The Silver Crown District had once been the heart of civilization—a city of light suspended across terraces and glass-strung skybridges. Now, it stood like a monument to decay. The towers were fractured, their surfaces eaten by corrosion and overgrowth. Broken solar arrays blinked weakly in the haze, and the streets below were buried in silence.
Theo stared up at the skyline from the ridge above, heart heavy. "It used to hum," he murmured. "Like a heartbeat. You could feel it through your boots."
Ayen stood beside him, cloaked in shadow, eyes scanning the broken domes. "And now it's a tomb."
Rell crouched nearby, fine-tuning the data pack strapped to his back. "Except the dead here whisper back. If the original code base for the threadline manipulation still exists, it'll be in the sub-levels beneath the Obel Core."
Theo nodded, gaze distant. "That's where it all started."
They descended at dusk.
The streets narrowed the deeper they went—once-grand corridors now overrun with shattered tiles, rusted rails, and root systems that slithered through every seam. Beneath the crust of history, the city had been built in layers. The deeper layers were meant to be inaccessible. Sealed.
But time had undone those seals.
Theo paused at a fallen tram station. He knelt, tracing a faded emblem embedded in the floor: a helix overlaid with a spiral. The sigil of Project Origin.
"We're close."
Rell adjusted his wrist tool. "There's an emergency ingress hatch beneath the platform. I've spoofed the old access code. Should still trigger the fail-safe elevator."
Theo glanced at Ayen. "Ready?"
She exhaled. "Let's find the ghost in the machine."
The elevator groaned to life, cables squealing under the weight of time. As it descended, Theo watched the light disappear above them—swallowed by the dark like a shutter closing on the world.
Below was silence.
And then: the Obel Core.
The chamber opened before them like the hollow inside a broken clock. Circular, cavernous, and impossibly vast, its walls pulsed with faint echoes of energy. Faded projections flickered through the air—glitches of people who once worked here, caught in infinite loops: someone typing, someone laughing, someone screaming.
Theo stepped forward, mesmerized. "They left fragments."
Ayen passed her hand through one of the glitched figures, which dissolved instantly. "This isn't just memory. It's the raw threadline data bleeding through."
At the center of the room stood the interface node: a glass console half-melted from heat damage, surrounded by what looked like petrified roots or crystalized tendrils—remnants of whatever force had torn this place apart.
Theo reached out but didn't touch it.
He closed his eyes.
And the world shifted.
In his mind, he saw the lab whole again: pristine, alive, pulsing with innovation. Scientists shouted over each other, and in the middle stood the woman from the vision—hair tied back, white coat fluttering.
"We shouldn't push it—time reacts like muscle. Strain it too far, and it doesn't just tear. It contracts."
Her words echoed in his head.
Then came the activation. The countdown. The light.
Theo opened his eyes.
The node flared weakly beneath his hand. It recognized him. Of course it did.
"Rell," he said, voice low. "I'm in. I need you to stabilize the output. Pull the active schematics and patch them into your relay."
Rell knelt beside a secondary port, fingers already flying across the input pad. "Copy that. Pulling thread logs and event layers now."
Ayen kept watch by the elevator. "How long until this lights up like a flare on Warden sensors?"
"Five minutes, max," Rell said. "Maybe less if the Seer's already tracing resonance."
Theo stared at the stream of data flowing from the node.
There it was.
The original override sequence.
It was crude—hand-coded, barely stable—but undeniably functional. The first wound. The first cut in time.
A single command string blinked on the screen:[REWRITE: TIMELINE ENTRY 0.0001]STATUS: UNSTABLEWARNING: COGNITIVE RETENTION LOOP DETECTED
Theo's hands hovered over the console. "This is what started it. The first reset. Someone tried to rewrite a personal moment—and instead, the entire timeline bent around it."
Ayen took a step forward. "Can you reverse it?"
Theo shook his head. "Not reverse. But I might be able to stabilize it. Close the fracture—not erase the damage, but anchor the loose ends. Give time something to hold onto again."
Rell looked up, eyes wide. "If you do that…"
"The resets stop," Theo said. "Or at least, they stop unraveling everything else with them."
He placed his hand on the final key.
And paused.
A memory surfaced: Nova's voice, trembling and strong. "The past doesn't need fixing. It needs understanding."
He whispered, "Not fixing. Remembering."
Then pressed the key.
The node flared.
A pulse surged through the room. Threads of light wove from the console to the walls, into the broken echoes and through Theo's body like a lattice knitting together.
And for one breathless moment, he saw them all.
The ones lost.
The ones forgotten.
And the ones waiting to be remembered.
He opened his eyes.
"We're not ghosts anymore," he said softly.
Outside, the world began to shift.