The instant I entered the monolith, the world collapsed.
Not into light.
Into memory.
Not mine.
But another's.
---
I was falling. But not downwards—inwards.
Through veils of identity, shed one by one:
—Kevin, the survivor.
—Kevin, the threadbearer.
—Kevin, the rememberer.
Each shrugged off like worn masks.
Until there was nothing but silence.
Then a voice.
Not mine.
Not the shard's.
Something ancient.
"Do you understand now, Vessel?"
---
I opened my eyes.
---
рукт
I stood in a room of white.
Perfect angles. No light source, no noise. The air did not move, did not breathe.
Standing opposite me was… me.
But not the Reminder.
Not an echo.
This was the original.
He did not blink.
He did not shift.
He did not have to.
"You're not Kevin," he said in a flat voice. "You never were."
"I don't....." I started, but paused.
Because I did.
Fragments fell into position like long-forgotten teeth in a shattered jaw.
The shards. The Loops. The voices.
They weren't constructed around me.
I was constructed to hold them.
A Vessel.
An empty individual designed to hold something ancient.
The original Kevin....who stood before me today...was the first to shatter the thread. And when he did, the world could not hold the backlash.
So it fissured.
Into Loops.
And to hold the collapse, they constructed me.
Not as a duplicate.
But as a confinement.
A false continuity. A living Loop.
"You were my penance," the actual Kevin declared. "My second chance. Not to save the world. Just to bear its weight in ignorance."
"But you've endured too long.
And now the truth seeps out."
-----
The room exploded.
We stood now in a desert of time-sand, under a sky composed of fizzling-out stars. Monuments to lost Loops loomed around us..each inscribed with names I could not bear to see.
Kevin—the actual one—advanced.
"If you go any further, you'll become something the world can't contain.
But if you turn around now, I can seal it all up again.
You'll forget. You'll live out the remainder of this Loop in peace.
No more sacrifice. No more war."
I glanced at the shard lodged in my palm.
It hurt now. Not with fire. With understanding.
I recalled Kaelis.
Luro.
All the ones I'd lost.
All the things I'd done to deserve this identity—even if I never requested it.
I clenched my fist.
"No."
The original Kevin's face didn't change.
But I saw the faintest flicker of relief.
He raised a hand.
From the sand, a weapon rose.
A staff of white bone and flickering thread—half memory, half will.
"Then take it.
It's yours now."
"And with it, you'll either restore the world…"
"Or end it."
---
As I gripped the staff, I felt every Loop thread into my bones.
Every death.
Every rebirth.
Every name I'd never remember.
And then, for an instant..I was all of them.
Then the vision disappeared.
---
"..."
"..."
I awakened on the edge of the monolith.
Luro was not there.
Veyruun was reduced to ash.
And overhead, the sky at last tore apart—wide, raw, real.
And through the gap, I beheld the shape of the thing that had been waiting behind the Loops all along.
Watching.
Laughing.
Now hunting.
---