!" His voice carried out through the thin wall, competing with a pan being set down too hard. "The three-kilo one."
She looked at the flower one more time before she went in.
[PERSONAL STATUS] Vitality: 178/185 Power Capacity: 3,900/4,200 Mental Strain: Low (rising since this morning) Note: You have chosen to ignore an active location-specific threat in order to purchase cooking gas.
She grabbed the cash tin from the shelf, counted out enough for a full cylinder plus a little extra in case Bu Marni had gone up on price again, and stepped out into the lane.
This was the part nobody warned her about when the power first woke up in her — that most of what it demanded from her wasn't fighting monsters. It was this. Walking down an ordinary road with an ordinary errand, and having to hold something down the entire time so the ordinary stayed ordinary.
Six months in, she'd gotten better at it, but better didn't mean easy. Every step she took, some part of her mind stayed locked on the same low, constant task — keeping the field around her body folded in tight, small enough that it didn't touch anything it wasn't supposed to touch.
She'd learned the hard way, back in the second month, what happened if she let her guard down even walking to the corner shop.
A stray dog had wandered too close to her one afternoon while her attention drifted, and by the time she noticed, its shadow had started moving half a second behind the rest of it, peeling away from its paws like it wasn't sure it wanted to stay attached. She'd spent twenty minutes coaxing the shadow back into place before the dog's owner came looking for it.
So now she walked carrying gas cylinders with one hand and holding the entire shape of her own existence in check with the other, and nobody around her ever knew the difference. That was the part that felt unfair some days. Nobody clapped for the disasters that didn't happen.
[PASSIVE COST] Reality Distortion Field: Actively Suppressed Power Capacity: 3,900 → 3,840 (Continuous drain while active) Note: Maintaining suppression during mundane tasks is not free. The field wants to express itself. Holding it still costs the same as holding your breath.
She felt the drain, you'd feel a held breath starting to ache in your chest — not painful yet, just present, a low background pull that would keep taking small amounts from her the whole walk there and back.
Sixty points for a bag of gas. She used to think about what that number meant in terms of what else she could have done with it — half a shield, maybe, or one clean burst of light if something came at her from the treeline.
Now she mostly just thought about how tired she was going to be by dinner, and how nobody at the warung would ever know that buying cooking gas had cost her anything at all.
Bu Marni was out front sweeping her own step when Sri got there, and she waved with the broom before setting it aside.
"Three kilograms of gas, Nduk?" Bu Marni said, meaning the subsidized ones were out again, third time this month. "The blue tank only."
"Yes, Bu." Sri counted out the money and traded it for the heavy blue cylinder, careful , she was always careful now, aware of the exact distance between the metal in her hands and the field she was keeping folded tight around herself. Metal held a charge longer than most things. She didn't need to find that out twice.
She carried it home past the empty guard post, where the kentongan hung from its rafter and a few cigarette butts sat crushed on the concrete. The ronda schedule was posted on the wall same as always, her father's name near the bottom for Thursday, and she already knew tonight she'd have to fake being asleep so nobody asked why lights kept flickering in the back garden at two in the morning.
By the time she reached her own gate, her arms ached from the cylinder's weight and something behind her eyes had started throbbing low and steady, the particular kind of tired that came from holding two things at once for too long.
She checked her status without really meaning to, the readout flickering up automatic now after six months of doing this so often it barely felt like a choice anymore.
[PERSONAL STATUS] Vitality: 176/185 Power Capacity: 3,838/4,200 Mental Strain: Low-Moderate Note: One ordinary errand completed. Cost: 62 capacity, 2 vitality. No incidents. This is what stability looks like — not the absence of cost, but the choice to pay it quietly, every day, without anyone noticing.
Cokro wasn't in the kitchen when she got back. He was sitting on the front room sofa, very straight, staring at his cracked phone like it had said something to him.
"What," Sri said, setting the cylinder down, letting the field around her finally loosen a little now that the metal was out of her hands.
He didn't answer. He held the phone out.
An unregistered number. No photo, no saved name. Seven names typed in a plain list, no greeting, no emoji, nothing that read like a person being friendly:
Sri Dewantara
Wirawan Kusmadi
Dyah Ayu Larasati
Bagas Prakoso
~Nining Wulandari~
Teguh Santosa
Nadia Rahman
The fifth name had a line through it. Not the grey auto-strike WhatsApp puts on a deleted message. Someone had typed the formatting in on purpose, which was somehow worse than if they'd just deleted the whole thing.
[MESSAGE ANALYSIS] Sender: Unidentified Contents: 7 names, all prospective Synthesis Network members One name manually struck through Probable meaning: status "complete"
"Who's Nining," Sri asked.
"Woman from Solo." Cokro's voice had gone flat in a way that wasn't calm, just a version of calm he was making himself do. "Sena brought her in three weeks back. Said she was the steadiest one we had."
"We should call her," Sri said.
"I did." Cokro didn't look up. "Her number's been off since last night."
Sri sat down next to him, and it was only then, with the weight of the gas cylinder finally off her arms and the field settling back into its usual quiet hum, that she let herself feel how much the walk had actually taken out of her.
Her own phone buzzed in her pocket and for one stupid second she hoped it was something useful. It was a battery warning. Five percent. Charger still on the nightstand where she'd left it.
That, out of everything, almost made her cry. That in the middle of all this she still had to think about a dead phone.
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