The silence after the Guardian's collapse wasn't silence at all.
It was the kind that pressed against Ethan's ears, like a vacuum sucking air out of the Core. Static hissed faintly at the edges of perception, almost too soft to hear, but impossible to ignore once noticed. The absence of the monster should have been relief, but it felt wrong—like killing the beast had only peeled back the first layer of something far worse.
Ethan's breath rasped in his throat. His hands trembled as he looked down at Raven, limp in his arms.
Her weight felt real, grounding. But the faint glow of her tether-thread pulsed against his chest like a heartbeat that wasn't his. He couldn't tell anymore if it was her keeping him anchored, or him holding on for dear life.
The scarf in his grip flickered, threads fraying in and out of existence. Its light, once blinding, was now a pale ember. His phone buzzed weakly.
Fragment Restore: 60%...
Exit unlocked.
Warning: Anchor unstable.
Unstable.
He swallowed hard. The word gnawed at his brain. The Core hadn't crumbled, but it hadn't healed either. The whiteness around them bled in streaks of black, like ink seeping into paper. Each pulse widened the cracks beneath his feet.
If he lingered, they'd both be swallowed.
Ethan shifted Raven higher in his arms. Her hair brushed his jaw, her breath shallow but steady. She looked impossibly small like this, fragile in a way that contradicted every hard edge of her personality. He hated it—hated how human she looked when a few minutes ago she had been hurling glyph-light like some goddess of war.
He pressed his forehead to hers for just a moment, closing his eyes. "Hang in there, Raven. Don't you dare leave me now."
A tremor rippled underfoot. The Core groaned like a dying machine.
No more time.
The exit shimmered in the distance—a vertical seam in reality, jagged and flickering, as if the world itself had been cut open by a knife that didn't belong here. On the other side, faint slivers of his apartment bled through: the couch, the half-empty coffee mug he'd left hours—or was it days?—ago.
But the seam wasn't steady. Each pulse of static warped the view, turning his living room into a grotesque carousel of images: the couch bent into impossible angles, the mug flickered between full and shattered, sometimes there, sometimes gone.
Ethan's stomach lurched. If the exit was this corrupted, what would stepping through it do to them?
Would they still be themselves on the other side?
His grip tightened on Raven.
"I don't care," he muttered, voice raw. "As long as you're with me."
He started forward, boots crunching against the fractured plane. Each step made the cracks widen, static sparks spraying from the edges. His body screamed for rest, but adrenaline kept him moving.
Halfway there, he froze.
A shadow moved beside him.
Not his.
Not Raven's.
It walked in step, out of sync, a silhouette of a woman with long hair that brushed her waist. When Ethan looked directly, it flickered—sometimes Raven's outline, sometimes someone else entirely. Someone achingly familiar.
"Liora…"
The name tore itself out of his throat before he could stop it.
The shadow tilted its head, just as she used to when he said something that puzzled her.
He blinked. The shadow vanished. Only Raven remained in his arms, pale and still.
Ethan's pulse hammered. The Core wasn't just collapsing—it was bleeding memories into him. Memories he wasn't sure belonged to him anymore.
Am I restoring her… or rewriting myself?
The exit loomed closer. The seam widened with each step, stretching like an open wound. Ethan could feel it tugging at him, pulling threads of his body apart molecule by molecule. The tether around his chest burned hot, then cold, then hot again.
His phone buzzed violently.
Anchor destabilizing. Proceed immediately.
Static surged underfoot. The ground split open behind him, chunks of whiteness falling into the void.
"Damn it—move, Ethan, move!" he hissed at himself. His muscles obeyed, even as exhaustion dragged at his bones.
A sound followed—the faintest laugh. A woman's voice, high and melodic, echoing across the collapsing Core.
Not Raven.
Not the Guardian.
Liora.
"Ethan…" The whisper curled into his ears, too intimate, too real. "Don't let her take me."
His throat tightened. The memory of Raven's last words stabbed him anew: Why I need her back.
