The northern trail wasn't meant to exist.
Not anymore.
The SYSTEM had long since erased it from maps, stripped it from fast-travel nodes, flagged it as deprecated terrain. Most players never thought to wander this far. Most players never needed to.
But we weren't most players anymore.
And the Lexicon wouldn't let me forget it.
Mist clung low across the cracked stones.
Trees arched overhead, skeletal branches threading through the air like old bones.The forest canopy grew thinner with every mile we passed—less alive, less cohesive.
Sometimes the leaves shimmered wrong when we looked directly at them, flickering between textures like the game engine couldn't decide what season it was.
Sometimes the mist whispered.
Not words.
Just...fragments.
A girl laughing.
A door slamming.
A loading screen stuttering halfway through a system patch.
Memories. Bleeding through the cracks.
Lyra walked ahead of me, hood pulled low.
Her boots barely made a sound against the fractured trail, but her presence felt heavier than before. Like the instability in her thread wasn't just glitching her stats or UI—It was changing the way the world responded to her.
We crossed an old quest marker—a collapsed signpost that once offered daily fetch tasks to early-game players.
Now it was blackened, charred.
The wood crumbled at a touch.
I ran my fingers across the rotted surface and caught the faintest glyph shimmer.
Not a SYSTEM rune.
A thread signature.
[Waypoint NULL.015 – Memory Node Failure – User: Irretrievable]
I didn't tell Lyra.
She didn't need another reason to doubt this path.
We pushed forward.
By midafternoon, the air grew colder.
The sun overhead flickered—actually flickered—as if the sky texture was a faulty hologram.
The grass turned patchy, giving way to cracked earth riddled with faint luminous veins that pulsed in sickly green patterns underfoot.
I checked my HUD out of habit.
No environmental debuffs listed.
No danger indicators.
Just a growing tension in the Lexicon at my hip.
Pages shivered whenever the veins pulsed.
An hour later, we found the first of the echoes.
A house.
Or rather, a memory of one.
Half-formed walls.
Flickering furniture.
A chimney that sometimes rendered, sometimes didn't.
Inside, the image of a woman moved mechanically between a stove and a dining table.
Over and over.
Without food. Without fire.
Just a loop burned into the memory of a world that no longer wanted her.
Lyra stopped beside me.
Her voice was low. Hoarse.
"Do you think she knows?"
I shook my head.
"I think she wasn't allowed to know."
The woman-echo turned toward us.
Her face glitched.
No expression.
No recognition.
Just a blank model template before she snapped back into her endless cycle.
We left her behind.
Not because it was dangerous.
Because it felt wrong to watch.
Farther up the trail, the mist thickened.
And that's when it hit.
Lyra stumbled.
Hard.
I barely caught her before she dropped to her knees.
Her eyes wide—too wide—pupils dilating and constricting in rapid succession.
"Lyra—?"
She shook her head violently, clutching at her temples.
"I heard something," she gasped. "But it wasn't me."
I knelt beside her, heart hammering.
"What did you hear?"
She stared past me.
Past the trees.
Past the world.
And whispered:
"An ending."
The Lexicon snapped open by itself.
Pages slammed outward, flipping faster than I could track.
New warning glyphs burned across the parchment:
[Echo Instability Surge – Fenwick.L]Thread Anchor Deviation 7.2%Memory Contamination Probability: Rising.
I gritted my teeth.
I needed to stabilize her.
But the Lexicon's stabilization glyphs were too raw.
Too dangerous to use outside a full anchor zone.
And there was no anchor zone here.
Just broken fragments.
Just ghosts.
Just ash.
I pulled her up.
She leaned heavily against me, breaths ragged.
"We're close," I lied.
She nodded numbly.
Maybe she even believed it.
We kept moving.
Step by step.
Through the thinning forest.
Through the failing reality.
Toward whatever broken place the Lexicon was trying to lead us.
Toward the echoes the SYSTEM hadn't been able to erase.
Yet.
When the mist thinned enough to glimpse the northern horizon, I saw it.
A shattered obelisk standing crooked against the skyline.
Cracks ran deep into its base.
Threadlight bled from its wounds.
And somewhere beyond it—
I knew the first real fight waited.
Because we weren't just walking into forgotten memory anymore.
We were walking into memory that was trying to survive us.