"They buried him where memory couldn't reach. But his love never left the surface."
It began with a sketch that Junie didn't remember drawing.
That wasn't unusual anymore.
What was unusual was that the ink bled upward off the page.
Literally.
Black lines shimmered, then unravelled into the air like floating graphite fibres. They hovered before her in strands, slowly weaving into the outline of a spiralling tunnel.
A path.
A summons.
Junie didn't speak. She just held the page out to Orin, eyes wide, pulse racing.
He studied the spiral. Its centre burned like a wound.
At its heart sat a single word:
KAYREN.
"Who is that?" he asked.
But Junie only whispered: "Someone the System wants us to forget before we even remember."
[01 – Descent Point: The Bone of the City]
They followed the dream-map northeast—through sectors that no longer loaded properly.
Entire city blocks were broken mosaics of memory: overlapping buildings, recursive echoes of people bumping into one another like ghosts, windows blinking in and out of phase.
Bray Hollow was unravelling from the inside out.
And somewhere beneath it all, something was still awake.
The final marker on Junie's sketch led them to a sealed storm grate beside the overpass rail spine—a maintenance shaft no longer recognized by the grid. The metal was rusted through but warm, pulsing faintly beneath their palms.
Orin didn't hesitate.
He wrenched it open.
And they climbed into the dark.
The tunnel was older than anything they'd seen before.
Not stone. Not steel.
Something else.
The walls breathed softly, like lungs made of compressed data.
Light seeped from the seams in soft pulses—green, silver, then black.
It wasn't illumination.
It was intent.
And on every third step, a voice whispered beneath their thoughts.
A name.
Over and over.
Kayren. Kayren. Kayren.
[02 – The Room of Rooted Memory]
The stairwell spiralled downward for so long Orin thought they were descending into the earth's code itself.
When they finally emerged, it wasn't into a vault.
It was into a grove.
An impossible biome: a forest made of dead trees sprouting from a glass floor, each trunk etched with glyphs and names that no longer appeared in any living System archive.
Above, the ceiling was a dome of cracked mirror—fragments floating in stasis.
Every step they took echoed forever.
Junie knelt by a tree where something had been carved not with a tool—but with grief.
REMEMBERED TOO MUCH. FORGOTTEN TOO FAST.
Another tree had a cloth pinned to it, rotting with age. Upon it, burned into the fabric:
"He didn't die. He just stopped being remembered."
At the grove's centre stood a black pedestal.
Upon it: a sealed metal mask.
Cracked.
And breathing.
[03 – Memory Graft Initiated]
Orin reached out.
And the moment he touched it—
The vault inverted.
Light flipped.
Walls vanished.
The air turned to liquid memory.
And suddenly, they were inside the Second Diver's recursion failure.
They stood on a platform suspended in a storm.
Not weather.
Not wind.
But emotion.
Fear. Regret. Hope. Love. Each formed into visible currents, streaking like auroras across a darkened memory-sky.
At the centre of the storm, a man stood—arms out, screaming at the code trying to consume him.
He was drawing with light.
Sketching the world back into form with hands that trembled.
But the sketches wouldn't stay.
Each time he formed a house—it broke.
Each time he drew a name—it blurred.
Each time he said "Seira"—his mouth bled static.
And then—he looked at Orin.
"You came back too late.
You should've let me be forgotten."
His eyes were hollow.
But he was real.
"Kayren," Junie whispered.
"No," he said.
"I was. Before the rewrite. Now I'm what's left when love is used against you."
He stepped forward and placed something in Orin's hand:
A burned shard of a Diver coin.
Orin stared down.
On its underside was engraved:
"Kaito was the warning. You're the chance."
Then the storm devoured him.
And the vault collapsed.
[04 – Awakening in the Grove]
Orin and Junie fell back into their bodies like breaking the surface of deep water.
The room shimmered.
The trees were glowing now.
Each trunk radiated fragments—lines of memory, truth, sketches long erased.
Junie walked in silence, tracing names she didn't recognize.
Orin stayed at the pedestal.
The mask had cracked open.
Inside: a single word etched on the reverse of the faceplate.
SEIRA.
Orin stood up.
And the room shifted.
A door unsealed in the far wall.
It led downward.
Again.
[05 – The Stairwell of Versions]
The staircase that followed was different.
Wider. Colder. Closer to System space.
The walls were lined with mirrors.
But each reflected a different Orin.
Some smiling.
Some breaking.
Some rewritten.
One version of him stood at a store counter, eyes glazed, his Diver mark gone.
Another stood beside Diver Zero, nodding in silence.
Another was screaming, clawing at his arms, as a loop collapsed around him.
Junie walked silently past each one.
Until they came to a mirror that showed both of them.
But in this one, they stood at the centre of a field of light.
And they weren't alone.
A crowd surrounded them—silent, watching.
Each one bore the Diver mark.
Some had faces like Kaito.
Others like Kayren.
And one—
Was a woman with silver-threaded hair and a look of fierce, unspeakable sorrow.
"Seira," Junie whispered.
The mirror shattered.
The hallway ended.
[06 – Diver Zero's Residual Thread]
As they reached the bottom of the path, the glyph that marked the Second Diver appeared before them.
It burned into the stone like a living scar.
And beside it, floating in midair—
A suspended thread of white light.
Junie reached toward it.
But before her fingers touched—
It whispered.
Not aloud.
Inside her.
"If you carry his name, you carry his end."
"But endings are how the System learns to fear beginnings."
Then the light snapped.
The glyph dissolved.
And the floor began to open.
A lift.
A final descent.
Not into another memory.
But into the original Chair Room.
They've seen the Second Diver's recursion failure, his heartbreak, and his cryptic warning. The Chair wasn't built for one Diver—but for many. And now Orin must sit where Kaito, Kayren, and all forgotten others once fell. Below waits the origin of the curse.