Darkness didn't fall.
It folded.
Like a curtain pulled back from a stage that had waited too long to be seen, the world collapsed and reassembled without sound or violence. The chaos was gone. The gods were gone. The Wheel, that rusted monstrosity of power and suffering, was gone.
In their place: symmetry.
The new Field rose from the remains in pristine precision. A grid of obsidian tiles stretched into infinity, each square reflecting a hollow version of the sky. Overhead loomed a pale dome of sterile white—no sun, no clouds, no warmth. Just a crushing, empty light that banished all shadow.
There was no wind. No ambient noise. Not even the low static hum of system presence. The world had gone quiet in a way that didn't feel peaceful. It felt controlled.
Saylor Cogni stood at the center, arms behind his back, watching the architecture of his final creation take form. He didn't glow. He didn't rise. He simply stood—perfect posture, perfect stillness, dressed in the same simple, dark clothes he had worn when the first loop broke. In this blank, godless world, he didn't need grandeur. He was the authority.
"I've stripped away the noise," he said. His voice did not echo, but it carried. "Welcome to Loop Zero."
Lucia lay crumpled a dozen meters away. Her ribs ached. Her arms shook. Her crimson thread had dimmed to a flicker. She sat up slowly, palms scraping against the smooth, frictionless tile.
There was no texture. No grip. Just design.
She turned her head.
Kayla, Tyne, and Marcus were near—scattered like fallen leaves. Their bodies twitched under the weight of residual lag, system inertia pressing down like gravity from a broken dream. Quentin was gone.
Lucia crawled forward, teeth clenched. "What did you do?"
Saylor didn't look at her at first.
"I ended the experiment," he said. "No more error handling. No more dead loops. No more unpredictable ascensions. This is the corrected version."
She coughed. "Corrected?"
"No gods. No spins. No Proxy loopholes. Just balance."
Her eyes scanned the horizon. There was nothing. No altars. No wheels. No Trial stones. No gates. Just endless black tile and white sky, sterilized of all identity.
"I thought you hated this place," she said. "You broke it."
"I studied it. Then I rebuilt it. My mistake before was letting the system pretend to be a game." He turned to face her now. "Now, it's what it was always meant to be. A controlled environment."
Lucia struggled to her feet. "You turned it into a cage."
He smiled. "Not a cage. A solution."
And then they appeared.
Six figures on the far edge of the grid, emerging not with footsteps but presence. They flickered into view like failed renderings, silhouettes stitched from thread and static. They didn't walk—they glided.
Lucia's muscles tensed.
"No…"
They looked familiar. Horribly familiar.
Lucia's mouth went dry as the nearest stepped closer. The figure's posture, her gait, even the tilt of her head—it was hers. But wrong. Skin pale and cracked like porcelain. Eyes replaced by hollow sockets spiraling with red thread. Her voice came layered with echoes of failed loops—hundreds of dying versions of herself speaking at once.
"You were never meant to win," it said.
Lucia stepped back instinctively.
Saylor watched from his place in the center.
"Every failure you buried... I kept," he said. "Every version that cried, broke, betrayed, or surrendered—I saved them."
More copies stepped forward.
Twisted versions of Kayla—eyes stitched shut, whispers of paranoia. Marcus—bloated with fire, veins full of black glass. Tyne—reduced to a looping playback of her worst moment.
Saylor's voice remained even.
"I'm not punishing you. I'm showing you. This is what you are without direction. Without design. You're noise. And I'm the silence that holds you."
Lucia's knees buckled.
There were no gods.
No Wheel.
Only this.
Lucia didn't run.
She couldn't. The platform stretched in all directions with no terrain, no cover, no edges. The twisted versions closed in like shadows with minds of their own—gliding across the surface with choreographed purpose. Each footfall echoed like a mocking heartbeat.
Her own copy came first.
The threads in its eyes coiled tighter, forming symbols she couldn't read but felt—numbers, cycles, timestamps of her failures. When it moved, it didn't fight with fury. It fought with knowledge—anticipating her every breath, every dodge, every hesitation.
Lucia ducked the first strike, a whip of red wire that cut the air like glass. She twisted left, kicked upward—but the copy didn't flinch. It caught her foot mid-spin, slammed her downward with surgical force.
The ground cracked.
Lucia coughed blood.
A second figure approached. Tyne's broken mirror. Her voice was a looped stutter, playing one sentence again and again.
> "It wasn't supposed to go like this. It wasn't supposed to go like this. It wasn't supposed—"
She reached out with a hand that glitched in and out of sync. Not attacking—injecting. System error bled through her fingertips, threatening to infect Lucia's thread.
Lucia screamed and rolled, narrowly avoiding contact. Her crimson chain flickered weakly at her side, sputtering like an engine without fuel.
Kayla's copy slid into view, long hair dangling like wet thread, muttering secrets in a tongue only the system understood. She turned her head in unnatural angles, clicking softly.
