The sky overhead wasn't sky any longer.
It was an open wound.
A ragged, long tear in the heavens, where light poured sideways and time bled backward. Ribbons of yellow light twisted like shredded nerves, descending toward the earth, their frayed edges burning with lost moments. And from the ribbons, memories dropped.
Not rain.
Memories.
Each one landed like dust. I could feel them brushing my skin...too soft to notice, too loud to ignore.
A mother sobbing over a child she never had.
A brother watching another version of himself die.
A king standing on a burning tower, laughing as the crown melted in his hands.
None of them were mine.
But they wanted to be.
---
I lurched ahead, my boots crunching over a land that couldn't make up its mind.
The ground under my feet buckled with each step...glass, then dirt, then rust. Mountains far away curled into and out of existence. One moment, they were rocky spires etched with crumbling runes. The next, they fell into flat desert dunes composed of ash and bone.
"This place isn't real," I grumbled.
"It's remembering itself wrong.
The shard within my hand throbbed weakly.
"You are within the Echofold," it stated, voice softer now, as if it was afraid of the space we found ourselves in.
"A place created when too many Loops collapse in one location. Reality within it has no anchor."
It wasn't merely forgetting.
It was bleeding.
All of this had at one point belonged to someone—a thing, a city, an existence. But now, memory-deprived, they all drifted in a world without ownership of identity. A country severed from itself.
---
I walked. Hours passed. Maybe days. Time felt warped here—stretching, folding in on itself. I watched the sun rise sideways once, then set into a cliff made of salt. At one point I passed my own footprints… but they were weeks old. I hadn't even been here that long.
That's when I found the first body.
---
The armor was blackened, burned through the chest, but I knew the symbol inscribed in bronze across the helm.
A spiral loop trapped in a triangle of thorns.
They weren't Reminders. They weren't agents. Curators were old—Loop-tenders taught to see, not touch. They only arrived when something profoundly awry was occurring.
They weren't supposed to die.
And if one had?
Then something more than a mere breakdown had started.
I squatted next to him. His Loop-tag still emitted a faint glow.
"Tag still on," I breathed.
"Which means somebody else is still in the Fold."
I was not alone.
---
Hours later, I stumbled upon a ruin that did not shift.
That alone was horrifying.
In this mutable world of fleeting geography, this site remained fixed—intentionally, as if reality was unwilling to wipe it away.
A dome of white stone, veined with shimmering silver thread, hovered over a basin hollowed out of a dead canyon. No doors. No guard. No harm.
And yet it throbbed with presence.
As if something within were watching.
---
I went in without brushing against the walls.
The air within was too quiet. Sound ceased the instant I crossed the doorway.
At the center of the room floated something that took the breath from my lungs.
A heart.
Not flesh. Not stone.
A Coreborn Heart—a crystallized focus of raw Loop-energy, enveloped in suspended filaments. The filaments throbbed with leeching memory, spinning like gravity around a sun that was dying.
And close by, sitting in the darkness—
sat man.
---
He resembled death given attitude.
Wrapped in graying robes, skin crinkled like dry leaves. Eyes lusterless. But they fixed on me with something keener than suspicion.
Recognition.
"You're behind schedule," he said.
"That indicates you met him. The First."
I stopped in my tracks.
He knew.
"The one who brought the first breach. The one who rent the Thread to begin all this."
He smiled, faintly.
"You met yourself, didn't you?"
I said nothing.
Because I didn't know what to say.
---
The old Curator arose. Creakily. Bones breaking.
He nodded toward the suspended Coreborn Heart.
"This is what's left of the world's last sealed memory. The one memory that even the Loops couldn't copy. Buried underneath each cycle. Each war. Each iteration of you."
"It is what the First Kevin attempted to destroy."
He spoke to me.
"You think you're here to save the world.
You're not.
You're here because you already did fail."
"And the world is trying to recall why."
---
My chest was constricted.
The shard was throbbing with an almost electrical pressure. Something in this place...it was harmonizing with it. Pulling out pieces of me that were silent until now.
I moved towards the Heart.
It thrummed with more than power.
With emotion.
Not my own.
Guilt.
Not mine.
Grief.
Not mine.
Fear of being remembered.
Not mine.
"If I break it," I whispered, "what happens?"
The Curator didn't respond.
Instead, he spoke:
"Can you carry the truth after the thread breaks?"
He moved back, into darkness.
And was gone.
---
Standing alone now in front of the Coreborn Heart.
Above me, the sky widened. The Break Above was no longer far away—it was starting to howl. I could see things now—distorted shapes attempting to force through.
Not monsters.
Not gods.
Things. Concepts.
Things that should never take shape, given purpose.
And they were pursuing me.
Because I remembered.
Because I lived.
Because I possessed the shard.
---
I lifted my hand.
Threadlight flared from my hand. The shard reacted as if it had been holding out for this moment.
When I reached for the heart, every memory I'd stolen, lost, and forgotten whispered all at once. All those voices—the dead, the broken, the buried...came tumbling to the surface.
"Break it."
"..."
"Or everything ends exactly as it always does."
I touched the heart.
It broke like glass.
---