The icon was still there when I logged out.
Still pulsing faintly.
Still shaped like the Lexicon.
I didn't click it.
Not yet.
But I stared at it for a long time before putting the headset back on.
The dive command blinked, slower than usual—like it was waiting. The pod lights dimmed as I sank back into Ascension. For a moment, I wasn't sure I'd logged into the game at all.
Then the cold hit.
Not environmental—not a frost debuff or ice region effect.
Just cold.
Empty.
We met just outside Elderfall's perimeter wall. Lyra didn't ask about the real world. Didn't ask about the icon. She just looked at me, eyes sharp but tired.
"You saw something," she said.
"Yeah."
She exhaled slowly. "I did too."
Her aura shimmered faintly when she spoke—spell residue. Echo bleeding. Her casting thread was still unstable.
But I didn't say it out loud.
Instead, I opened the Lexicon.
It pulsed once and turned to a page that hadn't been there before.
A crude map. Unlabeled. Fragmented. One part flickered in and out of resolution—a ravine etched between jagged ridgelines. A note scrawled over the top in faint, unstyled SYSTEM text:
[ARCHIVE LOCKED ZONE: DEPRECATED BRANCH ACCESS – LISTENER OVERRIDE PERMITTED]
I didn't ask if she was coming.
I just walked.
And she followed.
The zone didn't exist on the minimap.
Didn't load on approach.
The terrain just… folded open—the ground tilting slightly, shadows flickering as if undecided which direction to fall. A boundary shimmered in the air like heat distortion. I stepped through it and felt my breath catch.
Loading lag.
Even in Ascension, where lag was myth and tech was magic—that pause still existed.
Just long enough to feel like falling.
We landed on cracked stone. Not textured—placeholder geometry. The kind I hadn't seen since pre-release dev zones.
No wind.
No skybox.
Just dull ambient gray, pulsing at odd intervals. Every few seconds, a broken sound file played—a wood creak, a footstep, a door hinge—looped out of place.
Lyra hugged her arms. "This is giving me alpha-test flashbacks."
"I never saw this zone before," I said.
She gave me a look. "You say that like you've been through every zone."
I hesitated.
"I've… seen more of the game than most. Let's leave it at that."
"That supposed to be comforting?" she asked, arching a brow.
"Only if you're the trusting type."
She smirked, but it didn't reach her eyes. "You're lucky I am."
We moved forward.
The ground didn't respond to our steps. No sound. No weight. Like we weren't really here.
Then came the enemies—or what was left of them.
Half-spawned constructs. Golems made of code placeholders and null references. One turned its head too far and snapped into a reset pose. Another floated slightly above the ground like its navmesh had failed.
None of them attacked.
Not even when we walked straight past them.
The Lexicon hummed louder.
We reached a ridge and looked down into the crater below.
A structure stood at its center.
It shouldn't have.
It was a developer safezone—clearly marked. A white cube with beveled edges, untextured and unmarred, surrounded by corrupted terrain that hadn't fully loaded.
But it was anchored. Real. It pulsed with SYSTEM energy, tagged with an old identifier I didn't recognize.
I stepped forward.
A SYSTEM prompt tried to load:
[ACCESS VIOLATION – USER NOT AUTHORIZED]
The Lexicon flipped a page.
A symbol appeared across the interface:[Override: Listener.017 – Fragment Origin Key Matched]
The prompt vanished.
We entered the cube.
Inside, it wasn't blank.
It was buried.
Lines of corrupted dev tools were projected across every wall—toolbars, consoles, old version notes, bug reports looping endlessly. The air shimmered with half-formed UI elements and half-failed rollbacks.
Lyra reached toward a line of code that floated like a glyph. It disintegrated when she touched it.
"This isn't a dungeon," she whispered. "It's… a rollback cache."
I nodded slowly. "It's where they stored broken updates."
"Why would the SYSTEM give us access?"
"It didn't."
I pointed to the Lexicon, which was now hovering above the central console—no longer flipping pages, but writing them.
One line at a time.
A glyph was forming across both pages.
Not static. Not predefined.
It was reacting.
To us. To the zone. To me.
"Does it want you to cast it?" Lyra asked.
"No," I said.
Because I could feel it.
This glyph wasn't meant to be cast.
It was meant to be written.
A prompt formed mid-air, barely readable:
[GLYPH PATTERN INCOMPLETE – WAITING FOR THREAD INPUT]Target: User.017Thread Integrity: 73.0%Heirloom Insertion: Pending
I stepped back.
The Lexicon snapped shut.
The console beneath it flickered—once, then went dark.
For a second, everything stopped.
Even the ambient noise loop.
Then:
[NEW SYSTEM ALERT – THREAD.BRANCH.017 – RECURSION EVENT DETECTED]
I grabbed Lyra's arm. "We need to go."
"Now?"
"Now."
We bolted from the safezone. The corrupted terrain began collapsing—literally unrendering behind us. Trees turned to placeholder cones. Textures peeled off like paper.
As we reached the boundary line, I heard it.
Not a voice.
Not quite.
But something inside the Lexicon said, not aloud:
"You are not remembering. You are being remembered."
We passed through the boundary line and fell to our knees in a loading fog that felt far too heavy.
The zone behind us vanished. Gone.
No quest log. No experience gain.
Just a blank notification:
[THREAD.PATH.017 – Unstable Glyph Discovered – Echo Containment Pending]
The Lexicon was open again.
But the next page wasn't writing itself.
It was blank.
Waiting.