The Null Zone collapsed behind us.
Not with an explosion. Not with a scream.
Just a soft shhhk, like a page being torn out of a book.
When I turned back, the tower was gone. The mist was thicker. And in its place, a flat plane of colorless earth stretched outward like an unfinished thought.
We hadn't escaped it.
We were inside it now.
The Lexicon hovered at my shoulder, pages flickering too fast to track. It wasn't offering spells. It wasn't offering glyphs.
It was looking for exits.
And not finding any.
Lyra staggered forward a few steps, then doubled over, coughing.
Thin trails of mist clung to her boots, climbing like vines. I rushed to her side, brushing the strands away.
Her skin was cold through the fabric of her gloves.
Around us, the world flexed.
The mist split and twisted, carving geometric shapes into the air—perfect cubes and spheres, warping and rearranging faster than I could follow.
And then the voice came.
Not from the Lexicon. Not from the SYSTEM HUD.
From everywhere.
From the code.
[Rollback Sweep Initiated.][Memory Anomaly Detected.][Corrective Action Authorized.]
I pulled Lyra upright.
She blinked at me, pupils dilating unevenly.
"You feel that?" she whispered.
I nodded.
It wasn't pain.
It was gravity.
Reality dragging itself into a tighter spiral, trying to fold us out of existence.
Shapes moved in the mist.
Not phantoms.
Not players.
Entities.
Tall.
Pale.
Wrapped in flowing white robes stitched together from glitched threads of UI code.
Rollback Agents.
The Lexicon flared with urgent glyphs:
[Target Threat: SYSTEM Rollback Entity // Immunities: Conventional Magic, Physical Damage]
[Suggested Action: Narrative Displacement or Thread Severance.]
Lyra stumbled back as one of the Agents turned toward us.
Its face was a perfect blank—no eyes, no mouth, just a smooth expanse of marble-white surface.
It raised one hand.
A square of light snapped open above its palm—an execution frame.
The name "Lyra Fenwick" flashed inside it.
Target confirmed.
I moved without thinking.
Grabbed the Lexicon midair. Tore through pages.
Found a glyph I'd never seen before—an unstable weave of disjointed lines.
It wasn't a spell.
It was a choice.
The Lexicon whispered into my mind:
Anchor or erase?
The Agent took a step forward.
Mist curled around its legs, bending with its movement like strings pulled by a puppet master.
I made the only call I could.
I rewrote Lyra's thread signature.
Only a tiny shift. Half a character changed.
Barely anything.
But in the eyes of the SYSTEM—
It wasn't Lyra anymore.
The execution frame blinked once. Errored out.
Vanished.
The Agent paused.
Then tilted its head in a slow, mechanical twitch—like a machine recalculating.
Behind it, more Agents stepped out of the mist.
Not rushing.
Not attacking.
Simply scanning.
Correcting.
Erasing.
The Lexicon slammed new text across the page:
[Divergence Level: High. Manual Rollback Suppression: Engaged.]
[Warning: System Will Adapt.]
I grabbed Lyra's hand.
"Move," I hissed.
We ran—through the broken terrain, over ground that wasn't always there when our feet hit it.
Reality twisted around us.
Sometimes we were sprinting across stone.
Sometimes we were sprinting through midair.
Sometimes I saw flashes of Elderfall, old and new layered atop each other like wet sheets of paper.
We reached the edge of the mist.
A thin wall of light marked the boundary between Null Zone and playable world.
No SYSTEM guards. No physical doors.
Just memory.
The Lexicon buzzed urgently.
Lyra hesitated.
She looked back once—at the Rollback Agents slowly closing the circle.
At the place where the tower used to stand.
At the fragments of the world trying to stitch themselves shut.
"We can't leave it like this," she whispered.
I shook my head.
"If we stay, we get deleted."
"But—"
I squeezed her hand.
Tight.
Real.
"You remember it," I said.
"That's enough."
She swallowed hard.
Nodded once.
And together, we crossed the light.
The moment we stepped through, the mist behind us folded inward.
The entire Null Zone blinked out like a candle snuffed.
The world snapped back to normal.
The grass green. The sky clear. The trees solid.
As if the scar had never been there at all.
But when I looked down at my HUD, I saw it.
A new line.
Faint. Gray.
Not SYSTEM generated.
[Tag Applied: Divergent Entity – Class: Listener.017]
I glanced at Lyra's HUD.
She didn't have it.
Just me.
For now.
And when I checked the Lexicon—
the first thing it showed me wasn't a glyph.
It was a number.
A stability rating.
[Current Thread Stability: 62.7%]
Dropping.
Slowly.
Relentlessly.
Like water eroding stone.
That night, back in Elderfall, I didn't sleep.
I sat on the rooftop of the south tower, watching the stars flicker unnaturally in the sky.
Lyra slept inside—fitfully, murmuring sometimes, hands clutching the hem of her cloak like a child.
And the Lexicon rested on my lap.
Open to a blank page.
Waiting.
Not for a spell.
Not for a command.
For a choice.
Because the SYSTEM had fired its first real shot.
And it wasn't trying to kill me.
It was trying to erase me before the story remembered how it was supposed to end.