"You ever feel like someone else is watching from behind your eyes?"
Lira asked the question too casually for how late it was.
They were holed up in the Tier 0 archive chamber, surrounded by breathing walls of lore and obsolete god-thoughts, trying to plot a route to the Tier 3 Transversal Gate.
But Aren wasn't listening. Not really.
Because something had been off since the mirror.
He was starting to notice… glitches.
The glyphs that once hovered patiently in the air now shifted too fast for his eyes to follow.His status box — the one etched into the margins of his reality — now flickered in and out like it was buffering.
And his name—
It kept changing when he wasn't looking.
One moment it was Aren Veil.Then Aren V.Then just [User#A013].
At first, he assumed it was system interference.But sometimes…He saw something else instead:
AREN.ERA.IV — INHERITOR DUMMY INSTANCE. INTEGRITY: [0.43]. IDENTITY: DEGRADING.
He hadn't told Lira.
Not because he didn't trust her.
But because… he didn't know if she was seeing the same world anymore.
They walked in silence, deeper into the unreconciled pages of the Archive — a place the system referred to as the "Undeclared Narrative Wastes."
Unwritten, but not blank.Erased, but not empty.
Sometimes Aren caught glimpses of things trying to rewrite themselves.
A child's drawing turning into a war manifesto.A prayer becoming a threat.A family portrait melting into a sigil for something older than cause and effect.
And through it all…
A whisper.
Not language. Not thought. Just…
Recognition.Like something was trying to remember him before he remembered it.
They reached a door.
Aren didn't remember walking here.
Lira was gone. No goodbye. No footstep echo.
Just the door.
It didn't lead to another archive, or a stairwell, or a battle tier.
It led to something without metadata.
He checked the system prompt hovering beside it.
It simply read:
[Enter Instance: THE ECHOING SELF]You will not be allowed to bring your own time.
His hand moved before he could stop it.
The room was dark.
And not lack-of-light dark — more like light was being devoured before it could be born.
Except for one thing.
A chair.
And in that chair, slouched like time had tried to collapse him into itself, was—
Himself.
Not a mirror.Not a reflection.Aren Veil.
Version 6? 9? Maybe one that never even finished loading.This one looked like he hadn't slept in centuries.Skin pale. Eyes glossed with static. Fingernails stained with red thread.
He was breathing.
Barely.
And he was staring at him.
"You came out wrong," the other Aren said.
His voice was like crushed parchment and static.
Aren tried to speak.Nothing came out.
The other version tilted his head.
Then said it.
"But who are you supposed to be?"
Aren stumbled backward.There wasn't supposed to be an echo.But now there were hundreds.
All whispering that same line in delayed loops, like broken audio feeds.
But who are you——who are you——supposed to——supposed to be——be—
He clutched his head.His name flickered again.
[CONFLICT DETECTED]Identity loop acknowledged.Primary instance unstable.
The other Aren stood up slowly, like he'd forgotten how gravity worked.
His fingers were unraveling — literal thread, unwinding into the floor.
"You think you're the original?"He took a step forward."You think you're the reader?"
Aren backed up. "What—what is this—"
"You're not the Reader.""You're the Rewrite.""And you're already late."
The moment shattered like it had never happened.
Aren gasped, back in the Archive hall. Lira was leaning over him, wide-eyed.
"You dropped for a second again. Ten seconds this time. What's happening to you?"
He looked down at his hands.
Still whole. Still his.
But something inside him had been signed over.
Behind them, deep in the book spine code of the Archive, a new phrase emerged on a terminal no one should have access to:
INTEGRITY THRESHOLD: [0.38]INSTANCES COLLIDING.READER DETECTED IN MULTIPLE STREAMS."Fix the version before the version fixes you."