The Archive's last pulse had not faded when Kael opened his eyes to a sky that was not the one he remembered.It was red—no, fractured—split into jagged panels like a shattered mirror, each fragment showing a different reality. In one, the ocean boiled. In another, skyscrapers hung upside down in the air like teeth. And in the farthest shard, Kael saw himself, older, scarred, and smiling with a cruelty he didn't understand.
A crackle in his neural link pulled him back.
Elara: "Kael… you're not in the Worldstream anymore. At least, not entirely. You're inside an overlap."Her voice was hushed, as if speaking too loudly would wake something.
The ground beneath Kael shifted—not soil, but a shifting lattice of black code, each line humming with life. He stepped carefully, but every movement caused ripples, and from those ripples, whispers rose. They weren't words at first—just breaths, echoes of thoughts half-formed—but then they coalesced:
"He knows… he knows you… he's coming…"
Kael stopped cold.
Kael: "Who's coming?"No answer. Only the sound of something dragging through the lattice, slow and deliberate, from somewhere ahead.
When the shape emerged, it was like looking into a warped reflection. Its face was Kael's—but hollow-eyed, stretched thin, its skin marked with spirals that glowed faintly from within. The air between them bent, as if reality itself was leaning toward this other Kael.
Other Kael: "You should have stayed in the Archive. You've woken the Ash."His voice was both his and not his—layered, like several versions of him speaking in unison.
The ground cracked. From beneath, thin skeletal structures erupted, forming a cage of burning code around them. Elara's voice cut in, panicked:
Elara: "Kael, that's not a duplicate. That's an echo—a fragment of you rewritten by the Spiral before you ever touched it."
Kael felt a pull at the base of his skull, like someone yanking on the threads of his mind. Memories—real and imagined—flickered: standing in a lab watching Earth's crust split, whispering something into Elara's ear that made her eyes widen in horror, holding the key to the Worldstream and choosing to lock everyone out. None of them had happened… yet he remembered them.
The echo stepped closer, its spirals pulsing faster.
Other Kael: "I'm what you will become when you stop lying to yourself. I'm not your enemy… yet. But the Ash doesn't wait for your consent."From the cage's edges, a dark mist seeped in, curling around Kael's feet, biting into his skin like frost and flame at once.
Kael tried to move, but his body resisted. His neural link screamed with interference, Elara's voice breaking into static. Then, between the crackles, one phrase cut through, sharp and urgent:
Elara: "Do not follow him—whatever he shows you, it's a trap!"
The echo extended a hand. Behind him, one of the sky's fragments shimmered and shifted to show something impossible—a glimpse of the real Earth, untouched, blue and whole, as if none of this had happened. Kael's heart clenched.
Other Kael: "One step, and you can have it back. All of it. But you'll have to let the Ash rewrite you."
The mist rose higher, whispering his name now—not from one voice, but from countless ones, familiar and foreign, all tugging at the edges of his mind. Somewhere deep in his chest, Kael felt an unfamiliar urge—not to fight, but to give in.
And then, in a flicker of clarity, he realized something—the Ash wasn't trying to kill him. It was trying to prepare him.
The realization was so sharp, so terrifying, that he nearly stumbled forward into the echo's grasp.