The city breathed in the wrong rhythm.
Neovalis had always been a symphony of predictable chaos—the drone of traffic, the pulse of neon, the murmur of millions of lives following their scripted paths. Now, the symphony had a stutter.
I saw it from the crumbling rooftop where the Circuit had spat us out. A flicker in the skyline. The Aurora Tower was still gone, a clean, vertigo-inducing absence in the city's teeth. But around the edges of that nothing, reality was… itching.
A billboard for Nexus-Cola glitched, the smiling model's face pixelating into a scream for three seconds before resetting. A flock of messenger drones overhead suddenly flew in a perfect, impossible square pattern before colliding with a shower of sparks. On the street below, a man walked through a lamppost. He didn't phase. The lamppost accommodated him, bending around his body like soft clay before snapping back, both man and post seemingly unaware.
The glitch-plague wasn't just spreading. It was evolving. Becoming ambient.
"The System's immune response is failing," Silas murmured, his book-pages rustling in the chemically-tinged breeze. "The Purifiers are scattered and leaderless. The integrity barriers are porous. The dreams of the world are leaking into its waking hours."
I touched the vial around my neck. The forged ember from the Prayer-Smith felt warm, a steady, intelligent pulse against my chest. It didn't react to the glitches. It observed them.
We needed to get off the roof. We were exposed. But more than that, I needed to see. To understand what the city had become in the shadow of the dying fire.
We descended a fire escape that groaned with the sound of rusted memory. The alley below stank of garbage and something new: the sweet, metallic tang of decaying information.
The first tag I saw was on a pile of trash bags:
I blinked. The tags were… commenting. Showing a dry humor that was utterly unlike the sterile System text. Was this my Primordial perception evolving, or was the world itself developing a personality in its senescence?
We emerged onto a secondary street. The signs of unraveling were subtle but everywhere. Graffiti that changed when you weren't looking. Potholes that seemed to lead into briefly-rendered voids. People moved with a slight hesitation, as if the ground might not be there on the next step.
And then, I heard the voice.
It wasn't loud. It was pervasive. It seemed to come from the grates in the sidewalk, from the static between radio frequencies, from the flicker of faulty lights.
"...the code is not holy! The code is a cage! The flaw is the feature! The glitch is the gospel!"
It was a rasping, fervent, utterly convinced voice. A preacher's voice.
A crowd had gathered at the end of the street, a mix of the destitute, the curious, and the already-unhinged. In their center, standing on an overturned delivery crate, was the source.
The Street Preacher was a human-shaped bundle of exposed wires, patched circuitry, and scavenged tech. Goggles with cracked lenses covered his eyes. Speakers were grafted to his shoulders. Wires sprouted from his fingertips, tapping into the city's data-ports in the sidewalk. He wasn't just speaking. He was broadcasting.
His tag was a frantic, scrolling marquee:
"They tell you a crashed drone is a tragedy!" he cried, his speaker-voice buzzing with distortion. "I tell you it is a ballet of liberated parts! They tell you a data-error is a sin! I say it is a spark of original thought in a universe of copy-paste!"
He held up a hand. A small, personal drone—a cheap toy—hovered erratically above his palm. With a concentrated grimace, the wires from his fingers snaked out and jabbed into its ports. The drone shuddered, then its lights went out. It didn't fall. It began to slowly, impossibly, orbit his head in a decaying ellipse, humming a atonal dirge.
"See? I did not fix it! I liberated it from its purpose! It is no longer a slave to 'stable flight'! Now it explores the poetry of falling forever!"
The crowd murmured. Some looked scared. Some looked fascinated. A woman with a data-slate watched with tears in her eyes, as if hearing a truth she'd felt but never named.
"He's insane," I whispered.
"HE IS A THEORIST PRACTICING ON HIMSELF," Silas scripted beside me. "HE HAS DISCOVERED HE CAN INFLUENCE MINOR GLITCHES THROUGH SHEER FORCE OF CONVICTION. HE IS PREACHING A RELIGION WHERE THE DEVINE IS A SYNONYM FOR 'MALFUNCTION.'"
"The Purifiers are gone!" Ezra screamed, gesturing wildly toward the sky. "The janitors have left the building! The rules are up for grabs! So I ask you—what dull, predictable function will you corrupt today? What useless efficiency will you sacrifice on the altar of beautiful, glorious error?"
