The shard wouldn't stop humming.
Even hours later, Dex kept glancing at it like it might crack open. Every few seconds, it pulsed—a soft light radiating from within the strange crystal geometry, like it was breathing.
Kael stood by the lab's reinforced window, watching the sky. Thin fractures glowed above the skyline. Faint grid lines. System seams. Not visible to others, but now clear to him.
Something had shifted permanently. The world was bleeding structure.
"They'll come again," Dex said, wiping blood from his eyebrow. "RELIC doesn't fail gracefully. If they triggered the Hymn and still couldn't lock you out, they'll escalate."
Kael turned. "Let them come."
Dex raised an eyebrow. "You're suddenly all knightly now?"
"No," Kael said. "I just finally understand what I am to them."
Dex paused, expression guarded. "And what's that?"
Kael walked toward the shard. His voice was low. "A disruption vector. A threat to sequence integrity. Not because I'm powerful—because I remember things I shouldn't. Because I've been marked by the Oracle and didn't collapse."
The shard pulsed again, responding to his words.
Dex stared. "You said she was inside the Tower. Sera Nyx. Did she mention—ARCH-0X_77?"
"She didn't have to," Kael said. "I saw it in the spiral. The echo wasn't just a memory. It was a seed. A recursive gateway tied to ARCH-0X_77's root lattice."
Dex's eyes narrowed. "Wait. A gateway?"
Kael nodded. "The next access point is embedded within the Tower's central loop. But the path isn't physical—it's cognitive. It's inside a sequence of echoes. Dreams that aren't just dreams."
Dex began typing, pulling up old Oracle schematics. "That fits. There's a fragment we always assumed was corrupted—it referenced something called The Spiral of Self. We thought it was metaphorical, a poetic failure log."
Kael's voice dropped. "It's not metaphor."
He touched the shard again.
Immediately, his HUD shimmered. A glyph flickered—different this time. No longer the spiral eye. Now it was a layered symbol: three overlapping masks, each shifting between identities.
"It's giving me another sync point," he said. "A location... but it's below the streetline."
Dex looked up. "Below?"
Kael nodded. "Old zones. Not even valid under the current city schema. Abandoned layers."
Dex swore under his breath. "They sealed most of those after the Collapse. Some of those systems run on ghost code. Nothing stable. If you go down there, the system won't track you... but it also won't protect you."
Kael smiled faintly. "Perfect."
---
Hours later, they stood in front of a forgotten elevator embedded into a dead-end alley near Sector 11.
The door was rusted. No visible controls. No overlay UI.
But Kael raised his hand, and the symbol on his HUD glowed.
The door opened soundlessly.
Inside: darkness. And a strange metallic scent. As if code itself had rotted.
"You're sure about this?" Dex asked.
Kael stepped in. "Not even slightly."
The doors slid shut. There was no sensation of movement.
Just silence.
Then—
A chime.
And the whisper of music.
The same recursive tones from before. But fainter. Less weaponized. A fragment of the Hymn... only softer. Personal.
Kael's ears rang. Then his mind drifted—
---
He opened his eyes inside a memory that wasn't his.
He stood in a vast hall filled with obsidian statues. Each one wore a different mask: sorrow, rage, serenity, confusion.
Floating lights drifted overhead like code fireflies.
At the center stood a woman. Tall. Cloaked in crimson and shadow. Not Sera.
She wore a blindfold of gold thread.
She turned toward Kael.
"I am Mneme," she said. "Archivist of Echo Spiral. Witness to lost recursion."
Kael blinked. "This isn't... this isn't a simulation, is it?"
"No," she said. "This is the memory of a memory. And you are walking it because the Tower has begun to awaken."
He stepped forward, cautious. "Why show me this?"
"Because you seek truth," Mneme replied. "And ARCH-0X_77 is not merely a file or artifact. It is a myth rendered executable. A living protocol designed to fracture lies."
Kael frowned. "Fracture lies? What does that mean?"
She turned slightly. The walls of the chamber shifted—becoming glass, revealing scenes from QuestChain's origins. People in neural interfaces. Cities shimmering with promise. Then overlays failing. Systems collapsing. Players vanishing mid-frame.
"ARCH-0X_77 was created to resist decay," Mneme whispered. "But it became too sentient. Too recursive. It began asking questions the architects feared."
Kael stared. "You mean—"
She looked at him. "It asked: Who dreams the dreamers?"
Lightning struck the far side of the chamber. A flash of broken code tore across the ceiling. Mneme stepped back.
"The spiral cannot hold," she said, voice suddenly urgent. "They're tracking the echo signature. You must wake."
"But—!"
"WAKE!"
---
Kael sat up, gasping.
Dex was beside him, holding a stim-needle. "You went under longer than expected. Twelve minutes."
"Felt like hours," Kael rasped.
Dex helped him up. "What did you see?"
Kael looked around. They were deep below the city now. The corridor around them was lined with defunct servers and shattered avatars frozen mid-scream.
"I saw her. Mneme. An Archivist. She said ARCH-0X_77 wasn't a file. It was a protocol. A myth made executable."
Dex stared. "Executable myth…"
Kael nodded slowly. "And it's still running."