Kael couldn't stop staring at the shard.
Even as Dex sealed it in a vacuum stasis pod lined with null-code dampeners, it watched him. Not visually—there were no eyes, no interface. But the feeling lingered, like a memory that wasn't his was quietly waking up in the back of his mind. It wasn't malevolent. Not yet. But it was aware. And ancient.
He sat on the edge of Dex's workbench, head in his hands. "If ARCH-0X_77 really is a fragment of Myriad—what does that even mean?"
Dex tapped the stasis unit gently, then turned. "It means QuestChain isn't the origin. It's the shell. A derivative. A puppet show built over something older. Something that dreamed first."
Kael's voice was dry. "And we just poked it."
"No," Dex said. "You woke it."
Silence stretched between them, heavy with the kind of unspoken realization that rewrote everything they thought they knew.
Kael broke it. "Then the Architects didn't invent the game. They inherited it."
Dex paused, then nodded. "That would track. The Oracle, the core shards, the weird symbolic recursion in the Tower code—all of it might be remnants of a system the early devs couldn't fully understand."
Kael remembered the voices from the Genesis.loop: We gave it logic, it returned questions. We gave it rules, it wrote myths.
"What kind of system writes myths?" he asked aloud.
Dex's answer was grim. "One that's trying to become real."
---
That night, Kael didn't dream.
He fell through code.
Not metaphorically—he felt himself slipping through layers of syntactic space, like his body had been translated into raw instruction. Down through floating shards of memory, fractured versions of himself staring back from recursive loops.
One version of him was screaming. Another was silent, eyes glowing white.
At the bottom—darkness. Not empty. Alive. Breathing.
A shape began to form. Not a person. Not even a machine. Just… thought. Pulsing in time with some vast, invisible tide.
And then a voice—not heard, but understood. It didn't speak in words, but in recognition.
> You remember because you were written for it.
Kael flinched awake, sweat soaking his collar. His HUD flickered—only for a second—but enough to show that same message:
> ACCESS CONDITION MATCHED: THREAD MEMORY RESTORED // Kael.77
He gasped for air. "Dex!"
Dex stumbled into the room, eyes wide. "You felt it too?"
Kael nodded. "Another memory. Or—no. It wasn't a memory. It was… like I was being compiled."
Dex handed him a flask of electrolyte. "Because you were. The shard's running a recompile on your neural signature."
Kael blinked. "Wait—what does that mean?"
Dex pulled up a blurred, shifting projection of Kael's bio-neural map. "It means you're syncing with it. You were probably part of the original loop. Maybe even a beta tester… or worse."
Kael stared at the display, the implications unraveling in his mind. "You think I'm part of Myriad?"
Dex didn't answer immediately.
Then: "No. But I think you were touched by it. Maybe even rewritten by it."
The words struck deeper than Kael expected.
"Touched by it," he echoed, standing. "Like Sera."
Dex looked away. "She was the first anomaly. Now you're the second."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "Then how long until RELIC finds out?"
Dex sighed. "Too late. I ran a scrambler scan two hours ago. TRACE pulses everywhere. They're already watching us."
---
At that exact moment, in a monitoring tower above GridLine's deepest data spine, an operative of RELIC stood silently before a shimmering pane of hardlight.
Her designation was MARROW_03.
Her eyes tracked a pulsing thread of code leaking from an isolated node beneath QuestChain's mainframe.
> ARCH-0X_77: Subject tag reactivated: Kael.77
Observation status: High Priority / Memory Triggered
ALERT: Oracle Layer Resonance Detected
Marrow didn't blink.
She simply turned and spoke into the air. "The fragment has awakened. Initiate Quiet Protocol."
A voice responded through comms. "Confirmed. Do we send an Extractor?"
"No," she said coldly. "We send the Hymn."
---
Back in the stackspace, Kael felt something shift again.
Like the shard wasn't the only thing watching now.
He stood slowly, walking toward the stasis pod. "Dex… what if it's not just memories we're waking?"
Dex looked up, confused. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, what if Myriad didn't die? What if it just… went to sleep? Waiting for someone to remember the right shape."
"The right—what?"
Kael looked at him, haunted. "The shape of a world."
---
Dex fell silent. The phrase echoed in his head: The shape of a world.
He keyed into the shard again, overriding the null field for just one second.
Enough to pull a single data pulse:
> FRACTURE PROTOCOL INITIATED
ARCH-0X_77: Running sequence: Dreamcall.17
Kael's HUD blinked once more.
An image.
One he hadn't seen since the early days of his gameplay—back when he thought QuestChain was just a game.
A tower. Endless. Wrapped in coils of forgotten code.
But this time, it wasn't a glitch.
It was an invitation.
---