He stumbled, almost dropping Raven as his legs buckled.
"Stop it," he growled, clenching his jaw. "Not now. Not when I'm this close."
But the whisper followed, brushing the nape of his neck like cold breath.
"You can't save us both."
The exit ripped wider as he neared, the distortion pulling like a vortex. His vision swam, edges pixelating. He could see his apartment clearer now—the dim lamplight, the flickering neon outside the window. It was real. It had to be.
The seam flared.
Static shards whipped at his arms, slicing skin. Raven twitched faintly in his grip, a weak whimper escaping her lips.
"Almost there," Ethan panted. "Just hold on."
He lunged forward.
The seam swallowed them.
Pain.
Pure, ripping pain. Like being dragged through glass and fire simultaneously. His body convulsed, threads of him stretched thin across two realities. He felt himself splitting—one part anchored in the Core, the other desperate to cling to the physical world.
The tether screamed. His phone flared in his pocket, the screen hot against his leg.
Anchor compromised. Merge incomplete.
"Not… letting… go!" Ethan roared, forcing his body forward, shielding Raven against the tearing wind.
Every nerve screamed as if he were unraveling, but his grip on her never faltered.
And then—
He collapsed onto solid floor.
Ethan coughed, lungs burning. He lay sprawled on the living room floor, Raven cradled against his chest. His apartment swam into focus: the couch, the mug, the familiar neon glow leaking through the blinds.
He made it.
They made it.
For a heartbeat, relief loosened the iron band around his chest.
Then he saw it.
The wall near the couch—glitched. A strip of static rippled down the plaster, like a vertical scar in reality itself. It buzzed faintly, flickering, trying to disappear but failing.
Ethan's blood ran cold.
The Core hadn't stayed behind.
It followed them.
The first thing Ethan did when the spinning stopped was breathe.
It wasn't easy. His lungs dragged in air like it was acid, each inhale stinging, each exhale clawing at his throat. But it was real air. Thick with dust, faint with the smell of spilled coffee and stale takeout boxes—his air.
The weight of his apartment pressed down on him like an anchor. The couch sat crooked where he'd shoved it during his last restless night. The neon light from the diner across the street still bled sickly pink through the blinds. His laptop hummed quietly from the desk, screen saver bouncing a logo.
Normal.
Ordinary.
But not right.
Because in the corner of his eye, the scar still buzzed across the wall, a thin vertical seam where plaster bled into static. And every time he looked at it directly, it shivered, retreating like a guilty thing trying not to be caught.
Ethan tore his gaze away. One nightmare at a time.
He shifted Raven carefully onto the couch. Her body sagged into the cushions, limp, sweat-slick hair plastered to her temples. She hadn't stirred since he'd carried her through the seam.
Her skin was pale—too pale. Each breath she took rattled faintly, like her lungs weren't sure they wanted to keep working.
Ethan knelt beside her, brushing damp strands from her forehead. "Come on, Raven. You're stronger than this. Wake up…"
No answer.
As he pulled her jacket back to check her pulse, his hand froze.
There—just beneath the collarbone, where the shirt had slipped—thin black lines branched across her skin.
Not veins.
Not bruises.
Lines.
They shimmered faintly under the lamplight, like glowing circuitry carved into her flesh. Each branch pulsed with weak static, twitching in time with her erratic heartbeat.
Ethan's stomach twisted. He wanted to look away, pretend it was nothing, but his eyes wouldn't let him. His hand hovered over the markings, trembling, as if touching them might infect him too.
"Raven…" His voice cracked. "What the hell are you?"
The markings writhed faintly, as if reacting to his words.
Ethan jerked back, heart slamming against his ribs. His phone buzzed violently in his pocket, screen flaring:
Warning: Foreign access detected.
Anchor bleed in progress.
His throat closed. Anchor bleed? Was it her?
The glow faded, leaving the apartment too quiet.
