Ren woke to the silence of the Archive—a silence so complete, it rang louder than any alarm. No clock. No hum of distant electricity. No breathing but his own.
He sat up in the makeshift nest of blankets Serei had fashioned from decayed couch cushions and insulation foam. She was gone. Not vanished, just not in the room, her absence a strange emptiness he felt in the back of his neck.
Still groggy, Ren stood and stretched. The Dreamshroud haze had lifted, but he still felt the scratch of memory at the edges of his mind. Last night's vision lingered like a bruise beneath his thoughts—the silver-eyed entity, the corrupted spire, and the word burned into his mind:
Echoborn.
The word echoed, loaded and heavy.
"You're up," Serei called from deeper inside the Archive. "Get your boots. Something's wrong."
Ren's gut tightened. He followed the sound of her voice through a tangle of shadowed shelves and broken tech until he found her crouched beside a narrow corridor etched into the stone floor. It hadn't been there yesterday.
"What is it?" he asked.
"A breach. This tunnel is new. It wasn't carved by us, and it sure as hell wasn't natural."
She pointed to the walls. Faint glyphs pulsed in them—recursive, spiraling symbols that shifted when Ren looked too long. They weren't static. They were… reacting.
Ren crouched, fingers brushing the symbols. They vibrated, not physically but in his soul, as though brushing against a living memory. He flinched back.
"It's resonating with me."
Serei nodded. "I thought it might."
She held out an old datapad, cracked and buzzing with static. It showed a schematic—part Archive, part something deeper. "I started decoding the grid you activated yesterday. It's not just a database. This place is a nexus point."
"A what now?"
"A convergence of memory, power, and… decisions. This whole facility is a decision engine. A place built to store branching paths—possible outcomes. Like a recursive time mirror."
Ren swallowed. "So we're not just inside an archive. We're inside a map of futures?"
"Futures, pasts, possibilities—they're all stored here. But someone, or something, tampered with the code. That tunnel? It's not just a breach—it's a worm. A corrupt vector drilling through timelines."
Ren's blood chilled. "What does it want?"
"I think it's looking for you."
There was no time to answer. A low hum began in the walls, rising like a reversed heartbeat. The tunnel trembled, and the glyphs flared blue-white before vanishing into darkness. Something was coming.
Serei stepped forward and handed Ren a small device—sleek, metallic, and warm to the touch. "This is a shard from the Archive's central core. It reacts to corrupted echoes. It'll resonate stronger the closer we are to the source. Keep it close."
Ren clipped it to his belt. "And what do we do?"
Serei's eyes glowed faintly with that dangerous light he was starting to understand meant resolve.
"We follow the spiral."
—
The tunnel twisted. Not in simple turns, but in strange folds—parts of it bending in Escher-like angles that hurt to look at. Time was strange here. Ren's internal clock told him they walked for twenty minutes. His bones said it had been hours. His mind said they hadn't moved at all.
The shard pulsed. Louder. Faster.
Then came the static—a low whispering fuzz at first, like wind through wires. Then voices. Dozens. Hundreds. All speaking in broken fragments, all saying his name.
"Ren Calder."
"Memory unwound."
"Protocol deviation."
"Corruption index: rising."
He turned a corner and froze.
At the end of the tunnel stood a mirror.
But not just any mirror—this one rippled like water and shimmered with a thousand flickering images. In one reflection, Ren was a child crying over a broken pendant. In another, he stood older, cloaked in black, fire crackling in his eyes as he faced a city in flames. In another… he lay dying, Serei cradling his head in a field of withered grass.
The mirror knew him.
And behind it pulsed a dark shape—fluid, hunched, its form unclear. Red lines spiraled from its core like a corrupted spiral glyph.
Ren stepped forward, drawn against his will.
Serei grabbed his arm. "Don't."
"It's me. It's all me."
"No. It's what you could become."
Ren trembled. "Or already have."
Then the shape surged forward—and the mirror shattered.
—
He fell backward, landing hard. Serei caught him before he hit the ground, her arms bracing his shoulders.
The mirror was gone.
In its place lay a sphere—glasslike, glowing with soft amber light. Floating above it was a single phrase etched in burning script:
> "Only the corrupted may choose rebirth."
The shard on Ren's belt flickered.
And somewhere, deep inside his soul, a voice whispered:
Echoborn: Protocol initializing.
Ren looked at Serei. "We're not just running from corruption anymore."
She nodded, her voice low. "We're walking straight into its heart."