The scream of the Garden did not echo—it reverberated through existence. It peeled back layers of illusion, revealing a deeper substrate beneath the bloodwood and rune-roots: a world suspended between timelines, thoughts, and trauma.
Seraphyne hovered in midair, thorns embedded deep in her chest. But her face was calm. Transcendent. Her aura cracked like glass lit by internal lightning.
"Stop this," Nyx warned. "Whatever you're doing—it's untested code. You're mutating a divine class in real time."
She blinked once, slowly. "Isn't that what you do, Architect?"
ALERT: Entity Seraphyne entering hybrid state…
CLASS FUSION IN PROGRESS: [Red Queen + Emotion Kernel + Recursive Mutation Thread]
RESULT: UNKNOWN
The Bloodgarden twisted violently. Trees inverted. The sky glitched. Gravity folded in on itself like a poorly written loop.
Nyx activated his stabilizers.
Deploying Countercode Field: Reality Lockdown [Zone: 40 meters]
Synchronizing Internal Clock to Root Thread
The world stopped shaking—barely.
Seraphyne landed, breathing heavily. Her appearance had changed: her eyes were now endless recursive spirals, her hair bleeding symbols instead of strands, her body outlined by a second skin made of forgotten memories.
"You don't understand," she said. "You think I'm the virus. But I'm the update."
Nyx stepped forward, cautiously. "Then explain it. What is the Bloodgarden, really?"
She raised her hand. A seed of white fire bloomed in her palm.
"This place isn't a dungeon. It's a core file of Arkanis. A testbed. The gods seeded it here eons ago to simulate emotional entropy. To see if mortals could survive their own histories."
He frowned. "You're saying it's... a sandbox?"
She nodded. "And I was born from its failure. A security patch gone sentient."
Nyx's mind raced.
"So why summon me?"
"Because you're a rewrite. A deviation. If we clash... and I survive... maybe the system stabilizes. Maybe Arkanis stops collapsing."
Nyx looked around. The Garden was no longer hostile. It waited, pulsing like a heartbeat inside a motherboard.
He turned back to her. "You don't want to win. You want to fork the code."
"Yes," Seraphyne said. "And I need your signature to do it."
Incoming Request: CODE MERGE PROTOCOL [Y/N]
Risk: Total system desync / Reality fracture / Potential godhood
Nyx hesitated.
"I'm not here to become a god," he said.
Seraphyne smiled gently. "You already are. You just haven't compiled yet."
He looked down at the merge prompt.
Then tapped: Y.
The Garden convulsed.
Code bled from every leaf, thorn, and echo. Their threads braided together, forming a new entity not seen since the first root system.
Two beings—one born of logic, one of memory—intertwined in code.
The Bloodgarden burned away.
And the world shifted.