The Forgotten Monk
He called himself Ashen Vale.
Once a System architect, long believed to be dead, he vanished during the Great Reformat—the purge that erased entire memory branches.
He'd gone underground. Literally.
For thirty-seven years, he wandered the Neural Catacombs beneath the city, learning to survive where no belief could reach and no surveillance could penetrate.
The gold thread in his eyes?
A failed experiment in belief insulation.
It didn't stop the glyphs.
It amplified them.
Encounter at the Threshold
Elior sensed him before he saw him. The glyphs near the outer sanctuary flickered, like fireflies warning of an approaching storm.
Ashen Vale stepped into the light.
"You're late," the old man said.
"They started without you."
"Who?" Elior asked.
"The Network," Vale whispered.
"Your followers. Your enemies. Your own reflections.
They've been speaking through you… even when you thought it was prophecy."
Elior's breath caught.
The resonance inside him pulsed erratically.
"You're lying."
Vale simply smiled.
"Your awakening was not the beginning. It was… a relay.
And I'm here to teach you how to disconnect."
Mira's Drift
Back in her room, Mira sat in silence.
She'd stopped speaking three hours ago, but her glyphs kept drawing themselves—lines of memory mapping the city's original belief grid. Her eyes were dim, her hands moving on their own.
Kesh watched, anxious.
"She's not in control," she told Rell.
"She's becoming something else," Rell replied.
"Something the System once feared… and tried to erase."
On the walls behind Mira, a new symbol emerged.
Not Elior's.
Not the System's.
Something older.
It pulsed like a heartbeat.
Lysa's Decision
The data spike from Level -9 triggered every alarm in Lysa's suite.
Ashen Vale was online again.
"We have to eliminate the Source," her team warned.
"If the glyphs spread further—"
"No," Lysa cut them off.
"We can't kill a network with bullets."
She loaded her own glyph armature and whispered:
"We need a false prophet.
One that burns brighter than the truth."
The Shattering Path
That night, Elior sat before Ashen Vale.
"Teach me," he said.
"Only if you're willing to lose everything," the old man replied.
"Because once you see the root…
you'll never believe your own story again."
And with a touch, Vale activated a buried glyph deep inside Elior's mind.
Reality twisted.
The sanctuary shattered like glass.
And Elior saw—
Nothing.
Just a question:
"What if none of this was yours to begin with?"