Then she laughed.
A laugh that sounded exactly like Kayla—until it broke apart and devolved into static.
Lucia backed away, chest heaving. The ground offered no anchor. No edge. She looked over her shoulder, hoping the others were moving—fighting back.
But they weren't.
Kayla had fallen. Tyne was curled in stasis. Marcus stood frozen mid-step, confronted by a version of himself made entirely of scorched copper and flame. They were being overwritten. Not by brute force—but by doubt.
Lucia turned to Saylor.
He hadn't moved.
He stood in the center, hands still behind his back, watching like a teacher grading a final test.
"You said you wanted peace," Lucia snarled. "This isn't peace."
"It's proof," Saylor said. "You wanted to believe you were special. Chosen. That remembering made you strong."
The broken Lucia walked up behind her.
"You remembered me," it whispered.
Lucia's knees buckled.
Crimson thread unraveled.
> WARNING: THREAD INSTABILITY DETECTED ECHO PROXY STATUS: COLLAPSING
Lucia trembled. "No… I'm not done."
Saylor's voice softened. "You were done ten loops ago."
The broken version reached for her hand.
Lucia flinched. For a second—just one—she considered it. The end of resistance. The release of trying.
> "You can rest now."
A voice—hers, but older. Tired. Done.
And for a flicker of a second, she believed it.
Lucia stood on the edge of giving in.
The echo of herself—threaded eyes pulsing red—reached forward, its hand brushing against hers. It wasn't cold. It wasn't monstrous. It was familiar. The pain it offered wasn't pain at all. It was quiet. Stillness. The thing she'd begged for in her most fractured moments.
> "You can rest now."
The world blurred. Her vision swam. The entire grid shifted under her feet—tiles pulsing with an almost biological rhythm, a heartbeat not her own.
Lucia swayed.
Saylor said nothing.
He didn't have to.
This was the final proof he needed. The Echo Proxy collapsing under the weight of her own memory.
He watched with clinical distance, hands still clasped, jaw clenched with anticipation.
But then—
"Lucia!"
A voice cut through the fog like a blade.
Not Saylor's.
Not the Field's.
Kayla.
Lucia's eyes snapped open. Her crimson thread flared weakly, fluttering like a heartbeat fighting flatline.
She turned, breath hitching.
Kayla was standing.
Barely. Shaking. Her own copy clung to her, whispering dread into her ear. But Kayla was still there. Her thread—dim, torn—still glowed faintly at her side.
"You're not her," Kayla told her double. "You're a memory dressed in fear."
She shoved the copy back.
The thing shrieked.
Sound cracked the sky.
Lucia gasped, chest aching. "Kayla…?"
Marcus groaned nearby. His flame-covered double reared back, roaring, fists clenched in confusion. Tyne crawled toward Lucia, her hands scorched, her mouth trembling.
"Don't give him what he wants," Tyne said through clenched teeth.
Lucia's knees hit the floor.
Her copy bent low. "They'll fail. Just like you. Again. Again. Again."
Lucia whispered, "Then we fail together."
She lashed out with one last thread.
It wasn't strong. It wasn't even crimson.
But it was hers.
The thread struck the echo's chest.
The copy convulsed.
And shattered.
A scream tore from the broken Lucia—not of pain, but of release. Hundreds of voices died at once. The tile beneath them cracked like glass under pressure. Lines of red light spiderwebbed through the onyx grid.
Lucia slumped forward.
Her breathing came in ragged gasps. Blood dripped from her lip. But she was alive.
Saylor frowned.
The world paused.
One echo had died. One variable had slipped through.
> UNSTABLE PROXY DETECTED THREAD TRAUMA RECOMPILING
Lucia looked up, dazed. Kayla moved to her side, helping her up. Tyne stumbled over, shielding them with her body as another copy loomed.
Saylor stepped forward at last.
"Enough."
He raised a hand.
The Field stilled. The echoes froze mid-step.
Lucia coughed, wiping blood from her mouth. "Why stop now?"
Saylor's face twitched.
"You don't understand what you've done."
Lucia leaned on Kayla, blinking through tears and pain. "I stopped believing you mattered."
Saylor's expression was no longer calm. It was tight. Controlled. But cracked.
"I gave you mercy. I gave you rest. And you still crawl back to pain?"
Lucia grinned weakly, blood on her teeth.
"That's what makes us real."
Saylor clenched his fist.
The world responded.
Light surged upward. The tiles beneath their feet lifted and shattered. The white dome above split open like a skull. Wind screamed through the artificial stillness.
The echoes began to melt. Their forms lost cohesion, like oil burning on water.
Saylor rose above the ground—levitated not by thread or system, but by will. His outline flickered between man and construct.
> "Then be unmade."
Lucia closed her eyes.
The world went white.