The Lexicon didn't close.
Even after Sera disappeared and Lyra had gone silent beside me, it just stayed open—page flat, unmoving, holding the reflection of a person I didn't remember being.
Not fully.
But the emotion behind those eyes… that, I recognized.
[Lexicon Entry Registered: ECHO THREAD – Class: Unstable]Thread Origin: InvalidPreservation Protocols Engaged
I closed the book, finally, and the interface folded in like a living thing. It didn't vanish—it tucked itself away. Like it knew it might be needed again soon.
Lyra leaned forward. "So, that happen often?"
"What, reality flickering and a SYSTEM proxy showing up to tell me I'm violating the rules of a simulation I'm not supposed to know I'm in?" I said.
She smirked. "That's a no, then."
But I saw the tightness in her jaw. She was afraid. Not of Sera. Of me.
We went separate ways not long after.
Lyra said she needed to check in on her crafting guild contacts—real or not, her avatar's interface was lagging from "residual thread echoes." Whatever that meant. I didn't question it. I needed space too.
The Lexicon had asked me something no system menu ever should. A choice I didn't know how to answer.Remember who I was meant to be?
What if that version of me had already failed?
What if he was the reason this world had broken in the first place?
I didn't select yes. I didn't select no.
I closed the page and walked east—toward the place where memory still lingered in the stone.
I didn't have a plan. But the Lexicon kept pulling, like a compass spinning in a magnetic storm. And every time I passed through the east gate, it grew louder—whispers in ink, echoing from the place the SYSTEM tried hardest to forget.
The chapel ruins hadn't been repaired.
The SYSTEM had overwritten most of it—retextured walls, a sealed floor, no signs of a Vault. But the air still remembered.
Ash. Glyphs. And a faint pulse in the stone—like the memory of a scream that hadn't finished echoing.
I knelt and opened the Lexicon again.
[Spell Interface: REMEMBER (F) – Cast Ready]Target: Zone Residual | Focus: Visual Reconstruction
I let the ink drift. It didn't cling to surfaces like it used to—it searched. Danced in the air. Caught light that wasn't there and spun it back into shape.
The image resolved: the Vault door. Glyphs warping. Lyra stumbling, screaming, her form flickering between rendered states.
And something in the background, flickering between frames—
The Nullwatcher.
Only this time… it wasn't watching me.
It was watching something inside the Vault.
A second figure.
Hunched. Cloaked. Bound in chains of glyphs I couldn't read.
The image snapped.
And the Lexicon's pages burned for a heartbeat, ink boiling off the parchment like steam.
[ECHO THREAD RECOVERED: "Fragment 9 – Chainwrithe"]Entry Status: IncompleteReconstructing lost data......partial success.
A small page appeared in my inventory. Paper that shouldn't exist—too real, too sharp for in-game design. It shimmered like film.
I opened it.
It was a journal entry. Not from me.
"I heard it again. The voice in the stone. It's not a SYSTEM artifact—it's older. Prebuild. Preseed. The Vaults don't store spells. They store attempts. Failures. Ghosts of code that remember what they were before they worked."
"We can't keep doing this. If the Archivist sees me again, I think it will know I'm the one who left the loop open."
I didn't breathe for a long time.
Back in the village, the fog was lifting—but no one looked up from their routines. Players laughed. NPCs sold bread. Quest boards refreshed.
But something was off.
The square had a new statue.
I didn't remember it being built. No system message had announced it. No quest log marked it.
Just… there.
It looked like a cloaked figure bound in chains, half-unfinished. Like someone had tried to forget it mid-sculpt.
And at the base, scrawled into the stone:
"We do not archive what we fail to remember."
[SYSTEM NOTICE: Memory Sync Divergence 0.009% — Listener Thread Unstable][Echo Influence Detected – Adjusting Narrative Field]
The Lexicon didn't shake this time.
It laughed.
Softly. Just once.
A line of ink wrote itself across the margin of the page:
"You've seen the first chain. Do not follow it unless you are ready to forget what you're made of."