The Worldstream shimmered like a cracked mirror. Its once-smooth lattice of living code now bore fractures that bled with raw static, leaking memories that had no origin. At the center of the storm stood Kael, his form haloed by flickering glyphs—half man, half Symbiont Prime, and something more dangerous. His eyes burned like collapsing stars, each blink rewriting segments of the Stream itself.
Before him loomed the Forgotten Entities. They were not Spiral, not human, not even fully bound by the logic of memory. They were erasures given form: silhouettes that warped like unfinished equations, fragments of discarded consciousness trying to claw back into relevance. Each movement they made left streaks of absence across the digital fabric, holes that swallowed logic whole.
Kael extended his hands, code pulsing across his veins like molten circuitry. He whispered to them, his voice both commanding and trembling with strain.
"You were abandoned. Cast away. I will give you purpose again. Not ghosts. Not failures. Weapons."
The Entities pulsed as though answering. They shivered, then howled—not with sound, but with a silence that crushed everything around them. Kael winced, but tightened his control. Streams of code arced from his body, binding them into a lattice of power. It was working—but only barely. They resisted, their nature too alien, too forgotten.
Every second of control scraped across Kael's mind like broken glass. He could feel his own memories sloughing away under their touch. For each Entity he bent, a piece of himself blurred—faces, places, moments stolen from him and devoured.
But he did not falter. If he could forge them into weapons, he would wield something that no Archive, no Spiral, no human rebellion could resist.
Meanwhile, in the collapsing physical world, the survivors clung to scraps of existence. Cities had become mazes of flickering light and decaying matter, where fragments of the Worldstream bled into reality. Entire buildings would glitch—walls turning translucent, streets folding in on themselves, people freezing mid-breath as if caught between realities.
Lira moved through it all like a shadow. Her eyes carried the weight of sleepless nights, but her resolve burned brighter than ever.
Her small band of survivors—the resistance—were ragged, a patchwork of the unmutated and the barely-mutated. They carried scavenged weapons, half-broken tech, and a will that refused to die.
They had one goal: to hold the line against both the Spiral bleed and the loyalists who still worshipped Kael as a messiah.
The physical world was no longer stable ground, but every glitch was also a weapon. Lira had learned to anticipate the distortions, to turn collapsing architecture into traps. When a squad of Stream-loyalists advanced through the ruins of São Paulo's twisted skyline, Lira ordered her people to fall back. The loyalists jeered—until the street itself folded, splitting like a jagged mouth. The entire squad dropped into the screaming static below, erased without a trace.
But for every small victory, there was despair. Resources were dwindling. The glitches were spreading faster than her tactics could contain them. And the whispers from the Stream carried across even into flesh: voices that weren't human, promising release if one simply surrendered to integration.
"Hold the line," Lira whispered to her fighters one night, crouched beneath the shattered spire of what used to be a data tower. "If Kael bends those things—the Forgotten—we're finished. But if we break his grip, maybe… maybe we still have a world to claim."
Inside the Stream, Kael's struggle reached a fever pitch. The Entities twisted under his control, their forms warping into impossible weapons: blades of un-memory, storms of silence, tendrils that erased whatever they touched. His Symbiont frame screamed under the pressure, flickering between solidity and dissolution.
He saw flashes of his old life—the laboratory where his mutation began, the faces of comrades long dead, even Lira herself—each memory devoured as payment for binding the Entities.
Still, he pressed on. He needed this army. He needed to prove that he could not just survive the Stream, but dominate it.
Yet, deep within, another whisper stirred. Not from the Entities. Not from Spiral. Something else, buried in the very code of existence.
"Weaponize us, and you become us. Forget enough of yourself, and there will be nothing left of Kael to wield."
The warning rattled him. For the first time since his ascension, fear coiled through him.
Lira felt it too. In the collapsing physical world, her skin prickled, her bones humming with a frequency not her own. She didn't know why, but she felt Kael's battle bleeding through dimensions, his grip on the Entities straining.
She turned to her second-in-command, Rafiq, who was watching the horizon where skyscrapers flickered in and out like dying stars.
"Something's happening," Lira said, her voice sharp. "Kael's… doing something. And if he succeeds, these glitches won't be glitches anymore. They'll be weapons."
Rafiq nodded grimly. "Then we hit him first. Before he finishes whatever he's building."
But Lira's eyes narrowed. She wasn't sure if Kael was still fully Kael. She remembered the man—brilliant, broken, dangerous, but human. The thing she sensed now felt less like Kael and more like… an echo of the Forgotten Entities themselves.
If he lost himself completely, would killing him even matter?
The chapter closed with two mirrored images:
Kael, standing at the heart of the Stream, a lattice of Forgotten Entities coiling around him like black suns, his body flickering with erasure, his voice torn between command and collapse.
Lira, rallying her survivors in the ruins of the flesh world, knowing the only path forward was war—even as reality itself unraveled under her feet.
Two fronts, one battle. A world on the edge of silence.
🔥 Chapter 63 ends here.