The first thing Amon noticed was the silence.
Not the quiet of an empty room, or the hush of a forest at dawn this was the silence of a broken system. The kind of silence that pressed against his ears like a held breath, thick with the hum of something missing. It wrapped around him like a suffocating blanket, making every heartbeat sound impossibly loud.
He was lying on his back. Above him, the sky was a swirling mess of pixelated clouds, patches of blue and gray flickering in and out like a dying monitor. He blinked, and the motion felt heavy, as if someone had slowed down the frame rate of his existence. His vision stuttered a nauseating sensation, like watching the world through a faulty camera.
For a second, the world skipped, and he was staring up at a ceiling of black panels and neon lights. The air smelled of ozone and burnt plastic. A window flickered in his peripheral vision, lines of code cascading down transparent screens. Then it all snapped back to the forest, the transition so seamless it might have been a dream.
Where the hell am I?
Amon sat up, and the movement was wrong. His body moved in jerky increments, like a puppet on cut strings. One moment his hands were on the damp earth, the next they were suddenly in his lap, as if frames of his motion had been deleted. The sensation made his skin crawl. He flexed his fingers experimentally. They rippled, distorting for a split second into blocks of cyan static before solidifying again.
His breath came shallow. Think. Think. There had to be an explanation. Maybe he'd hit his head. Maybe this was a concussion, some kind of vivid hallucination. But the cold earth beneath him felt real enough. The moss pressing against his jeans was real. So was the strange, electric taste in his mouth.
Okay. Okay. This isn't right.
He tried to stand. His legs glitched, phasing halfway through the ground before snapping back with a sensation like being violently yanked. Pain shot up his spine. He stumbled, catching himself on a tree trunk only for his palm to sink into the bark as if it were liquid. The sensation was sickening, like plunging his hand into warm tar.
The tree screamed.
Not in pain, but in binary a high-pitched squeal of ones and zeros that made his teeth ache and his vision swim with numbers. The sound was alien and wrong, like hearing a color or seeing a smell. Amon yanked his hand back, gasping. The bark reformed seamlessly, as if he'd never touched it at all. Not even a mark. Not even a memory of his touch.
What the hell is happening?
His heart hammered in his chest. The panic was starting to set in, that creeping dread that came when reality began to unravel. He looked down at his hands. They looked normal enough skin, fingernails, the small scar on his knuckles from something he couldn't quite remember. But when he moved them, there was a half-second delay, as if his brain and body were running on different processors.
A sound cut through the static and the ambient hum that seemed to pulse through the world itself. Footsteps. Crunching leaves, then the squelch of boots in mud. Real boots. Deliberate footsteps.
Amon turned.
A figure emerged from the mist, like something stepping out of a half-rendered dream. They were tall, impossibly so, cloaked in a patchwork leather coat that seemed to shift between textures smooth one moment, scaled the next. Beneath the coat, glimpses of metal armor caught the sickly light. Their face was obscured by a steel half-mask etched with glowing runes symbols that burned a faint purple, pulsing like a heartbeat.
They moved with purpose, with predatory grace. A satchel hung across their chest, covered in tools and strange devices whose function Amon couldn't even guess at. Their other hand rested on the hilt of a jagged, serrated dagger that looked like it had been forged from a broken circuit board. The weapon hummed faintly, like a computer fan struggling to cool an overheating processor.
The stranger stopped, their body going rigid. Tilting their head, they studied Amon with an intensity that made his skin crawl. Even through the mask, he could feel the weight of their gaze.
"You're not from here," the stranger said. Their voice was modulated, layered with a faint electronic distortion, as if speaking through a broken speaker. "And you certainly weren't here a moment ago."
Amon opened his mouth to reply. What came out wasn't words.
It was a burst of static, a string of garbled binary that crackled in the air like a radio tuning between stations 101101101, then backwards: 1011000. The sound scraped against his throat like broken glass. His throat burned. He clapped a hand over his mouth, eyes widening as the stranger's dagger twitched, the runes flaring bright blue in response to whatever had just come out of him.
The stranger took a deliberate step back, their body language shifting from curiosity to something more cautious. "A Glitchling," they breathed, the words coming out like a curse. "Here? Now? During the Recall?"
Amon's vision flickered again, a sensation he was beginning to despise. For a heartbeat literally just one he saw something different. The stranger's mask was gone, replaced by a young woman's face. She looked terrified, pale, her eyes reflecting the eerie glow of a computer screen. Her mouth was open as if to speak, or scream. Then it was back to the mask, back to the electrified runes and the faceless stranger.
Had he imagined it?
The stranger lunged.
