Riven didn't know how long he stood in that alley, staring at the mark pulsing beneath his skin.
It moved.
Not visibly—no crawling—but in a way he could feel. Like it breathed when he did. Like it watched.
He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and forced himself to think.
This wasn't just a dream. It wasn't a hallucination brought on by blood loss or shock or desperation.
He had died.
He'd felt it. Kara's last breath. His last stand.
And then this.
A second chance wrapped in something worse.
The System.
He swallowed hard and looked up. The skyline was clean. Untouched. No smoke. No ash. The towers of Sector 12 gleamed with polished glass, blinking neon ads still dancing across the top floors.
This was before everything fell apart.
Five years before.
The date glowed in his mind now, bright and cold.
He hadn't seen a working calendar in two years.
[Time Remaining: 29 Days, 22 Hours, 19 Minutes]
The mark on his wrist pulsed again, then dimmed.
Riven rolled his sleeve down and stepped out of the alley.
The streets were loud, full of life. Kids darted between sidewalk stalls. Vendors shouted from corners. Music thumped from shop speakers. Drones floated overhead, scanning traffic flow and civilian tags. The chaos of a living city.
No one knew what was coming.
No one else could see it.
He crossed the street in a blur of instinct and nerves, ignoring the looks from pedestrians when he hesitated at intersections or glanced too long at security cams.
He needed to move.
He needed answers.
And more than anything, he needed to know if Kara was alive in this timeline.
If she was still somewhere out there—before the fall, before the rooftop, before the blood—he had to find her.
[Echo Detected: Thread Anomaly – Zone 12B]
[Classification: Ripple Event – Tier I]
[Estimated Time to Breach: 01:14:33]
Riven froze.
A pulsing silver thread bloomed into his vision, stretching faintly across the skyline—visible only to him, thin as a spiderweb but humming with energy.
An Echo Thread.
He didn't know how he knew that. It was just there now. Part of him. A second sight stitched into the back of his eyes.
[Echo Sense I].
It was leading him somewhere.
His first ripple.
His first real test.
He turned and followed it.
He didn't hesitate.
He couldn't afford to.
Not this time.
Zone 12B had always been a quieter sector—industrial warehouses, old tram lines, and maintenance tunnels beneath aging foundations.
But even this early, there were people around. A street cleaner rumbled past. Two teens on scooters zipped down a cracked sidewalk. Somewhere nearby, someone was playing a trumpet badly in a second-story window.
Riven moved through it all without drawing attention, his hood low and his steps even.
The thread guided him toward an abandoned community center behind a grocery store. Vines curled up the broken fence. The front doors were chained shut, but the side gate had been kicked in.
The thread led inside.
Riven ducked through.
The moment he passed through the threshold, the light changed.
Not visibly. Not fully.
But everything felt… off.
The air was heavier. The silence thicker. His thoughts felt slowed. Like walking through syrup.
[You Have Entered a Ripple Zone.]
[Status: Thread Instability Rising.]
[System Warning: Thread Flux Approaching Critical.]
There was something alive in here.
Something stuck.
He moved carefully, past the shattered foyer and into the corridor beyond. Rusted lockers lined the walls, and old flyers still clung to corkboards in faded ink.
But there were footprints.
Fresh ones.
And something else—
Breathing.
He turned the corner and saw her.
A girl.
She was sitting with her back against a locked door, one arm clutching her side. Blood soaked through the bottom of her shirt. Her face was pale, her eyes wide.
Silver hair.
Not platinum. Not white.
Silver. Like liquid metal under moonlight.
She looked up as he approached and flinched.
"Wait," he said, raising both hands. "I'm not here to hurt you."
"You don't belong here." Her voice was steady, but her body trembled. "You're not part of this thread."
That made him pause.
She knew.
She could see it, too.
The System.
The ripple.
"Neither do you," he said softly.
"I was pulled in."
"So was I."
"No," she said, eyes narrowing. "You were placed."
He didn't know what that meant. Not yet.
But she was bleeding. That mattered more.
He crouched down, slowly. "Let me see."
She hesitated, then lifted her shirt just enough to show the gash beneath. It wasn't fresh—it was echo-frozen, the kind of wound that looked wet but didn't drip. A ripple injury.
He reached into his jacket pocket, and to his surprise, found a small silver case tucked inside. It wasn't his. Not from before.
Inside was a white bandage and a vial marked: [Stability Salve – Temporary].
System-provided, apparently.
He applied it gently.
She didn't move.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Elira."
The name echoed in his head like it belonged there already.
He didn't know why.
He only knew she felt… important.
"You're not like the others," she said. "Not just Marked. Something else. Hollow."
"How do you know?"
"I remember you." Her voice cracked slightly. "But not like this. Not here."
"You've met me before?"
"Not you exactly. A version. One who died trying to stop what's coming."
Riven's breath caught.
So she was from before. From a failed version of this loop. A ghost of another timeline.
"Do you know what I'm supposed to do?"
She shook her head. "No one knows anymore. The System's fragmented. Rules change with every collapse. But I know this—" she looked up at him, steady now, "—if you're here again, you're the last one."
His chest felt hollow.
Not with fear.
With weight.
The kind of weight you don't walk away from.
"Elira," he said quietly, "how do I collapse a ripple?"
She pointed at the door beside her. "Behind that."
The door opened like it didn't want to.
The room beyond was dark, lit only by flickers of static light. Stretched across the far wall was a shimmer—a living veil, like water over glass, distorting the shape behind it.
A figure.
Human-shaped. Almost.
It twitched.
Its head turned sideways.
Riven stepped closer, breath steady.
The mark on his wrist began to burn.
[Ripple Core Identified: Hollowborn Fragment – Tier I]
[Collapse Required: Anchor Disruption or Direct Elimination]
The creature twitched again.
Its body flickered, glitching between shapes—sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes blank entirely. Like it hadn't decided who it wanted to be.
Riven's jaw clenched.
He didn't have a weapon.
He didn't have a plan.
But he had something else.
Resolve.
He stepped into the veil.
The Hollowborn turned.
Its face shimmered—then locked into one.
His.
His own face.
"You failed her," it hissed.
He didn't flinch.
"I won't again."