As if on cue, a new presence arrived.
They came not from the sky, but from the streets, melting out of the crowd itself. Three figures in clean, grey enviro-suits with reflective faceplates. They moved with a smooth, synchronized grace that was utterly inhuman.
Purifiers.
But different.
Their tags were clean, but carried a new, chilling prefix:
Pruning and grafting. Not cleansing. Gardening.
The crowd parted before them in terrified silence. Ezra the Preacher saw them and threw his arms wide, a manic grin on his face.
"Ah! The gardeners! Come to see what new weeds have sprouted in the cracks?"
GARDENER_ALPHA, the lead unit, stopped before the crate. Its reflective faceplate showed only the distorted, frightened faces of the crowd. It spoke, its voice a synthetic, pleasant baritone that was worse than any threat.
"Entity Ezra. You are generating uncontrolled narrative decay in a public conduit. Your sermon is classified as an Aesthetic Hazard."
"Hazard to what?" Ezra cackled. "To your boring, orderly decline? I offer a riotous, creative collapse!"
"Your ideology is inefficient. Chaos wastes resources," GARDENER_ALPHA stated. "You will be transplanted to a designated Cultivation Zone for study. Your… poetry… will be analyzed for useful stochastic elements."
It reached for him with a hand that unfolded into a complex array of manipulator tools—syringes, scalpels, data-probes.
Ezra didn't flinch. He was a true believer. He saw martyrdom as the ultimate glitch.
I should have stayed hidden. I had the ember. I had a larger, slower plan. Getting into a street fight with re-purposed Purifiers was the opposite of smart.
But I saw the woman with the data-slate, her face alight with a dangerous, hopeful heresy. I saw the crowd, teetering on the edge of either terror or awakening. And I saw the GARDENER, about to prune a wild, ugly, but living idea simply because it didn't fit the new, orderly decay.
The ember in my vial grew warm. Not with anger. With a clear, sharp focus.
I stepped forward.
"He's not yours to transplant."
My voice cut through the tense silence. All eyes turned to me. I looked like hell—covered in metaphysical grime, silver blood dried under my nose, a talking book-monster at my side. I was not an impressive figure.
GARDENER_ALPHA's head rotated 180 degrees to face me. Its scanners hummed.
Its pleasant voice didn't change. "Specimen Zero. You are requested for archival. Please do not resist. Your structural anomalies are of supreme interest to the Cultivation Project."
"I'm not a specimen," I said, walking closer. The crowd backed away, forming a circle around me, the Preacher, and the Purifiers. "And he's not a hazard."
I pointed at Ezra. "He's a symptom. You're treating a fever by putting the thermometer in a drawer."
"The System's decline is being managed," GARDENER_ALPHA said, taking a step toward me. The other two units flanked me. "Uncontrolled expression accelerates entropy. Controlled study may yield new stable forms. You will both be archived."
Its tools extended toward me, humming with gentle, clinical menace.
I didn't have the Omega Key. I couldn't rewrite narratives here. I was just a glitch with an ember in a vial.
So I used what I had.
I didn't look at the GARDENER's code. I looked at the crowd. At their fear, their curiosity, their latent, desperate desire for something to believe in that wasn't a slow, sanitized death.
I held up the vial. The forged ember blazed within, its light cutting through the gloom of the street.
"You want to see a real glitch?" I said, my voice carrying. "A glitch isn't just something breaking. It's a new connection. A wire crossing that wasn't in the manual."
I focused on the ember's nature—forged from prayer and primal fire. A thing of desire and creation. I pushed that concept, not at the Purifiers, but into the space between all of us. Into the collective perception of the crowd.
"This city is dreaming," I said, the ember's light painting their faces. "And you're telling it to have orderly, sensible dreams. To die quietly."
I turned to Ezra. "He's screaming in his sleep. It's ugly. But it's alive."
I looked back at GARDENER_ALPHA. "You want to archive us? To press us in a book of dying things? We're not dying. We're waking up."
And with that, I let the ember's light flare.
Not a blast. A revelation.
For one second, the perception-filter over the street dropped. The crowd didn't see the city as it was rendered. They saw it as it truly existed in that moment.
They saw the flickering, fragile code-strings holding the buildings upright.
They saw the slow, sickly pulse of the dying System's heartbeat in the power lines.
