The memory bottle hung in the mist, turning slowly.
No chain. No pedestal. Just gravity and inevitability.
Dark veins pulsed inside it—red and black and deep, shifting with the rhythm of something older than the SYSTEM itself.
Lyra stood frozen beside me, staring.
The Lexicon hovered near my shoulder, pages half-fluttering.
The mist pressed against my skin—thick, cold, almost oily.
And for the first time, I understood:
This wasn't a fragment left behind.
It was a scar.
A wound the SYSTEM had tried to stitch shut.
The Lexicon unfurled a line of script across the open page:
[Memory Fragment: Thread.NULL.03]Origin: Suppressed Pre-Rollback Instance.
My heart skipped.
Pre-rollback.
Meaning this memory wasn't just old.It was from before the SYSTEM rewrote the world.
Before they scrubbed away the parts that didn't fit.
A SYSTEM warning flashed at the edge of my HUD:
[Unauthorized Memory Detected.][Rollback Sweep Inbound.]
I reached for the bottle.
Lyra grabbed my wrist, hard.
"Aiden," she said.
Her voice was shaking.
"This feels wrong."
I looked at her.
And for a moment—just a heartbeat—her face blurred again.
Lyra.
Talia.
Flickering like two overlapping images that couldn't sync.
The Lexicon flickered too, struggling to stabilize the local thread.
I thought of my first life.
Of the rollback.
Of how it had come without warning.
Without explanation.
And how I'd barely noticed it then.
Just minor glitches. Just forgotten quests. Just background noise in a game too big to question.
I'd shrugged it off.
We all had.
But now—
Now I could see the stitches.
The scars.
The hollow spaces where stories used to be.
The rollback hadn't fixed the world.
It had crippled it.
And we were standing in the proof.
I turned back to the bottle.
Mist curled tighter around it, whispering threads of half-formed words.
Memories trapped mid-thought.
A child's laugh.
A guild hall toast.
A dying promise.
All crushed down into a thing the SYSTEM didn't want to exist.
The Lexicon vibrated more violently.
A new prompt burned onto the page:
[Stabilize Memory?][Risk: Rollback Agent Deployment – High.]
Lyra's hand tightened on my arm.
"Please," she said.
Her voice was hers now. No glitch.
No Talia overlay.
Just Lyra.
Scared.
Real.
I made my decision.
Not with my mind.
With my hands.
I took the bottle.
The instant my fingers closed around it, the world cracked open.
The floor beneath us split into a spiderweb of floating fragments. The mist solidified into writhing ribbons of code, slashing through the air.
A sharp tone pierced the void—like a massive alarm being pulled through a broken speaker.
And from the edge of the void, figures moved.
They weren't players. They weren't monsters.
Rollback Agents.
I'd only heard rumors of them in my first life—ghost stories players told after patches, about invisible SYSTEM enforcers that deleted corrupted data before anyone could notice.
Now I knew the truth.
They didn't fix memory.
They erased it.
The Lexicon flipped furiously.
A dozen glyphs layered themselves over the pages:
[Rollback Override Detected.][Priority Threat Class: Listener.][Deploy Recursive Correction Entities.]
I spun, yanking Lyra toward a floating stone platform as the ground behind us disintegrated.
The bottle pulsed in my grip—heavy now, like it was trying to pull my arm down.
Threads of memory lashed outward from it, striking the Agents.
Some staggered. Some absorbed the impact and kept moving.
It didn't matter.
There were too many.
We ran.
Jumped between floating fragments of reality.
Lexicon trails spiraling around us, trying to map a path that didn't exist.
The mist thickened again, folding into shapes:
Echoes of Elderfall's streets.
Broken glimpses of old quest hubs.
Faces I half-recognized from a version of Ascension that never made it past the rollback.
Lyra stumbled mid-leap.
I caught her wrist—barely—and hauled her onto the next platform.
The strain sent a burning line of pain up my side.
I didn't care.
We couldn't fall.
Falling meant forgetting.
The bottle glowed hotter.
The Lexicon whispered urgently:
Anchor the fragment or sever it.
Choose.
Another platform cracked underfoot.
The Agents closed in—too fast.
I couldn't fight them here.
Not without sacrificing everything we were carrying.
So I did the only thing I could.
I severed the fragment.
I slammed the Lexicon into the mist, carving a glyph with pure will.
The bottle shattered in my hand.
Light exploded outward—not gold, not silver—but jagged, fractured hues of a story that would never finish itself.
The mist howled.
The Agents staggered.
Reality recoiled.
And we fell.
I woke up gasping on cold grass.
Above me, Elderfall's familiar broken stars wheeled across the sky.
Lyra lay beside me, breathing shallowly but alive.
The Lexicon hovered above us, pages scorched, edges torn—but still whole.
The HUD pinged once:
[Rollback Sweep Incomplete.][Divergence Risk: Elevated.]
I sat up slowly, cradling my burned hand.
The SYSTEM had tried to wipe us out.
Not because we were breaking the rules.
But because we were remembering the rules before they were rewritten.
And now, they knew where to find us.
I sat back, gasping. The sky above me was wrong—too still, too clear. The Lexicon pulsed once against my chest.
Not safe yet.
I thought we had escaped. But deep down, the world still ached with something unfinished.