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I didn't answer.
But the page turned.
I brought her back to Elderfall under cover of dusk. She didn't wake.
Her body was warm. Her vitals were stable. But her UI flickered every few seconds like a page trying to load—and failing.
She wasn't unconscious.
She was somewhere else.
The innkeeper said nothing when we carried her upstairs. Players passed us without notice. No whispers. No popups. No SYSTEM interaction at all.
It was like the game had stopped seeing us.
I laid her on the bed and pulled the curtain closed. The Lexicon floated beside me, still open. Still humming.
I didn't sit.
I couldn't.
Instead, I watched her chest rise and fall in rhythm with something not present. Not environmental. Internal.
The glow around her hands had changed.
It wasn't magic.
It was code.
That night, I read every page the Lexicon had opened since the rollback zone. Some were full. Some weren't.
But every one of them ended with the same line:
The system cannot resolve this version of you.
She woke just after midnight.
No dramatic surge. No spellburst. Just a sharp inhale and a jolt upright like she'd missed her cue in a dream.
She blinked. Looked at her hands.
And then at me.
"…Where are we?" she asked.
Her voice was hers. But not completely.
I sat across from her.
"Back in Elderfall," I said. "You glitched."
"I remember a light. And then—" She winced. "A name."
"Talia."
She nodded.
But it was hesitant. Not memory. Recognition.
I waited.
Finally, she said, "I don't think she's gone."
I didn't ask how she knew.
Because the Lexicon was already writing again.
A new page. Blank at first. Then:
[THREAD HOST MERGE: STAGE ONE COMPLETE]
[LYRA.F | TALIA.V: PARTIAL MEMORY ACCESS GRANTED]
"Can you read it?" I asked.
She looked down at the page.
And began to speak.
Not in her voice. Not exactly.
A second cadence wove beneath her tone—familiar from the vision of Listener.003.
"They called us echoes. Fragments. We were never supposed to stabilize. But some of us did. And we remembered."
She shuddered.
"I remember what she tried to seal. I remember why she failed. And I remember you."
Her eyes locked with mine.
"Not who you are now. Who you were meant to be."
I didn't know what to say.
She did.
"Whatever this is," she said, voice returning to her own, "you're not alone in it anymore."
The Lexicon flared.
New script formed across the page—rushed, panicked, like a heartbeat stuttering:
[NEW THREADLINK DETECTED – MEMORY SEED ESCALATION]
[PREVIOUS VERSION REWRITE IMMINENT]
[INITIATING RECONCILIATION PROTOCOL – THREAD.017]
The world bent.
Not physically. Not through graphics or terrain.
It bent like memory—slipping sideways, realigning.
We were still in the inn.
But the windows showed a different Elderfall.
Broken.
Empty.
Ash on the breeze.
And something tall—too tall—looming in the distance.
A tower of light made from incomplete code.
I looked down.
The Lexicon showed a message I didn't understand:
[THREAD.017 → THREAD.ROOT]
And beneath it:
You are now writing the origin story.