The house was still.
Morning hadn't fully arrived — not in color, just shape. Gray light from the window leaked across the floor like fog in slices. Quiet, too. The kind of quiet Kael used to cherish.
Now, it only made his skin tighten.
The sound of crayon on paper broke the silence.
Faint, back-and-forth scratches. Not rushed. Not messy.
Methodical.
Kael stepped around the corner from the hallway, still in his undershirt, and saw her:
Senna, sitting at the table with her legs swinging off the chair, face half-lit by the windowlight, and a dozen crayon pieces scattered like broken spell components.
She didn't notice him at first.
He watched her hand — small, quick, firm. She was filling in a shape in deep blue, almost black.
"Up already?" he asked gently.
She turned, bright-eyed.
"I didn't sleep. I had to finish this."
She held up the drawing.
Kael smiled, because she was smiling. That reflex was still real. He stepped closer.
Then he stopped.
It was a child's drawing — lines wobbly and wrong, proportions ridiculous.
Stick figure. Big head. Two dots for eyes. A jagged shape behind it. That's what it looked like, at first.
But the shape wasn't random.
Not to Kael.
Not to someone who'd hardcoded patches into raid instances for seven years.
The lines weren't just lines.
They were half of a glyph.
"What's this?" he asked softly, kneeling beside her.
She pointed at the jagged mark. "That's the part I saw last. It was floating behind him."
"Behind who?"
She blinked. Then leaned closer, as if to whisper something important.
"The mirror man."
Kael didn't speak.
Didn't breathe.
His heart thudded once.
Senna glanced around the kitchen, then back at the paper. She tapped the figure's head.
"He wasn't scary. But he didn't blink."
Kael swallowed.
"Where did you see him?"
"My room window. But not in the window. In the mirror. He smiled when I looked."
"And what did he do?"
Senna tilted her head. "He said your name. But backwards."
Kael froze.
"Backwards?"
She nodded. "Leak."
Kael's hands stayed steady, but only because he'd learned how to fake calm the same way he faked cooldown timers: manually.
"And what else did he say?" he asked softly.
Senna frowned like she was trying to remember something hard.
"Mmm... nothing words. They were broken. But they felt like your spells. I knew what they meant even if I didn't hear them right."
"What did they feel like?"
"Hot."
Kael's breath hitched — just once — and he forced it still.
Rollback sigils burn during patch rejection.
Only failed echoes produce heat signatures.
Only corrupted code pulses in dreams.
And now it was whispering to a six-year-old.
"Did you tell Mama?" Kael asked.
Senna shook her head quickly.
"No. She doesn't like when I talk about the mirror."
"Why not?"
"Because last time I told her, she got sad. And she threw the drawing away."
Kael blinked. "What drawing?"
"The red one. From two nights ago. It made her cry."
He kept his voice flat.
"Do you still remember what was in it?"
Senna tilted her head again. "It was just a door."
"A door?"
"Yeah. But it was sideways. And it had eyes."
That was when Liora walked in.
Barefoot. Tired. Holding a mug of half-steeped tea. Her eyes lingered on Kael too long before she smiled.
"Everything okay?"
Kael stood up fast.
"Yeah. Just early drawing lessons."
"That what that is?" she asked, nodding at the picture.
Kael turned the page over before she could look too close.
"Just glyphy nonsense," he muttered with a forced grin.
Liora narrowed her eyes for a second. But she didn't push.
"Right. Glyphy nonsense," she echoed.
Then she walked off toward the bedroom, and Kael heard her close the door a little too gently.
He turned back to Senna.
"Can I keep this one?"
"You like it?"
"Yeah," Kael lied.
She beamed. "Then I'll make another one tonight."
Kael tucked the paper into his coat. Carefully. Like evidence.
Because that's what it was now.
Not art.
Not a drawing.
A leak.
The sync tool booted with a flicker.
Outdated software. Legacy interface. No cloud connection.
Kael had kept it offline for a reason.
There were things the system shouldn't trace.
And glyphs were one of them.
He laid the crayon sketch gently on the scan pad. The scanner hummed once. Slowly — like it was struggling to parse a child's scrawl into something machine-readable.
He watched the progress bar crawl forward.
33%
51%
70%...
The screen blinked.
And then displayed something he didn't expect:
[GLYPH PATTERN: RECOGNIZED]
[ID: S-DELTA-194 // PATCH_FRAGMENT // RECONSTRUCTED FROM ERROR CACHE]
Kael sat back.
That was impossible.
That glyph wasn't public.
It wasn't archived.
It was a live-field hotfix fragment, patched during the Ashhelm gate collapse — a botched raid that had never made it to council review.
He had created it on the fly, manually. At the time, it had barely held the party together.
But here it was.
Drawn with a blue crayon.
By a six-year-old.
