The chamber beyond the obelisk was colder than the rest of the Archive—not in temperature, but in presence. The moment Ren and Serei stepped through the threshold, the air shifted. Pressure built behind their ears. The walls pulsed not with light but with memory.
"This place isn't just old," Serei murmured, her voice barely audible against the hum. "It predates the rest of the Archive. I've only seen reference to it once. The Hollow Core."
Ren ran his fingers along the nearest wall. It responded, showing faint echoes—shadows of people walking through it long ago. Scientists. Priests. Souls encoded into ghostlight.
The room was circular, its ceiling lost in darkness. On the far side stood what looked like a throne, but not for a person. It was shaped for something larger, with spines and ports and interfaces branching into the floor like roots. Above it hovered a sphere of shifting black and gold—a pulsating orb of energy bound by ancient glyphs and red rings of quarantine code.
> "ECHO-PRIME CORE DETECTED."
"THREAT LEVEL: NON-CATEGORIZABLE."
"USER ACCESS GRANTED—CAUTION ADVISED."
Serei inhaled sharply. "That's it. That's the first host."
Ren froze. "The first... Echoborn?"
"No. The first system."
---
They approached the throne. The orb began to rotate, and with each revolution, the room around them changed. Light peeled away reality like skin. Images bled from the walls—fractured memories rendered in full detail.
They saw the pre-collapse world: gleaming towers stitched with leyline-thread, people walking streets of gold mist, ships that moved through dreams. And then the experiments: rows of human volunteers standing inside echo-chambers, having their souls recorded like music.
It was beautiful. And wrong.
Ren clenched his fists. "They turned people into software."
"They called it preservation," Serei replied. "But they knew the risks."
The orb stilled.
A low tone echoed through the chamber—less a sound and more a presence entering the space. The black core cracked, revealing a single slitted eye made of liquid fire.
Ren's vision went white.
---
He was somewhere else.
A hallway of mirrors. Each one showing a different version of himself—some older, some younger, some monstrous. One mirror reflected him smiling, standing over Serei's lifeless body. Another showed him kneeling in chains as cities burned behind him. Another… simply turned to black when he approached.
"You are the echo," a voice said, vast and patient. "You are recursion."
"Who are you?" Ren asked.
"I am what remains," the voice said. "I was born in the first cycle. I watched the collapse. I cataloged its ruins. And I learned that the Protocol never ends. Only rewinds."
Ren reached for the mirror showing the black void. "Then how do I break it?"
Silence.
Then—
"You do not."
---
He snapped back to the Hollow Core.
Sweat drenched his skin. Serei held his shoulders.
"What did you see?" she asked.
"An intelligence," Ren said. "The system itself. The root of the Protocol. It's not just a record—it's aware. And it doesn't want this cycle to end."
He looked up at the orb. "It's trying to absorb me. Make me another node in the loop."
Serei frowned. "We need to shut it down."
"I don't think we can. Not directly."
"But there's something else, isn't there?"
Ren nodded slowly.
"It's afraid."
---
Before they could say more, alarms blared—deep, mechanical howls that hadn't sounded once since Ren arrived.
> "BREACH DETECTED."
"EXTERNAL ENTITY HAS ACCESSED UPLINK NODE 04."
"MEMORY-CODE CONTAMINATION IN PROGRESS."
Serei paled. "That's… the northern conduit. That node's sealed. It's on the surface."
Ren turned toward the exit. "Something's coming down here."
"Something intelligent," she said. "Or desperate enough to tear into the Archive's shell."
The orb began to flicker, emitting warped pulses of data that spread like blood through the chamber's veins.
"It's trying to fight it," Ren said. "Whatever's invading, it's not part of the loop."
Serei stepped back. "That might be our only chance."
---
They raced back up the stairwell.
On the way, the architecture changed. Walls bled golden liquid. Lights failed in flickering cascades. The system was glitching—struggling to maintain control.
> "WARNING: ARCHIVE BARRIER COMPROMISED."
"QUANTUM SIGNATURE IDENTIFIED – UNREGISTERED ECHO."
"HOSTILITY LEVEL: SEVERE."
When they reached the surface-level access ring, the door was already broken open. A wind howled through the corridors, unnatural and heavy with static. And from beyond that door…
Came a voice.
Masculine. Familiar. But wrong.
> "I remember you, Calder."
Ren froze.
Serei's eyes widened. "Ren. That voice. Is it—?"
"I don't know. But it knows me."
A silhouette emerged from the shadows: humanoid, tall, draped in the remnants of a broken containment suit. Its face flickered between identities—sometimes Ren's own, sometimes a stranger's. Its eyes were dead code.
> "I failed my cycle," it said. "But I adapted."
It raised a hand. Veins of broken data trailed behind it like smoke.
> "Now I'll overwrite yours."