The next morning, Lyris walked slower.
He didn't limp, didn't drag his feet, but something in his posture shifted. A slight tension in his shoulders. A narrowed gaze that scanned rooftops and alley corners like they might move.
They didn't. But he didn't trust stillness anymore.
The village was too quiet. It wasn't the silence of dawn—it was the hush that came after screaming.
He passed old Lerna's bakery. Her shutters were sealed. Flour dust no longer seeped from under the door. No scent of yeast or firewood.
Gone.
Across the square, a child's ragdoll sat in the dirt, one arm missing, soaked from dew or tears.
He didn't pick it up.
[System Prompt: Emotional pattern detected: Dissonance. Suggestion—avoid prolonged exposure to anomaly zones.]
"Give me something useful," he muttered.
[Information limited. Environmental decay inconsistent with known variables.]
He stopped at the edge of the woods, staring into the trees.
The basin still sat somewhere within. It hadn't left his thoughts.
Neither had the journal from the chapel basement. Third Cycle. Rift. Signal.
Who was S. Mallorn?
More importantly… where were the other two basins?
Lyris turned away. Not yet.
He returned home. Tennen was gone—out early, likely helping the neighbor with cattle.
The fireplace was cold. He didn't relight it.
He sat at the table and began writing.
Not a novel. Not yet.
A list.
Discrepancies:
Sky greys out after shard appearance.
Villagers increasingly silent.
Marked tree outside the basin.
Old journal beneath the chapel—implies prior cycles.
The system references anomalies it doesn't fully understand.
[System Notice: Observational behavior aligns with User's prior neural patterns.]
"Good. That means I'm still me."
[Clarification: Identity coherence confirmed. Existential drift minimal.]
Drift.
He didn't like that word. It felt like standing too close to a ledge.
He turned to the window again. Movement.
A figure.
Fast. Limping. Running toward the house.
He stood immediately.
It was Maja—the shepherd's daughter. Clothes torn. Mud streaked across her cheeks. She stumbled through the door before he could open it.
"Don't go into the north woods," she gasped.
He caught her before she collapsed. "What happened?"
"There's... there's something under the lake."
She shivered beneath the wool blanket. Lyris boiled water, added dried herbs. She drank slowly. Didn't speak for minutes.
He waited. Watched the way her fingers wouldn't unclench.
When she finally did speak, her voice was hollow.
"We heard it yesterday," she said. "Me and the twins. We were at the lake. Throwing rocks."
He didn't interrupt.
"A sound came up. Not from the woods. From beneath the water."
He frowned. "What kind of sound?"
She looked at him. Eyes too old for her age.
"Whispers. But not in our heads. In our mouths. Like something was trying to speak through us."
A chill moved across his spine.
[System Alert: Parallel anomaly cluster forming. Cross-reference: Basin location. Northern lake proximity—confirmed. Pattern repeat probability: 68%.]
A second basin. Beneath the lake.
She continued. "We ran. But I tripped. The twins didn't stop."
"You mean they left you?"
She shook her head.
"I mean they... didn't move. They just stood at the edge. Staring. Like they were asleep standing up."
[Vital signs anomaly. Potential mental override or resonance capture.]
Lyris sat down.
Something was waking. Not fast. Not loud. But it was real.
And it was spreading.
He left Maja with his younger brother, told Tennen not to open the door for anyone unless he knocked three times. Then once more. A code. A shield.
He didn't wait for argument.
He headed north.
It wasn't far, the lake. Just past the edge of the shepherd's field. Normally peaceful. A mirror of the sky.
Today, it looked like ink.
Still. Too still.
No wind. No birds. Just water reflecting grey.
And two children standing at the shore.
He approached slowly.
The twins. Eyes wide open. Pupils dilated. Skin pale.
"Milo. Ressa."
They didn't move.
He stepped between them and the water.
"Can you hear me?"
Both nodded. Slowly. Mechanically.
"What's in the lake?"
Their mouths opened in unison.
"It listens."
He stepped back. Heart pounding.
[System Intervention: Risk threshold exceeded. Memory buffer initiated. Neural overload possible.]