The tool continued parsing.
[ERROR: INVALID STROKE CURVATURE]
[INCOMPLETE SIGIL SEQUENCE – DATA CORRUPTED]
Kael leaned forward.
There. Right there. A curve in the central line — off by five degrees.
Not much. But enough to destabilize the whole glyph.
It wasn't just a copy.
It was a failed imitation.
Something had watched him patch that fragment.
Had remembered it.
Had shown it to Senna.
And had gotten it wrong.
Kael's stomach turned cold.
It's learning. But it doesn't understand yet.
It knows the shape, not the syntax.
Like a virus writing code by watching fingers move.
Not understanding what the fingers mean.
He closed the tool. Disconnected it.
Wiped the scan buffer three times.
Then folded the drawing and burned it in the sink.
He didn't speak when Liora stirred in the bedroom.
Didn't move when Senna rolled over in her sleep and whispered "Leak" again.
Kael just stared at the burner coil until it cooled to black.
The message arrived at 5:37 AM.
Kael hadn't slept.
He was still sitting at the edge of the couch, shoulders hunched, watching shadows stretch across the floor like thin black glyphs trying to form a sentence.
The ping was quiet.
But sharp.
[USER ALERT — STRYX-K]
[INSTANCE ID: 0024-VERDANT.FLATS]
[RAID SPIKE: UNSTABLE WINDOW DETECTED]
[DURATION: 00:00:14]
[REPEAT COUNT: 2x IN 6 HRS]
There was no audio. No visuals.
Just one attached note:
FROM: ARIA
"This one's supposed to be stable. Something's wrong. Minor party got bounced. Just outside protocol range. No formal request."
"Officially? It doesn't exist yet."
"Unofficially? Bring your gear. And a reason."
Kael stared at the words.
"Bring your gear" wasn't the issue.
It was the second part.
"Bring a reason."
He didn't need to ask what she meant.
Because if the Council reviewed the sync logs later…
If instance footage somehow survived a rollback spike…
If Kael pulled one wrong glyph — one not in the books — one that worked…
Then he would need a reason.
To be there.
To act like he did.
To explain how he survived what others couldn't.
Kael rose without a sound.
The city outside hadn't woken yet. But his body had.
The cracks in his forearm pulsed once. Then again. Slow, like a heartbeat syncing with something distant.
A new line appeared in his HUD overlay as he stepped toward the gear case:
[LIMITER OVERRIDE: LEVEL PENDING — TRIGGER LOCKED]
[INSTABILITY NEAR — PATCH INTEGRITY AT RISK]
Kael's breath came slow and sharp.
This wasn't just an echo.
It was the first test.
The gear chamber sealed behind him with a pneumatic hiss.
Cold metal. Warped light.
Kael stood alone in the vault — same as always. Same lockpad. Same grid floor. Same three loadouts.
But it felt wrong this time.
Not dangerous.
Not glitched.
Just… aware.
His breath fogged faintly as the diagnostic rune activated above the prep terminal.
[AWAKENER ID: KAEL STRYX]
[CLASS: MID-TIER | RANK: B-]
[GEAR: LOADED]
[LIMITER: ENGAGED]
[GLYPH MODIFIER: STABLE]
The last line stuttered.
Kael blinked.
The word "STABLE" glitched — flickered between that and something else:
[GLYPH MODIFIER: ———]
[GLYPH MODIFIER: UNLOCK PENDING]
[GLYPH MODIFIER: STABLE]
Then back again.
"No," Kael muttered, stepping closer. "You're not supposed to shift yet."
He opened the limiter manually, running a local patch. No surge. No crack.
Just heat.
A warmth across his arm — one he hadn't felt since before the rollback.
This is what it felt like…
When I still believed I could climb tiers.
But this wasn't belief.
This was response.
The glyph along his forearm glowed — not red, not cracked — gold.
One clean ring.
Then a second.
It wasn't fracture.
It was friction.
Like two layers of code trying to sync — and failing.
Or not failing.
Choosing.
He reached toward the control panel, ready to cancel the engagement.
His HUD blinked a new message:
[SYNC PULSE: GATE SIGNATURE MATCHED — USER IDENTIFIED]
[LIMITER OVERRIDE: AWAITING FIELD STIMULUS]
[CONDITION: SURVIVE COMBAT SEQUENCE — UNLOCK POTENTIAL]
Kael froze.
Not because of what it said.
Because he knew what it meant.
This wasn't just a raid.
The system was testing him.
And if he passed…
He wouldn't just survive.
He'd break through.
For the first time in this new timeline, the rollback wasn't just rewinding.
It was updating.
He strapped on his coat.
The glyph pulsed once more — not like before. Not a warning.
A beat.
A signal.
Like something in the system was rooting for him.
Or watching very, very closely.