He looked back at Raven. She hadn't moved. If not for the weak rise and fall of her chest, she could've been a corpse.
Ethan pressed his hands against his face, dragging them down until they shook on his knees.
He wanted answers. No—he needed answers. He needed to shake her awake and demand the truth. About the Guardian. About the Core. About why she whispered about Liora like she owned her.
But she was broken.
One look at her made it clear: she wasn't pretending. This wasn't some trick. She was burning herself out.
And despite the anger boiling under his skin, he couldn't bring himself to hurt her.
Not when she had saved him in the Core.
Not when he still remembered her standing between him and the Guardian's blade, glyphs blazing from her trembling hands.
He exhaled shakily and grabbed the blanket from the armrest, draping it over her. The markings glowed faintly beneath the fabric, but he forced himself to look away.
"You get one pass," he muttered, voice hoarse. "But when you wake up, you're telling me everything."
He staggered to his feet, legs like lead. Exhaustion pressed down with every step, but he forced himself toward the desk. His laptop screen jittered when he sat down.
The bouncing logo on the screensaver froze mid-arc, then split into two, then into four, multiplying until the whole screen was a grid of flickering shapes.
Ethan's breath caught.
The shapes twisted into letters.
61%
His stomach plummeted.
The fragments were climbing on their own now. He hadn't touched the phone, hadn't triggered anything.
He slammed the laptop shut, heart hammering. The lid rattled as if something inside was still moving, still alive.
The fridge in the kitchen clicked loudly, the hum stuttering. His digital clock blinked 00:00, 00:00, 00:00.
Every screen in the apartment was infected.
Ethan pressed his fists into the desk, sweat slicking his palms. He didn't want to look at the scar on the wall again, but his eyes betrayed him.
The seam had spread.
It wasn't a thin line anymore—it stretched halfway to the ceiling now, faint static crawling like mold along the edges.
Reality itself was peeling.
Ethan sank back into the chair, covering his ears, trying to block it out.
But he couldn't block the whisper.
Soft. Female. The same voice that had haunted the Core.
"Ethan…"
He flinched, eyes snapping to Raven. But her chest rose and fell shallowly—still unconscious.
The whisper came again, not from her lips but from everywhere. From the static in the wall, from the hum of the fridge, from the dead clock.
"Don't let her have me."
His throat closed.
"I won't," he rasped, the words tearing out of him. "I'll bring you back. I swear I'll—"
Static roared suddenly, drowning the whisper. His phone vibrated hard enough to rattle the desk.
When he yanked it out, the cracked screen flashed red:
Anchor warning.
Foreign presence accessing fragments.
User: RAVEN.
Ethan stared, frozen, heart pounding.
Raven lay unconscious on the couch. But the phone swore she was already inside, already reaching for Liora.
His hands shook so badly he nearly dropped the device.
"Raven…" His voice broke between disbelief and betrayal. "What are you doing?"
The red warning still burned across Ethan's cracked phone screen when the first knock came.
A soft, hesitant tap against his apartment door.
Ethan's heart stopped.
For a second, he couldn't move, couldn't breathe. Who the hell would come knocking now, when his walls were bleeding static and Raven was unconscious on the couch?
Another knock. Louder this time. Three precise raps.
He forced himself up, every nerve taut.
His apartment door looked the same as always—cheap wood, old brass handle, one dent where he'd kicked it once during a lockout. But the sound didn't come from the wood. It came from inside his head. Like someone knocking directly on his skull.
"Ethan."
The whisper.
He stumbled back, almost tripping over the coffee table. His pulse hammered in his ears. He glanced at Raven—still pale, still motionless under the blanket.
The knocking stopped. Silence fell so suddenly it hurt.
Ethan shoved his phone in his pocket and staggered to the window. The neon sign across the street still blinked, but something was wrong. The letters bent, twisting into shapes that weren't letters at all. Symbols, maybe. Or fragments of code.
