I didn't remember falling asleep.
But I woke to the Lexicon breathing.
Not literally—no air, no lungs, no sound. Just pages rising and falling in rhythm, like the whole book was drawing breath through memory alone.
Lyra was still asleep. Or dreaming. Her UI no longer flickered, but a faint thread of code coiled around her fingers like phantom runework.
I could see it now—Talia wasn't gone. She was dormant. Latent. A piece of the story that hadn't finished writing itself yet.
I didn't wake her.
Not yet.
Because the Lexicon was glowing again, and I already knew what that meant.
The moment I touched it, the inn vanished.
Not faded.
Vanished.
I stood in nothing—a blank devspace. No lighting, no environment grid, just infinite neutral tone stretching forever. The Lexicon hovered in front of me, open to a single line.
Welcome to Thread.Root.
A cursor blinked below it.
Waiting.
The page turned.
There were two maps now.
One I recognized—Ascension's current world. My world. Cities I'd visited, guilds I'd scouted, routes I knew like muscle memory.
The other?
It was the world that came before.
Before the rollback.
Before the SYSTEM finalized its patch structure.
This map had no names. Just glyphs, floating over territories that no longer existed.
One of them pulsed—centered on the tower of light we'd seen through the inn window.
[Origin Beacon Detected – SYSTEM SEAL DAMAGED]
Would you like to re-enter the original version?
Y/N
I didn't click either.
But the Lexicon responded anyway.
Re-entry authorized.
I blinked—and I was standing on the ridge again.
But the world had changed.
The sky was off—colors oversaturated, lighting layered wrong. Trees looped the same wind animation every three seconds. A waterfall in the distance rendered in reverse for half a beat before correcting.
The world was breaking.
And at the center of it stood the tower.
Made of pure, unstable light—glyphs swirling through it like DNA strands breaking and rebuilding.
I walked.
The Lexicon didn't follow.
It led.
There were no enemies.
No SYSTEM threats. No combat flags.
Just a feeling.
Like a book about to close on the wrong page.
At the tower's base, a platform hovered midair—runed and flickering, with a single stone lectern in its center.
The Lexicon placed itself on it.
Thread.017 detected. Narrative Anchor unstable. Manual Override Option: Available.
Would you like to become the author of your story?
I stared at the prompt.
Because this wasn't just metaphor anymore.
This was a command.
And I knew what it meant.
If I said yes—I wouldn't just guide the Lexicon. I'd merge with it. I'd become its anchor, its writer, its point of origin.
My memories wouldn't just shape the world.
They'd replace it.
I closed my eyes.
I thought of my first life. My wasted years.
I thought of the Fragment of Origin.
I thought of Lyra.
And I said, "Yes."
The tower reacted instantly.
Glyphlight surged upward, looping through the Lexicon and around my arms like bracelets of burning code.
A voice—not spoken, but remembered—echoed in my thoughts.
You are no longer contained.
You are no longer remembered.
You are now the writer.
The world shuddered.
A pulse went out—code and color.
Across Ascension, players froze in place as notifications blinked open and then vanished before they could be read.
In Elderfall, an NPC dropped a scripted conversation halfway through and stared blankly at a wall.
In the Duskridge square, a merchant's voice glitched—repeating the phrase "Welcome, welcome, wel—" before stopping entirely.
And on a terminal screen in a dorm room in the real world, a Lexicon-shaped icon began glowing again.
This time, when it pulsed, it left a burn mark on the display.
I opened my eyes.
I wasn't standing in the tower anymore.
I was in the space behind it.
The place the SYSTEM hadn't defined.
Blank canvas.
The Lexicon hovered in front of me.
A fresh page.
No glyphs.
No prompts.
Just a blinking cursor and one sentence:
The story you think you're telling isn't yours.
I wrote underneath it.
Then I'll write one that is.
The Lexicon shuddered.
And the system responded:
Override Confirmed – Narrative Control TransferredUser: Listener.017 // Origin Class: Fragment Root
And at the very bottom, a quiet final line:
The world remembers what it shouldn't.
[END OF VOLUME ONE]