It began with a whisper in the Pillar feed.
Aryan Sharma had been cross-checking the stability rates after the relay infiltration when it threaded through—a thin, unequal pulse deep under the usual broadcast hum. It wasn't a Warden injection. It wasn't from any Anchor city. It was something else, quieter than static but sharper than glass.
He froze, eyes locked on the stream. The Shard Within immediately flared against it, not in hostility, but recognition.
A.I.D.A.'s voice came in low.
"That… is not part of the lattice."
"Then what is it?" Aryan asked.
"Something buried. Something the Wardens didn't build. And it's moving."
The pulse repeated, slightly stronger—a three-beat pattern, like a coded heartbeat. Aryan pulled it into isolated thread-view and saw it for what it was: not one signal, but hundreds, braided together so tightly they passed as noise until now.
"They're coordinates," he said slowly. "But to where—"
A.I.D.A. interrupted. "Not where. When."
By dusk, Aryan had confirmed it—these weren't spatial markers inside the loop but temporal ones, pointing toward an archived cycle long before his birth. The Wardens would never allow this kind of data near a live mesh. If it was bleeding through, something had changed at the root.
The Anchors were still busy sealing seep anomalies in the cities. He couldn't drag them into this—not yet. If the signal was from another cycle entirely, there was no guarantee anyone anchored in the current loop could even follow.
But the Shard pulsed differently to this call. It knew the route.
He initiated the jump.
The transition was violent.
Not a drift through layered points, not the fluid slide of a Node crossing. This was a ripping sensation, as though he had been printed on paper and someone had just torn him free from the page. When the pressure eased, he was standing on a shoreline of black sand. Above him, no sky—only a dome of fractured light, each shard showing a different world mid-moment, all out of sync.
And in the distance... a tower.
No lattice, no mesh. Just jagged stone and iron beams, like a lighthouse built by someone who had only read about lighthouses and had never seen the sea.
Inside his mind, the stranger's voice spoke for the first time.
"You're late."
She appeared at the tower gate.
A woman, tall, wrapped in layers of padded cloth stitched with symbols he didn't know. Hair close-cut, eyes the pale grey of a screen faded by too many reboots. She looked him over with practiced caution.
"You're Aryan Sharma," she said, not asking.
"And you are?"
Her mouth twitched. "Someone who remembers before remembering was illegal."
He followed her in.
The tower interior was nothing like its rough exterior. The walls were lined with floating panes of memory—some whole, some cracked, some nothing but silhouettes. Each one pulsed faintly, like breathing photographs.
"This," she said, gesturing, "is what bled through your broadcast war. I've been keeping it… quiet. But the relay breach you pulled in Chapter Twenty-Three shook loose partitions I couldn't hold alone."
Aryan walked slowly along a row of suspended moments: a crowded street lost to a plague no loop history mentioned; a boy making a fire in a forest under a green sun; the same woman he was speaking to, much younger, crying over an empty cradle.
"These aren't just from our loop," he realized. "They're from parallel runs. Abandoned ones."
She nodded. "And the Wardens have been strip-mining them for emotional code. They send the pain back without the truth. It's what fuels their dread pulses."
That made the room feel smaller.
She brought him to the top floor, where a single frame hung in isolation.
It showed a Warden—not blurred, not armored—standing in a hall lined with Anchors. The Warden was… smiling. Not a false, flat curve, but real. In his hands, he held a shard of light Aryan recognized instantly.
The Shard Within thrummed: one of its pieces.
"You want me to take it," Aryan said.
"You need to," she answered. "Without it, you'll never pierce the Origin Layer where the Wardens' charter was first written."
Aryan considered the image. "Where is this moment?"
Her gaze hardened. "In their memory vault. And the second you touch it, the Vault AI will wake."
Aryan exhaled slowly. "So it's bait."
"Yes," she admitted. "But it's also the only way to end the Siege permanently. The Pillar you hold is a tool. That shard is a key."
He knew what A.I.D.A. would say. What common sense would say.
But he also knew the war had shifted. The Wardens were fracturing from inside. Some had seen what he injected into the relay—a truth about their past. If he could get into the Origin Layer, maybe he could change more than just their broadcasts.
Maybe he could change what they believed they were.
Back on the black-sand shore, the woman gave him the full coordinates.
"When you leave," she said, "you'll forget my face until you're in the Vault. That's the only way to keep them from pulling it from you."
Aryan stepped toward the tear the Shard had opened for his return. But before he crossed, he stopped.
"What's your name?"
She gave him a small, tired smile. "In the loops, I've had many. But the one I still keep… is Maera."
And then she was gone.
Aryan landed back in the safehouse with the coordinates burning in his mind, already fading, already locking under some protection Maera had set. Outside, the Siege lattice still glowed against the city's sky, but in his head, something new now glittered: a path into the heart of the Wardens' origin.
When A.I.D.A. asked where he'd been, he told her only:
"To get the next piece."
And for the first time since the war began, the Shard Within pulsed not like a heartbeat…
but like a countdown.