Echoes Beneath the Root
In the dark of the fractured system root—the layer beneath even Saylor's direct control—something began to blink.
An ancient shard.
Not divine. Not player-born. Something old. Something architectural.
A remnant of the original Field design.
A shape emerged from the node. Neither god nor man. Composed of floating tiles and segmented time.
Its label had long been scratched out, but new code scrawled itself across its fractured core:
> PROXY-AETH: FOLDER 0
It blinked once.
Then split into four distinct pulses and vanished into the current trial, invisible to all except the Memory Core itself.
---
Lucia's Gambit
Lucia, Veyra, and Brant descended further into the system's buried infrastructure. The terrain became alien, primitive code grafted to modern scaffolding.
They passed glowing spires engraved with failed names:
> Aurelius, Sorn, Mirra, Hathryn, Calvarix...
Ghosts of previous god-renders.
Lucia paused at one of the spires.
"They weren't all monsters."
Brant snorted. "They became them."
"No," Veyra interrupted. "They were written to be."
Lucia turned to them. Her voice steady.
"So we write something different."
She drove the God-Faced mask fragment into the spire. It pulsed.
> PROTOTYPE MASK-GOD: INITIATING INJECTION
The resistance had just made a god.
But it wasn't perfect. It wasn't stable.
And it was angry.
---
Vault Disturbance
Alarms flared in the Vault.
Saylor stood, eyes narrowing.
The Memory Core hummed harder now. The system, for the first time in cycles, wasn't completely quiet.
> NOTICE: UNAUTHORIZED ASCENSION DETECTED WARNING: LOCALIZED SENTIENCE EMERGING
He closed his eyes.
"So they're building gods now."
He walked to the core terminal.
"Let them."
He typed a single command:
> TRIAL FIVE: ASCENT OF THE FALSE DIVINE RULE: TO CLAIM THE THRONE, YOU MUST KILL YOUR MAKER.
---
Far Below: A New God Screams
The prototype god, formed of fractured judgment, broken truth, and stolen code, opened its eyes.
It had no name.
Just pain.
And its gaze turned upward, toward the surface.
Where Saylor Cogni waited.
Smiling.
> "Come then. Show me what you made."