We made camp near the edge of a broken clearing.
The land here didn't breathe the way it should.
No insects.No birds.No wind.
Just the low pulse of unseen threadlight leaking from fissures in the earth—and a sky overhead that didn't seem convinced it was supposed to exist.
I set a shallow fire. Not real flame—just a glimmer glyph stitched hastily into the dry stones.Enough to throw light.Enough to feel like we hadn't vanished entirely.
Lyra sat cross-legged across from me, arms wrapped tight around herself.
She hadn't said much since the waystation.
I didn't push.
Sometimes silence was survival.
The stars above us flickered.
At first I thought it was just the firelight playing tricks.
But when I looked harder—
the constellations themselves were glitching.
Stars sliding into wrong positions.Whole patches of sky turning black and resetting.Some stars doubled back, replaying their paths in short loops like broken animations.
And once—briefly—the entire sky split sideways into an old patch version,showing a set of constellations I hadn't seen since before the rollback.
Lyra noticed too.
She flinched.
"That's not possible," she whispered.
"It's not supposed to be," I said.
The Lexicon pulsed faintly against my hip.
Waiting.
Always waiting.
I didn't know if the SYSTEM even knew about this broken stretch of world anymore.Maybe it had written it off.Maybe it was just too deep to reset.
Or maybe...something else was happening.
Something neither side controlled.
I stared into the flickering sky until my eyes burned.
And for the first time, I thought about the message that had appeared back in the real world.
Fragment Root Confirmed.
Anchor Status: Active.
I hadn't wanted to think about it earlier.
Too much.
Too fast.
But here, under a sky that was forgetting itself, I couldn't avoid it anymore.
The Lexicon used to offer spells.
Power.
Options.
Things I could wield and control.
Now it offered something else.
A root.A memory.A version of the world that wasn't supposed to exist anymore —anchored inside me, whether I understood it or not.
I wasn't just playing Ascension now.
I was carrying it.
Rebuilding it.
Risking everything by remembering what was supposed to be forgotten.
I didn't know if that made me a threat.
A mistake.
Or just another broken thread flailing in a dying weave.
But I knew one thing:
The SYSTEM couldn't delete me the way it wanted to anymore.
And that meant, sooner or later, it would try something worse.
Across the fire, Lyra stirred.
Her head dropped slightly, and for a moment I thought she was falling asleep.
But then she began to speak.
Softly.
Too softly.
Words that didn't belong to any language I knew.
Faint glyph-shapes twisted in the air around her mouth.
Memory echoes.
Her instability was deepening.
I leaned forward, heart hammering.
"Lyra."
No response.
I reached out, gently touching her wrist.
The glyphs snapped backward into her skin like ink retreating from a broken page.
She gasped—a sharp, painful sound—and looked at me with wide, terrified eyes.
"I... I was dreaming," she said.
"You're awake," I said softly.
She hugged herself tighter.
"It didn't feel like a dream."
The Lexicon opened without me touching it.
Pages fluttered once, then locked onto a single line of text:
[Thread Instability – Critical Threshold Approaching]Stabilization Glyph Available: Risk Factor – Extreme.
I swallowed hard.
The Lexicon wasn't suggesting a spell.
It was offering a gamble.
I could try to stabilize her.
Force her instability back into a coherent thread.
But if it failed—if the glyph misfired—there was no telling what would be left of her.
Or me.
Or the world between us.
I glanced across the fire.
Lyra sat hunched, breathing shallowly, eyes still distant.
Not broken.
Not yet.
The fire guttered low.
The stars above us flickered again,and for just a moment,I saw them rearrange themselves into a shape—
—a glyph.
One I didn't recognize.
One that didn't belong to any SYSTEM I'd ever learned.
It burned itself into my memory before the sky shuddered and reset again.
I closed the Lexicon.
Not tonight.
I wasn't ready.
Neither was she.
Some things had to be carried a little longer before they could be fixed.
Sleep came in broken pieces.
Half-formed dreams.
Memories of people I couldn't name.
Places that had never been mapped.
And the faint, persistent feeling that the world under my feetwas rewriting itself faster than I could hold it together.
When morning came, the mist was thinner.
But the fractures in the earth were deeper.
The trail ahead glowed faintly with threadlight scars,leading us toward the broken structures on the distant ridge.
Toward the forgotten fight waiting for us.
I helped Lyra to her feet.
She didn't argue.
Didn't complain.
She just walked beside me, silent and steady,as the ruined world shivered under a sky that no longer remembered itself.