I did not dream about the throne. That was the first thing I confirmed when I woke up. Dreams fade, blur at the edges, lose their weight once you're conscious. This memory didn't. It sat in my head like a splinter—sharp, precise, and uncomfortable. Broken gods. A seat carved from something that didn't belong to reality. And me, older and colder, sitting there as if I had earned the right. I stared at the ceiling of the underground room they had locked me in and exhaled slowly, counting my breaths until the pressure in my chest eased. Whatever that vision was, it wasn't a warning. Warnings were vague. This had been clear. That scared me more than anything else.
The room itself was aggressively ordinary, which I suspected was intentional. Smooth concrete walls, a single metal table, two chairs, and a faint humming sound that made my teeth itch if I focused on it too long. Suppression field. Low-grade, but constant. Enough to keep most anomalies docile. Not enough to stop me, if I decided to push back. That fact alone told me how nervous they were. If they truly believed I was a threat beyond control, they would not have put me here. Which meant they still thought they understood me. People always made that mistake first.
The door opened without a sound. A woman stepped in, silver hair tied back neatly, eyes sharp enough to cut glass. I recognized her immediately. Director Elys Varn. Head of the Error Department. The person who decided what mistakes the world was allowed to keep. She didn't sit down. She never did, not when she wanted to remind people who held the power. She placed a thin folder on the table and slid it toward me. "You caused significant instability yesterday," she said calmly. "Sixteen civilians hospitalized. Three agents unconscious. One city square permanently flagged as unreliable." I opened the folder. It was empty. I looked back up at her. "You're missing some pages." She didn't blink. "No," she replied. "You are."
That was new. Most people danced around the truth, afraid to acknowledge it directly. Elys Varn didn't bother. She gestured, and the wall behind her flickered to life, displaying a timeline filled with red markers. Each one represented a contradiction event—erasures, restorations, partial failures. The longer I looked, the worse it got. Dates overlapped. Locations repeated themselves. And running through all of it, like a scar carved into history, was a single black line. Me. "Every major anomaly in the last ten years intersects with your presence," she said. "Sometimes directly. Sometimes indirectly. Sometimes before you even arrive." I leaned back in my chair, folding my arms. "Sounds like coincidence." "We stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago," she replied.
She changed the display. A new file appeared, older than the others, its metadata corrupted almost beyond recognition. "This is the first record of you," she continued. "Or rather, the first time the system noticed something it couldn't classify." The date was wrong. Not inaccurate—wrong. It didn't belong to any known calendar. I felt that same itchy sensation crawl up my spine. "That's not possible," I said quietly. "Everyone has a beginning." Elys studied me for a long moment. "That assumption," she said, "is what keeps breaking reality."
Before I could respond, the lights flickered. Once. Twice. Then the humming suppression field stuttered. My vision blurred for half a second, and suddenly the room felt bigger, stretched, like someone had pulled at the edges of space without permission. Elys's expression tightened. "We're detecting movement," she said, tapping a device at her wrist. "Multiple contradictions. Not appearing—activating." A chill ran through me. There was a difference. Appearing meant accidents. Activating meant intent.
The door burst open, and a man rushed in, breathing hard, eyes wide with something close to fear. "Director," he said, "the archives—something is rewriting them in real time." Elys didn't curse. She didn't panic. She only nodded once. "Show me," she said. They moved fast, and I followed, uninvited and unrestrained. No one stopped me. That told me everything I needed to know. The Error Department wasn't in control. They were reacting.
The archives were worse than I expected. Rows upon rows of shelves stretched into the distance, each one holding records that defined the world as people understood it. Names. Events. Wars. People who mattered, and people who didn't. Or at least, people history decided didn't. As we entered, papers began to lift into the air on their own, ink bleeding off the pages, letters rearranging themselves into new meanings. Some files turned blank. Others screamed. I don't mean metaphorically. The sound was thin and high, like a voice being erased mid-sentence.
I stopped walking. My shadow didn't.
It took a step forward on its own, then froze. I stared at it, heart beating faster despite myself. Shadows were loyal things. They followed rules. When they didn't, it meant reality was slipping. Elys noticed too. "You're reacting," she said. "No," I replied. "I'm being recognized." At the far end of the archive, something moved. Not a person. Not fully. A shape formed between shelves, stitched together from missing data and broken records. When it spoke, its voice echoed from everywhere at once. "Error-Seventeen," it said. "Your existence is premature."
I felt the pressure build again, heavier this time, as if the world itself was leaning in to listen. "You shouldn't be awake," the thing continued. "You were meant to remain dormant until collapse." Elys raised her weapon. Agents followed suit. I didn't move. "Dormant for what?" I asked. The thing tilted its head, a gesture copied from humanity but poorly understood. "Correction," it replied. "Replacement."
The archive shook. Shelves collapsed. Files disintegrated into dust. The shape began to fade, its purpose fulfilled. Before it vanished completely, it spoke one last time, its words sinking deep into my mind. "When the gods broke reality," it said, "you were created to survive what came after." Silence followed. Heavy. Final. Elys turned toward me slowly. For the first time, her composure cracked. "What are you?" she asked.
I looked down at my shadow, now behaving again, obedient and still. Somewhere far above us, the sky flickered. Somewhere far beyond that, something else was paying attention. I met Elys's gaze and gave her a tired smile. "That," I said, "is a very dangerous question."