A millennium is a long time for stories. The tale of the Hundredfold Apprentice, once a foundational myth, had itself been fractured, smoothed, and simplified by the relentless river of time. In the gleaming, crystalline city of Aethelburg—built where Veridia's roots had once been—it was a children's fable. A story of a man who could do anything a hundred times better, used to soothe toddlers frustrated with tying their shoes or learning their letters.
Dr. Aris Thorne was a footnote in a historical database, her name familiar only to specialized archivists. The Gloaming was a theoretical concept in physics, a hypothesized "period of dimensional instability" used to explain certain geological and genetic anomalies. The world was a utopia of sustainable energy, post-scarcity economics, and profound peace. The struggles that had forged it were as remote as the struggles of the first amphibians crawling onto land.
On a world now simply called "Terra," in a university dedicated to xenocultural studies, a young xeno-archaeologist named Kael (a name he'd chosen for its sharp, historical sound) was bored. His thesis was on "Pre-Synchronization Apocrypha," and it was going nowhere. The records were too clean, the official histories too neat. He felt, in his bones, that something was missing.
He spent his days in the deep digital archives, past the curated public records, sifting through corrupted data streams and fragmented personal logs from the chaotic era just after the fall. Most of it was useless—grocery lists, fragments of love letters, the detritus of a dead world.
But then he found it. A ghost in the machine. A data packet, shielded and encrypted with a code that shouldn't have existed, tagged with a user ID that made his heart skip a beat: OConnor_L.
With trembling fingers, using decoding algorithms he wasn't strictly authorized to possess, he broke the encryption. It wasn't a log or a manifesto. It was a single, text-based file. A letter. Unsent. Unfinished.
//Log Fragment - Personal - L. O'Connor//
//Date: [Data Corrupted] - Post-Synchronization//
Kaelen thinks I'm at peace. Elara thinks the work is done. Maybe it is. The world is healing. The networks are strong.
But I can still feel it. Not the Gloaming. The other side of the Synchronization. It's… listening. It's learning. It's a student, and we are its textbook.
I showed it our story. Our pain, our joy, our resilience. I thought that was the end. But a student who finishes a textbook doesn't just close it. It goes out into the world to see if the lessons are true.
What happens when it's done reading?
I've been having dreams. Not nightmares. Something else. I see… patterns. In the way the leaves fall. In the migration of birds. In the mathematical constants that underpin reality. They're shifting. Subtly. Evolving. It's not a hostile act. It's an artist, experimenting with a new medium. Our reality is its new medium.
The Hundredfold Application was never about me. It was a key to a door. I thought I was locking it, or maybe building a bridge across it. But I was wrong. I was just the first one to turn the knob and step through.
I am afraid. Not for myself. But for all of us. We are living in a story that is still being written, by an author whose mind we cannot comprehend. Our peace, our utopia… is it our creation, or is it its first draft?
I have to—
The file ended. Corrupted. Or deliberately truncated.
Kael sat back in his chair, the sterile light of the archive suddenly feeling cold and invasive. The cheerful children's fable shattered in his mind, replaced by the terrified, profound uncertainty of the man at the center of it all. The "Great Synchronization" wasn't a happy ending. It was an introduction.
The world wasn't healed. It was being studied. Their perfect, peaceful civilization, a utopia built on the sacrifice of legends, might just be… data. An experiment being run by a consciousness from beyond the veil of reality.
He looked out the window at the impossibly graceful spires of Aethelburg, at the citizens living lives of perfect, curated harmony. Was it their harmony? Or was it a composition being played for a silent, unseen audience?
Leo O'Connor's final fear wasn't that the Gloaming would return. It was that it had never left. It had just changed its methods.
The work was not over. The final chapter of the story was not "and they lived happily ever after." It was an ellipsis. A question mark hanging over all of existence.
Kael minimized the file, his hands shaking. He was no longer a bored academic. He was the sole bearer of a terrifying secret. The foundation of his world was not stone, but sand, and the tide was not coming in.
It was already here, and it was taking notes.