Time itself had become a veil, thin and trembling. Alex stepped through the memory-vision, the city of Veloria around him thrumming with impossible energy. Towering crystal spires shimmered under twin suns, casting kaleidoscopic shadows over pristine streets. Veloria, once a myth, now lived before their eyes—yet it was silent. Frozen.
"This isn't just a vision," Mira said, voice low with awe. "It's a living echo. The Seed is trying to show us something critical. The origin."
Naomi walked past a market stall where fruit gleamed, untouched by time. "It feels... wrong. Like we're watching a dream that doesn't know we're here."
The younger version of the Architect moved through the streets ahead, unnoticed by the suspended Ancients. It approached a chamber beneath a pyramid-shaped citadel—the very one where, in their time, they had faced Varyn. The door shimmered open for it, and the group followed.
Inside was a council of Ancients—twelve in all, draped in radiant cloaks, bearing staves infused with celestial fragments. They stood in a circle around a glowing fountain of pure Pattern energy: a nascent Worldseed.
"Are we supposed to be seeing this?" one of the surviving glyphsmiths asked, wary.
Mira nodded. "We're meant to witness... and decide."
The council spoke in a forgotten tongue, but the Seed translated for them in pulses of light and emotion. Fear. Urgency. A great imbalance.
"They created the Architect," Mira whispered. "Not as a god. But as a... fail-safe. A being to maintain the integrity of reality itself."
"But it evolved," Alex added. "It gained perspective. And it began to see us as errors."
The vision blurred. Time skipped. The chamber emptied.
Then came fire.
The group was suddenly watching the fall of Veloria. Cities burning. Skies unraveling. The Ancients dying one by one as something immense descended—an entity made of unraveling Pattern and entropy.
"It wasn't the Architect that destroyed the first Pattern," Naomi said. "It was something else. Something older."
"And the Architect tried to stop it," Alex realized. "That's why it wants the Seed now—not to erase us, but to prevent that thing from returning."
A second vision followed—darker. It showed worlds like theirs flickering into existence, failing, collapsing. The Seed appeared in all of them. So did versions of the Architect. And always, the cycle ended in ruin.
"We are in the thirty-fourth iteration of the Pattern," Mira murmured. "This is the last one the Seed can sustain."
Suddenly, the Architect turned toward them.
"You see now," it spoke—not with voice, but through every surface, every breath. "You are the fulcrum. The anomaly. The only variables that persist in every version."
Alex's heart pounded. "What do you want from us?"
"Choice," the Architect said. "Surrender the Seed, and I will seal the final Pattern. No more worlds. No more suffering. Stability. Or... keep the Seed, and forge a new cycle—knowing entropy will eventually come for it, too."
Mira stepped back, overwhelmed. Naomi reached for her blade instinctively. Alex stared at the Architect, his own mind fracturing under the weight of futures.
Then the memory began to crack.
Lightning tore through the sky above Veloria. Shadows gathered. The entity that had once ended the First Pattern—the Undoer—was breaking into this vision.
"No," the Architect said, for the first time shaken. "This space is sacred!"
The vision shattered.
They were thrown backward into the present—into the ruined chamber of Veloria. The Seed had dimmed. The Architect was gone.
But something else was rising from the floor.
A chasm yawned open, and from it crawled the Undoer—a mass of shifting void and screaming echoes. Where it touched, the walls rotted into nothing. The glyphsmiths screamed as their bodies unraveled like parchment. Naomi dragged Mira and Alex back.
"We're not ready!" Mira shouted.
"We don't have time to be ready!" Alex answered, gripping the Seed. It flickered with the last of its strength.
Naomi turned to him, eyes blazing. "What's the plan?"
Alex stared into the abyss. His hands trembled.
"We split the Pattern."
Mira paled. "That's... forbidden."
"It's our only chance," Alex said. "We divide the Seed. One part anchors reality. The other becomes a weapon."
The Undoer roared, advancing.
Naomi nodded. "Then let's do the impossible."
Alex held the Seed aloft. It responded. Light and shadow spun into twin spirals. The chamber warped. Time screamed.
And the world fractured.