That night, the memory kept looping in my mind—the boy's face in the void, the cracked glyph terminal, and the way the Lexicon had answered a question I never asked.
Would you like to restore the previous version of yourself?
What did that even mean?
I didn't feel different.
But maybe that was the point.
Morning in-game came with a flicker. I logged in early, before the taverns filled or the market spawned new wares. The chapel was quiet. Nobody visited it anymore. Not after the glyphs. Not after the Tag Logs.
Lyra sat on the stone ledge outside, arms folded, watching the forest fog peel away from the trees. Her hair glimmered faintly in the sunlight—barely a detail, but it helped ground me.
"You look like you didn't log out," she said.
"I did," I said. "Didn't help."
She stood and joined me as I walked. "What's next?"
"I want to know who she was," I said. "The girl from the recording. Listener.003."
"She looked like she broke the rules. Or was the rule, once."
I nodded. "And she failed."
We walked the path out of Duskridge, passing through the edge of the testing fields—abandoned zones marked for internal dev work. Just a wide stretch of flagged terrain and a few broken obelisks.
But I knew what I was looking for.
The monolith stood at the far end, partially buried, jagged with age. No quest markers. No enemy pings. Just a faint pulse of glyphlight that flickered every thirty seconds like a dying star.
I raised the Lexicon.
It didn't wait for permission.
[ENTRY FLAGGED: TAG LOG – NULL.03]Fragment alignment incomplete. Proceeding may risk contamination of current identity thread.Recommend minimum Sync: 75%.Current Sync: 72.4%
"Close," I muttered.
But not close enough.
The monolith responded anyway.
The stone shimmered and pulled back like shifting data, revealing an interior socket carved with deep rune channels.
I saw it before it fully rendered.
The Forgotten Heirloom. The amulet that started it all.
It pulsed in my inventory.
Slot available. Thread receptive.
My hand hovered near the socket—but didn't move.
"Not yet," I whispered.
Because deep down, I already knew what would happen. The heirloom wasn't just a trigger—it was a keystone. A bridge to something I hadn't recovered yet. Not knowledge. Not power.
Memory.
The kind I hadn't earned. The kind that might rewrite everything I'd become.
And I wasn't ready to find out who I was before I had the chance to decide who I wanted to be.
I let my hand fall away.
Lyra was staring at me.
"You keep looking at that thing like it's going to answer a question."
"It already has," I said.
We returned to Elderfall before sundown.
No fanfare. No alerts.
But the Lexicon wouldn't close.
Its pages pulsed with new tension—not just curiosity, but urgency.
And then, for the first time, it asked a question in open script, not hidden UI.
Aiden Chase. What do you remember?
I stared at the text.
Not can you remember. Not do you want to.
What.
The Lexicon was no longer reacting to me.
It was interrogating me.
Lyra looked over. "What does it say now?"
I turned the page.
The story you think you're telling isn't yours. It's an overwritten thread—looped, revised, redacted. Would you like to see the original?
I didn't answer.
But the page turned anyway.
A new phrase formed across the page like it was etched in thought itself:
Let me tell you the version that came first.
In the real world, the moment I logged out, my terminal blinked.
The overdue notice hadn't cleared. My bank account was still frozen. My stomach still ached from whatever passed as powdered broth.
But on my desktop, a new icon had appeared.
One I hadn't installed. One that hadn't been there before.
It was shaped like the Lexicon.
No label. No source.
Just waiting.
I stared at it in silence, then slowly reached for my headset again.
Because I didn't know if I was playing Ascension anymore.