Silence had a texture here.
It wasn't the kind of quiet that came from the absence of sound — it was the silence of things that had been erased.
Every breath Aiden took disturbed that silence, making it ripple like fabric too old to hold its shape.
He had fallen through the fracture between realities — a gap so thin it didn't even register as space.
For a while, there was nothing but drifting static. Then, faintly, whispers began to take shape.
> "Can you hear us…"
"We are still here…"
"Please… rewrite us…"
The voices weren't coming from anywhere. They were the air, the dust, the broken particles of discarded code floating like ashes around him.
Aiden turned slowly. All around him, shadows flickered in the dark — outlines of faces half-formed, names half-remembered.
He recognized some of them. NPCs. Deleted players. Fragments of stories the system had purged for memory optimization.
They were supposed to be gone.
