Rael hated this place.
The Veil distorted more than time—it twisted self. Every step he took felt like a choice unmade, every breath an echo of someone else's memory. He wasn't alone either. Patchling drifted behind him, flickering as if caught between update cycles.
"We shouldn't be here," she whispered.
"That makes two of us," Rael muttered, gripping his halberd.
His HUD was silent. System support was unstable in the Veil. He couldn't even trust his stats anymore—one moment maxed, the next reset to zero.
Patchling's glow dimmed. "The Core's protection doesn't reach this far. This is… outside."
Rael paused. "Outside of what?"
"Reality," came a new voice.
Oroth stepped out from a glitch-rift, a new sigil burned into his arm—half-key, half-scar. "You're in an echo branch, Rael. Not a world. A draft of one."
The sky pulsed red, a heartbeat across space. Far ahead, Kazen stood at the base of the Tower of Decline, facing Revenant. Neither had moved. The tower's spire twisted like memory itself, endless and wrong.
Rael scowled. "So what, this is all fiction?"
"No," Oroth said. "It's memory that was never written. Possibility turned sentient."
Patchling hovered between them, uncertain. "Then the Revenant…?"
"Is a possibility Kazen could become. One the system archived... but never deleted."
Rael clenched his jaw. "We're fighting ghosts now?"
"No," Oroth said, eyes glowing faintly. "We're fighting what we could have been."
Suddenly, the tower screamed—a high-pitched, code-shattering sound. The echoes had awakened.
And they were coming.