Zeroverse Short Stories
By: Enrique Delgado
The Fire That Walked
A Zeroverse Short Story
Long before the Grid, before phase anchors and Council control, the desert knew another kind of travel—one carved into stone, breath, and memory.
When a young guardian of the Thirteen Fires witnesses the arrival of a strange, wounded traveler, her world fractures. The newcomer carries technology unlike anything her people have seen, yet speaks of dangers they’ve known for generations—shadow echoes and a machine that erases what it cannot understand.
As tensions rise between honoring ancient resonance and surviving the invader’s warnings, the guardian must decide: protect her people’s secrets, or risk everything to stop a threat older than the Grid itself.
Some fires burn to guide.
Others burn to warn.
And some… burn to walk.
Before the Jump
A Zeroverse Short Story
Before Raeven Virek became the Grid’s most dangerous anomaly, she was just a curious teenager breaking into the maintenance levels where no one her age belonged. But the Grid isn’t just wires and code—it remembers.
When Raeven stumbles across a dead jump pad that isn’t as offline as it seems, she triggers a cascade of events buried since the Council’s most hushed disaster. Across the city, her sister Kieris—once trapped in the same anomaly—feels the pull, and old signatures start bleeding back into the system.
Locked between past and present, Raeven drifts into a space where echoes speak, memories lie, and choices ripple far beyond a single phase jump.
Every origin has a moment where the rules break.
This is hers.
Drift Lock
A Zeroverse Short Story
Beneath the neon arteries of Portal City, the Grid hides more than phase routes and Council secrets—it hides ghosts.
When Council observer Tevon Zavaro is sent to investigate a failing relay deep in the underlevels, he finds more than corrupted code. Something is mimicking his slate signature. Something that shouldn’t exist.
Across the Grid’s echo layers, old signatures awaken—patterns braided from the living and the lost. And in the shadows between phase points, the Watchers stir, drawn to the drift like moths to a dying signal.
Every lock has a purpose.
Some are meant to keep you out.
This one was built to keep something in.