Cars rolled by, their headlights smearing too long, like the light couldn't keep up with the speed. Each driver's face looked blank when he squinted, features blurred like unfinished sketches.
On the sidewalk below, two people passed each other. For a split second, their shadows stretched the wrong way—toward the sky instead of the ground.
Ethan's breath fogged the glass.
This wasn't just his apartment anymore.
The Core was bleeding into the city.
A figure stood across the street, beneath the half-dead neon light.
At first glance, just a man in a dark hoodie. But when Ethan focused, the man's face flickered. Sometimes it was there—eyes, mouth, nose. Sometimes blank, smooth, featureless.
The hoodie man tilted his head.
The same tilt.
The same damn tilt Liora used to give him when she was curious.
Ethan stumbled back from the window, heart in his throat.
"No. No, no, no—"
When he looked again, the figure was gone.
A weak sound snapped him around.
Raven.
Her lips moved, whispering. Her eyes stayed shut, lashes trembling against pale cheeks.
Ethan dropped to his knees beside her, leaning close.
At first he thought she was speaking nonsense, words half-formed. But the more he listened, the more he recognized them.
Fragments.
Lines of code. Strings of binary. Half-sentences in a voice that wasn't hers.
"Restore… anchor breach… seventy-two errors…"
He clutched her hand, shaking it. "Raven! Wake up! Look at me!"
Her voice shifted—lower, more like a growl. "Not… yours…"
Ethan froze.
Her eyelids fluttered open for the briefest second. Her pupils weren't black. They were filled with static.
Then they rolled back, and she went limp again.
His phone buzzed so violently he almost dropped it. He yanked it out, hands shaking.
Foreign process detected.
Fragment Restore: 62%.
User access confirmed: RAVEN.
The number climbed by itself.
62%.
62.5%.
63%.
Every time Raven twitched, it rose.
Ethan slammed his palm against the desk. "Stop it! Stop taking her!"
The phone didn't listen.
The warning pulsed faster, each percentage like a nail hammered into his skull.
A scream ripped through the night.
Ethan jerked toward the window.
Down on the street, a man clutched his head, stumbling. His shadow stretched long and jagged, peeling away from him like it wanted to escape.
Pedestrians stopped, but their faces glitched—blurring, repeating, frozen mid-expression. Some walked in circles. Some froze in place like NPCs whose scripts had broken.
The screaming man collapsed. His body twitched once, twice—then burst into static and dissolved into the pavement.
Ethan's stomach lurched.
No one else reacted. The crowd dispersed, moving like nothing happened.
As if the man had never existed.
Ethan pressed his back against the wall, gasping. His apartment seemed smaller, darker. The seam in the plaster had grown again, crawling halfway across the ceiling now. Static dripped down in strings like water leaking from a pipe.
He felt it inside his skull, too. A crack forming. Something splitting him between who he was and who he used to be.
Liora's laughter flickered through his head. Her hand brushing his. Her voice whispering his name.
But it came tangled with Raven's whisper, her glyphs burning against the Core, her body collapsing against his arms.
The fragments weren't just restoring Liora. They were rewriting him.
And he didn't know how much longer he could tell the difference.
He crouched by Raven again, staring at her fragile, glitch-lit skin.
If she was stealing fragments… was she doing it knowingly? Or was something else using her body as a conduit?
The question gnawed at him.
All he knew was this: if the fragments hit 100% before he had control, he might lose Liora forever. Or worse—she'd come back as something neither human nor his.
His phone buzzed again.
Fragment Restore: 64%.
The numbers wouldn't stop.
And Ethan realized he had to make a choice.
Stop Raven.
Or lose everything.
The hum inside Ethan's apartment had changed.
It wasn't the soft, low drone of old appliances anymore. No—this was deeper, heavier. Like the sound of the world itself struggling to breathe.
The plaster seam in his ceiling widened another inch with a dry, ripping sound. Static seeped through it in threads that dangled like vines. They swayed though there was no wind.
