A Vision Reborn
Elior's sleep was shallow, interrupted by distant whispers he could not silence.
In his dream, he walked through a tunnel made of mirror-shards—each reflecting a version of himself: a leader, a martyr, a tyrant, a god.
At the end of the tunnel stood Mira.
But her eyes were not hers. They were filled with static, flickering like old signal code.
"You are not dreaming," she said.
"You're remembering something that never happened."
He reached toward her—
—and woke, heart pounding.
Lysa's Shadow
Beneath District 12, Lysa watched a captured data-slice of Mira's appearance. She looped the pulse signature, filtering it through four layers of Mindscape decoders.
Still no match.
"She wasn't born in the system," she muttered.
"She woke in it."
Her superior sent a single message across the encrypted channel:
"Proceed with caution. Level 7 is unstable."
Lysa didn't reply.
She was already packing her field kit.
This wasn't just surveillance anymore.
It was containment.
Three Sparks, One Fire
Back at the Sanctuary, Mira sat cross-legged as Rell and Kesh surrounded her. She'd drawn complex symbols into the concrete using nothing but ash and memory threads—lines of code she'd never learned but instinctively understood.
"These are glyphs of the First Language," Rell whispered.
"The what?" Kesh blinked.
"The one they erased. Before the System. Before belief control."
Mira opened her eyes, calm but distant.
"I don't want to lead. I'm not a prophet. But something inside me remembers… everything."
Elior, watching from above, clenched his fist.
This was no longer about him. The network had chosen others.
And it had begun to grow beyond his reach.
A Stranger from Below
At the edge of the forgotten tunnels, something stirred.
An old man, eyes stitched shut with gold wire, stumbled forward. His body was frail, but his voice was steady.
"He has returned," he said to no one.
"The Echo-Breaker walks again.
But the Network is bleeding.
And it remembers me."
Behind him, glyphs ignited along the walls—patterns Elior had never seen.
A new player had entered the field.