The day after the event in the library was eerily quiet. The skies above Sector-0A7 had turned an unnatural silver-gray. The rain didn't fall—it hovered, suspended like glass beads in slow motion. Aren walked through it, unbothered. Something had shifted. He felt it in the marrow of his bones.
Nara had gone silent again. Her presence in his mind dimmed like a radio signal on the edge of its range. It wasn't gone, but it was...warped.
"There's a resonance decay in the surrounding area," Juno muttered, adjusting the telemetry gauge on her wrist. "Everything's phasing slightly out of sync. Like the world's lagging behind itself."
"What does that even mean?" Aren asked, watching the sky ripple as if it were a reflection on disturbed water.
Juno looked at him, and for a second, something unspoken passed between them—recognition, or maybe shared dread. "It means we're somewhere we're not supposed to be."
The base of the obelisk came into view through the shifting fog. It hadn't been there yesterday. Aren was sure of it.
It was carved from a black stone that shimmered with faint, multicolored veins—like oil on water, but more...alive. The glyphs on its surface rearranged themselves as he stared. Not visually. Conceptually. The meaning changed the longer he tried to grasp it.
"It's not in any known lexicon," Juno said. "But the pattern resembles Class-6 causality anchors. This shouldn't be here unless—"
"—something fractured," Aren finished.
His hands trembled as he approached. He didn't know why. He had touched relics before. He had faced horrors beneath the Fifth Temple. But this felt different.
It felt personal.
He reached out. Not physically—but with the part of himself that had awakened since the Tower Reboot. The whisper in his spine that bent time when he needed to dodge. The part of him that remembered dying.
For a moment, everything stilled.
Then he saw it.
A room with no floor. No ceiling. Just a black void stretched in every direction. A single table. A single figure.
It was him. But older. Not by age—by wear.
The version of him looked up, as if sensing Aren's presence bleeding through from another angle of reality.
The light flickered. Aren's heart pounded as his other self stood slowly.
Then the voice came. Familiar, but hollowed out.
"But who are you supposed to be?"
Aren recoiled. Not from fear. From instinct. That line wasn't meant to be rhetorical. It wasn't curiosity.
It was condemnation.
Before he could respond, the vision collapsed into static—shards of memory that weren't his began scraping at the edge of his mind.
Juno caught him as he fell.
"You saw something, didn't you?" she whispered.
Aren gasped for breath. The world around him flickered for a moment—then reassembled.
"He knew me," he said. "But he didn't."
Juno's eyes narrowed. "Temporal bleed. Reflexive recursion. You weren't just watching a memory. You were watched."
Aren looked up at the obelisk. The glyphs had changed. One of them now looked like a name.
His name.
Elsewhere
In the space between coordinates, where time could not enter without forgetting itself, a ripple passed through.
A hooded figure stepped into the chamber of glass. Behind him, dozens of mirrors shattered into sand as he walked. He touched the air like it was silk.
"The boy has glimpsed the Echo."
A dozen distorted voices replied in unison:
"Then he is no longer just a Witness."
The hooded figure turned toward the largest mirror—its surface now blackened.
"Begin Phase Null."
The ink of reality stirred.