Grimthorne

When Vera awakens on the marble floor of a university's library, she has no idea how she got there. Her memories are gone-cleanly erased-yet a strange silver ring on her finger feels familiar. Etched inside the band is the Latin phrase "ad veritatem." Toward the truth.

But something is desperately wrong.
Every clock on campus is frozen at 2:17 a.m.
Time hasn't stopped... it's looping, flickering, stuttering like corrupted code. The hallways glitch between states, staircases shift direction mid-step, and the portraits on the walls seem to watch her, frame by frame.

Vera soon discovers she isn't alone. Four other students-each dazed, memoryless, and wearing identical rings-are scattered across the university grounds:
None of them remember why they're there, but their rings link them like pieces of a broken equation.

As the five try to understand the glitching reality around them, fragments of memory bleed through-shards of a secret society at the university, an experiment that pushed beyond the boundaries of consciousness, and something they tried to uncover... or to hide.

The phrase ad veritatem begins to take on a darker weight.
The truth is what they were searching for.
The truth is what broke the world at 2:17.
And the truth is something one of them is still hiding.

To restart time and escape the collapsing reality, they must recover what they lost.
But the more they remember,
the more the glitches hunt them-
as if the world itself is trying to prevent the truth from resurfacing.

And Vera suspects that when the clock finally ticks again,
one of them will not survive it.