"No."
He forced his breathing to slow. Forced control.
"I'm not going to lose myself. Not here. Not now."
The twins blinked. Their posture eased. They collapsed into the grass, breathing shallow but alive.
[System Alert: Influence receded. Subject recovery underway. Causality loop avoided.]
Causality loop?
"Are you saying this already happened?"
[Clarification unavailable. Probable misalignment between time states.]
Another chill.
This world wasn't just unstable.
It was echoing.
Repeating pieces of itself.
Like drafts of a story overwritten too many times.
Lyris carried the twins back himself. He didn't speak. Didn't explain. Their parents took them in without a word.
They knew something was wrong. But fear is a chain.
And villagers had learned to wear chains like clothes.
That night, he marked the northern lake on his notebook.
Two basins confirmed.
The third would not wait long.
And somewhere between the cracks of this world, something ancient was listening.
He closed his eyes only after sunrise.
The system flickered once.
[Query: Do you wish to survive this story, Lyris? Or rewrite it?]
He answered without speaking.
Both.
Lyris dreamt of ink.
Thick, black, unmoving. It didn't drip or bleed. It watched.
When he woke, his breath caught.
The world was still there—but something felt off.
No sound. Not even the birds.
He got up from his straw bed slowly, checked the corners of the room, his brother's breathing, the sealed window.
All untouched.
[System Status: Passive monitoring. No intrusions detected.]
Yet something clung to his thoughts like ash.
A whisper that hadn't come from outside.
It had come from him.
The villagers spoke in hushed tones. They asked nothing about the lake. The twins didn't return to school.
Maja stayed quiet. Her hands trembled too often. Her eyes avoided water.
Lyris didn't press. She had seen too much.
He turned to the system.
"What are we actually fighting?"
[Unknown. Entity does not conform to classification. Origin suspected: Narrative residue.]
"Narrative residue?"
[When stories decay, fragments remain. Some become sentient.]
A pause. The kind that sat too long.
[This world may be built on such fragments.]
He didn't like the word may.
Too fragile. Too uncertain.
But it made sense. This world—it didn't behave like one built cleanly. It felt… rewritten. Stitched together. Too many quiet horrors placed just far enough apart to feel coincidental.
And the shard in the basin hadn't been just an object.
It had been a memory. Or a warning.
Or both.
He opened the journal again—the one from the chapel.
Cycle Three. Drift acceleration confirmed. Anchor points unstable. Containment only possible through story integrity.
He reread it twice.
Then again.
Story integrity.
He wasn't surviving a world. He was surviving a story.
That evening, he walked to the chapel again.
No one stopped him. No one followed.
The door creaked open louder than usual. Dust hung in the air like guilt.
He climbed down to the basement. Held the lantern high.
He wasn't searching for the journal this time.
He was listening.
The silence didn't last.
A soft clicking. Not mechanical. Biological. Like fingers on wet stone.
He turned.
Nothing.
But the cold grew sharper. He gritted his teeth and pressed on.
At the far end of the underground chamber, he found it:
A sealed stone box. Runic symbols carved on every side. Half-erased.
Something pulsed within.
[System Alert: Proximity to an Anchor Point confirmed. Interference threshold rising.]
"Define Anchor Point."
[A fixed event. A truth. If it breaks, reality bends.]
He touched the lid.
Vision shattered.
For less than a breath, he was elsewhere.
A room of thousands of bookshelves—burning. Voices screamed. One echoed louder than the rest:
"Close the draft—before it rewrites you—"
Then silence.
He collapsed. Sweating. Breathing like a hunted man.
The box hadn't opened.
But it had spoken.
Not in words. In impressions.
And one feeling had screamed louder than all others:
This world is unfinished.
That night, Lyris wrote again.
This time, not a list.
A passage:
"If this is a story, and I am its character, then the writer is either asleep, missing, or gone mad. And the ink left behind is trying to remember what it once meant to say."
The system responded for once without prompt:
[That is not entirely incorrect.]
And Lyris, for the first time, did not feel alone.