Amon reacted without thinking. His body moved on pure instinct, drawing from survival instincts he didn't know he possessed. The world stuttered. His consciousness fractured. One second he was standing there, exposed and vulnerable; the next, he was five meters to the left, his body phasing through a bush before solidifying again with a sickening lurch. His stomach rolled. The forest spun around him, the trees becoming smears of green and brown.
What did I just—
The stranger's dagger slammed into the spot where Amon had been standing. The blade struck earth with an impact that should have been muted but instead released a pulse of energy. The ground around it pixelated instantly, dissolving into a checkerboard of black and magenta pixels before snapping violently back to normal grass and soil.
The stranger yanked the dagger free, shaking off the lingering pixel-dust. "You're coming with me," they said, their voice tight with controlled tension. "The Guild will want to see this. A Glitchling with conscious control? That's... unexpected."
Amon's hands clenched into fists. His fingers glitched, dissolving into streaks of cyan code before reforming. He didn't know what a "Guild" was. He didn't know what a "Glitchling" was, or why his voice sounded like a corrupted audio file. He didn't know anything except that he was terrified and in pain. But he knew one thing with absolute certainty:
He wasn't going anywhere with that stranger.
He took a step back. The world lagged, moving one beat slower than it should. The trees seemed to stutter. The stranger's eyes narrowed behind the mask—
—and then Amon was gone.
Not running. Not hiding.
Deleted.
For a single, impossible second, he didn't exist. No body, no presence, no consciousness just a gap in reality where a person should have been. Existence paused. Then, with a sensation like an elastic cord snapping, he reappeared twenty meters away, gasping. His knees hit the dirt hard, sending pain shooting through his legs. His head pounded with the force of a thousand hammers. His vision swam with error messages displayed in glowing red letters:
WARNING: MEMORY_LEAK_DETECTED
WARNING: PHYSICS_ENGINE_UNSTABLE
ERROR: FORCED_TELEPORTATION_ATTEMPTED
Each message sent a spike of pain through his skull.
The stranger was already moving toward him, faster this time. Determined. The purple runes on their mask flared brighter. "You're new to this, aren't you?" they called, their modulated voice carrying an almost pitying tone. "You'll kill yourself if you keep doing that."
Amon pushed himself up, his muscles screaming in protest. His breath came in ragged bursts. The forest flickered again this time, the trees inverted, their leaves turning inside out before snapping back with a sound like reality clearing its throat. The wrongness of it all threatened to shatter what remained of his sanity.
What is this place? What am I?
The stranger raised their dagger. Light gathered along the blade like water pooling, runes burning white-hot. The air around the weapon began to distort, pixels gathering and coalescing into something that looked almost solid. Dangerous. "Last chance," they hissed. "Come quietly, or I purge you. Your choice."
Amon bared his teeth. His eyes burned with tears of frustration and fear. And then, without consciously deciding to do it, he felt something shift inside him. Something awakening.
And then he spoke.
Not in words.
In code.
A wave of static erupted from his mouth, a cacophony of screeching symbols that made the air itself vibrate. Mathematical equations, binary strings, garbled voices all mixed together into a wall of sensory assault. The sound was deafening, physical, like a blast of arctic wind. The stranger staggered, dropping to one knee, clutching their head with both hands. The dagger fell from their grip, clattering against stone. Its runes flickered and died, and the weapon short-circuited with a sound like ice cracking.
The stranger gasped for breath, clearly fighting to process what had just happened to them.
Amon didn't wait. He turned and ran, his feet pounding against the forest floor. Or tried to. His body glitched again, this time teleporting him in the wrong direction. He phased forward and up simultaneously, his trajectory carrying him directly into a tree trunk. The impact was catastrophic. Pain exploded across his shoulder like a supernova. He rebounded, collapsing to the ground, his vision swimming with black spots and error messages.
The world stuttered. His sense of direction inverted. When it stabilized, the stranger was suddenly right in front of him. Where had they come from? How had they crossed that distance so quickly?
The dagger was pressed to his throat, its jagged edge drawing a thin line of blood. Amon could feel the weapon humming against his skin, could feel it trying to tear into him like it was made of something between solid and liquid.
"You're dangerous," the stranger hissed, their breath hot against Amon's face. "More dangerous than any Glitchling has a right to be. And you're mine now. The Guild will study you. They'll take you apart and understand what you are."
Amon's right eye burned a sharp, searing pain that radiated from somewhere deep behind his eyeball. He clenched it shut, but not before he saw something in the darkness:
A crimson "X", floating in the void behind his eyelid. It was the only clear thing in an ocean of chaos and confusion, the only thing that felt real. It pulsed once, twice, and Amon understood, on some primal level, that it meant something important. That it was important.
Then the world went white. Pure, blinding white that consumed everything sound, sight, thought, fear, identity.
And Amon fell into nothing.