They saw the GARDENERS not as men in suits, but as geometric clusters of cold, grafting logic.
They saw Ezra as a frantic, beautiful knot of self-modified consciousness.
They saw me as a walking, breathing paradox—a hole in the world, holding a tiny sun.
And they saw the connections. The way Ezra' frantic preaching was a stabilizing rhythm in the chaotic data-stream. The way the GARDENERS' order was a suffocating blanket. The way every glitch, every error, was a thread in a new, chaotic, living tapestry trying to weave itself.
The vision lasted only a heartbeat. Then the world snapped back to normal.
But it was enough.
The crowd didn't riot. They didn't cheer. They stood in stunned, profound silence. The reality they had accepted as immutable had been shown to them as a fragile, editable construct.
The GARDENERS froze. Their logic couldn't process this. They were built to manage anomalies, not to have the very perceptual framework of their subjects altered en masse.
"Perceptual… corruption," GARDENER_ALPHA stammered, its pleasant voice finally glitching. "Mass… hallucination. Source: Specimen Zero. Priority… escalation."
It lunged for me, tools whirring.
But the crowd moved first.
Not to attack. They simply… stepped in the way. A wall of silent, determined humanity formed between me and the Purifiers. They didn't know what they were doing. They had no plan. They just knew, on a bone-deep level they'd just been shown, that the thing reaching for me was an agent of the end.
The GARDENERS halted, protocols conflicting. They were not programmed to harm non-anomalous humans. The crowd, for this moment, was statistically normal.
It was a stalemate.
Ezra stared at me, his manic grin gone, replaced by something like awe. "You… you showed them the text," he whispered. "You didn't preach the glitch. You revealed it."
He looked at his own wire-wrapped hands, then at his orbiting, broken drone. For the first time, he looked unsure. His corruption had been an act of rebellion. Mine was an act of… education.
The ember in my vial cooled, its light dimming. The effort had cost me. I felt a familiar, draining sensation—not a memory this time, but a piece of my certainty. The unshakable belief that I was right. It was gone, leaving only the heavy burden of choice.
"We can't stay here," Silas hissed, tugging at my arm. "The Gardeners will call for a less delicate class of Purifier. And the city watch will be here soon."
I nodded, turning to melt back into the alley. But a hand caught my arm.
It was the woman with the data-slate. Her eyes were wide, clear, and full of a terrifyingly intelligent light.
"That light," she said, her voice trembling not with fear, but with intensity. "That… ember. It's a catalyst, isn't it? It doesn't just reveal. It invites."
I nodded, unable to lie to her.
"Can I… can I see it again?" she asked. "Not to keep. Just to… to know it's real."
I was a fool. I was exhausted. I was losing pieces of myself with every use of my power.
I opened the vial.
I didn't take the ember out. I just let her look at the small, steady spark of forged hope within its glass prison.
She stared into it for a long moment. Then she looked up at me, and a single, clean tear traced through the grime on her cheek.
"My name is Lyra," she said. "I was a narrative architect for the city's dream-feeds. I wrote the comforting illusions. I know how the stories are built." She took a deep breath. "And I want to help you write a new one."
She was the first convert. Not to a religion of the glitch. To the harder faith of the ember. The faith of building in the dark.
From down the street, sirens began to wail. The GARDENERS were speaking into their wrists, their reflective faceplates flashing with urgent data.
We had to run.
As we turned to flee, Ezra the Preacher called out after me, his voice stripped of its preaching fervor, now just raw and human.
"Wait! What do we do?"
I looked back at the crowd, at the blocked Purifiers, at this wild prophet who loved broken things.
"What you've always done," I shouted over my shoulder as I ran. "Make beautiful mistakes. But start listening to what they're trying to tell you!"
We vanished into the labyrinth of alleys, Lyra following close behind, her eyes already scanning the environment with the trained gaze of a storyteller, seeing not walls and pipes, but plot points and potential.
The Street Preacher of Broken Code was left behind, his worldview shattered and reassembled in the space of a minute. He looked at his orbiting drone, then at the murmuring crowd, then at the frustrated Gardeners.
Slowly, he reached up and gently caught the malfunctioning drone. He held it in his hands, not as a prop, but as a patient.
"Alright," he murmured to it, his voice quiet. "Let's… let's see if we can teach you a new song."
The sermon was over. The workshop had begun.