On the couch, Raven's chest rose shallowly. Her lips parted, voice rasping with a weight that wasn't human.
"Ethan…"
He froze.
Her eyes fluttered open.
They weren't her eyes. Not completely.
For a moment they looked normal—dark, sharp, stubborn as he remembered. But the longer he held her gaze, the more he saw the static dancing just beneath her irises, like fireflies trapped under glass.
"You…" She coughed, gripping the blanket with shaking fingers. "…shouldn't… be here."
Her voice carried an echo, two tones layered—hers and something older, heavier.
Ethan leaned closer. "Raven. Talk to me. What's happening to you?"
Her jaw tightened. "It's not… me."
He wanted to shake her, demand answers, but something in her eyes stopped him.
"Then who?" His voice cracked. "Who the hell am I supposed to trust if it's not you?"
Raven's hand shot up and grabbed his wrist.
Her grip was iron.
Her pupils widened until the whites of her eyes vanished. Static flooded the room, crawling across the TV screen, the lights, the walls.
And then she whispered it.
A name.
So soft Ethan almost missed it.
"Liora."
His stomach dropped.
"No—" He jerked his hand away, stumbling back. "You don't get to say her name."
Raven's face twisted—not in anger, but pain.
"You think… I chose this?" she rasped. "You think I wanted her inside me?"
The floor buzzed beneath them, trembling like a heartbeat.
His phone lit up on the table, screen bleeding red warnings.
Fragment Restore: 72%.
Foreign access escalating.
Anchor breach imminent.
72%.
The number jumped to 73 before his eyes.
Every percentage felt like a countdown, not to Liora's return, but to something else. Something larger.
The air grew heavier, thick with pressure. His ears popped. The dangling static threads from the ceiling swayed harder, reaching down like hands.
"Anchor breach…" Raven gasped, clutching her temples. "It's too soon."
"Then tell me the truth!" Ethan shouted, voice breaking against the trembling walls.
Raven looked at him, really looked, and for a heartbeat her old self shone through. Exhausted, furious, terrified.
"I was supposed to protect you from her," she whispered.
Her words sliced into him deeper than any glitch ever could.
Protect him? From Liora?
The idea cracked something inside him.
His chest felt hollow, his mind splitting down the center. Memories of Liora's smile tangled with the static in Raven's eyes. His hands trembled as if they no longer belonged to him.
Who was he fighting for anymore?
The lights exploded with a sharp pop. Darkness swallowed the room, broken only by the pulsing red glow of his phone.
74%.
75%.
The air filled with the high-pitched whine of a system overloaded. His furniture vibrated, floorboards groaning.
Through the window, the city flickered. Whole skyscrapers blurred, doubling, glitching. The neon signs collapsed into strings of gibberish. People froze mid-step like marionettes with cut strings.
The world was failing.
And the Core was waking up.
Raven's body convulsed once, hard enough to lift her from the couch. Static surged from her mouth in a scream that wasn't human, wasn't hers. The sound stabbed through Ethan's skull, dropping him to his knees.
When the noise cut off, Raven collapsed back onto the cushions, trembling.
Her hand reached for him, fingers slick with faint static trails.
"Don't… let her in…" she whispered, tears streaking down her face. "Please, Ethan. Don't let me become her."
76%.
77%.
The red glow from his phone pulsed faster, syncing with the pounding in his chest.
Ethan's hands hovered over her, shaking.
If he saved her, he might lose Liora forever.
If he saved Liora, Raven might vanish into nothing.
His choice would split everything.
The wall cracked behind him with a deafening SNAP. Static surged through like a flood, covering the plaster in writhing glyphs that burned his eyes.
And through that flood, a face began to form.
Liora's.
Half-complete, stitched from fragments of light and memory, smiling as though nothing had ever gone wrong.
The glyphs around her mouth flickered into words:
I'm home.
Ethan staggered back, heart in his throat, Raven's trembling body still in his arms.
78%.
79%.
The countdown roared.
The Core wasn't giving him time.