The Wheel spun without hands.
No click of activation, no cry of a chosen. It rotated as though dreaming, caught in its own echo.
Saylor watched it from the edge of a deformed platform, mist swirling beneath him like breath held too long.
Brant was unconscious, breathing shallowly. Lucia stood over him, chain slung across her back like a flag torn in a windless storm.
They were alone again. But not really.
Not anymore.
---
> "It spun for no one," Lucia said.
> "No," Saylor replied. "It spun for something. Or maybe for me."
---
His Mimetic Spin pulsed faintly—no light, no sound. Just an ache behind his eyes.
Then a whisper, not heard but felt.
> A flicker of heat.
A string pulled in his spine.
A name: Taelrin.
He staggered, catching himself on the fractured edge of the slab.
Lucia turned sharply.
> "Saylor?"
He shook his head. "Not pain. Not exactly. More like… an instruction."
---
The Field shifted again. Not with a god. With a wound.
Platforms warped mid-space, their edges twisting like molten iron poured through ice.
From below, long glitch spikes rose — jagged shards of translucent code stabbing through the air in silence.
Lucia recoiled as one sliced past her arm, drawing a line of red that shimmered in and out of existence.
> "It's rewriting while we're on it," she breathed.
---
> [FIELD STRUCTURAL EVENT: PHANTOM WHEEL STATE DETECTED]
[STABILITY LEVEL: 4%]
[GLITCH ZONES ACTIVE]
> [PLAYER STAMINA MAY FLUCTUATE RANDOMLY]
---
Saylor stepped into the shifting code.
His new passive—Dustroot Bind—latched onto a fracture mid-air. It formed a tether he used to pull himself sideways, avoiding a collapsing section.
Brant groaned from the far side.
> "Pulse… drained me…"
Lucia grabbed him by the arm, dragging him out of a pulse zone—an invisible area that drained mental clarity and stamina with every second inside it.
---
Saylor knelt near a torn edge of mist. Something hovered just above the floor: a Ticket.
It flickered between real and unreal, pulsing with static.
He reached for it.
It recoiled.
> "That's not yours," Lucia said. "It's… infected."
> "It's familiar," Saylor whispered.
---
He focused.
His Mimetic Spin aligned, not to absorb, but to recognize.
The same signature. The same patterned error his first Ticket carried when he spun it back on Earth.
> "It's mine. Or… it was. In a different game. In a different version of me."
Lucia stared at him.
> "You think this has all happened before?"
> "No," he replied. "I think I have happened before."
---
The Wheel turned again—slow, ominous, like a clock refusing to tick.
From behind them, a low hum rose. Old tombs opened—stone lids sliding sideways, revealing floating remnants of dead Tickets and charred bones.
Lucia stiffened.
> "This is wrong. This feels… recursive."
> "It is," Saylor said.
---
He activated Echoshard.
Let the past speak through pain.
A sudden jolt of burning in his ribs. A whisper behind his eyes.
> "Taelrin… The one who chose silence… The one who became God."
---
Lucia gasped.
> "You heard that name before."
> "No. I remembered it."
---
The Wheel spun faster.
This time, Saylor felt it react to his presence.
The spin wasn't random. It was reading him. Evaluating.
> [UNREGISTERED SPIN ECHO DETECTED]
[ENTITY: SAYLOR COGNI — FLAGGED FOR SYSTEM RESTRUCTURE]
---
> "Flagged?" Lucia whispered.
Saylor turned to her.
> "It's starting to see me… not as a player. But as something else."
---
From the tombs, mist rose again—thicker this time.
And within it, the shadow of a face.
His own.
Not mirrored.
Not present.
Remembered.
---