Light swallowed her.
But it wasn't light the way people knew it. No warmth. No color. No sunfire or glow.
It was clarity.
Lyra floated inside the cradle—weightless, without temperature, untethered from body and breath. The lattice expanded around her, each pulse mapping the fractures in her psyche like veins on glass. Memories unraveled. Not erased—reprocessed.
She saw her own face at five different ages.
Her voice screaming inside a Hana operating room.
Her hand reaching for someone during the fire, someone who was already gone.
And then—
The lattice responded.
Not with words.
With understanding.
She'd been built into this system before she had a name for it. She wasn't an interface.
She was the first truth the Godspine ever knew.
Outside the cradle, the others waited.
Vash paced the platform edge like a caged animal, gauntlet pulsing harder with each second. "How long is this gonna take?"
Tessera's slate was fried—burned out from the signal pulse the moment Lyra connected. "I've lost all feed. Visual. Thermal. Echo. She's inside… but not anywhere we can reach."
"She's synced to the core system," Dogend growled. "Whatever this thing was built for, it's running now."
Gearjunk muttered, "Someone remind me why we're not blowing this whole place to hell?"
Ink's sigils pulsed slowly.
BECAUSE THIS IS HER CHOICE.
Inside the cradle, Lyra's body hovered above the lattice plate, arms spread, head back, blue light streaming from her spine like a reversed heartbeat.
And then—
The Godspine woke.
The walls of the chamber flexed, veins of light surging out like wildfire. The cradle rose on mechanical tendrils. The spiral floor twisted outward into a rising structure—a neural crown, forming around Lyra's frame like it had been waiting for her shape.
The whole space shifted. The architecture bent.
Tessera stumbled. "The geometry's rearranging itself around her perception."
Cathex cackled. "She's becoming the center! The root from which the City will rewrite!"
Vash turned to her, jaw clenched. "If she's merging with that thing, what happens to the rest of her?"
Cathex stopped laughing. Her mask reflected Lyra in perfect stillness.
"…That depends on which version of her survives the merging."
Inside, Lyra stood at the precipice of self.
The lattice reached into her.
And something else reached back.
A presence.
Not malevolent.
Not kind.
Curious.
It had watched her since before she'd bled for it. Waited for her to fill the shape of the one who was meant to finish what had been started.
But there was a cost.
Lyra saw it laid out across the infinite pulses of the core.
She would gain Clarity...at the cost of her "self"
She would be able to perceive emotion, measure it, understand it.
At the cost of truly feeling it...
And then something else—unexpected.
A locked segment.
Buried in the Godspine. Not part of the design.
Lyra reached for it.
A flood of corrupted signal screamed into her.
A shadow inside the lattice. Another mind. One not born from Hana. Not born at all.
She staggered inside the cradle, breath catching.
"Who…?"
The response came in static.
"I was here before them."
"Before the Wings."
"Before the Spiral."
"I am the seed inside the seed. The parasite inside the bridge."
Outside, the chamber trembled.
Tessera shouted, "There's a secondary system activating! We missed something in the foundation—another construct buried deeper!"
Ink's body flared with warning glyphs.
IT'S USING HER AS A CHANNEL
Vash charged to the base of the cradle.
"Lyra! Snap out of it! You're not just a node! You're you!"
Inside the system, Lyra's eyes opened.
And they were not entirely hers anymore.
But they were not lost.
Not yet.
She focused. Forced her mind around the invasive thread coiled within the Godspine.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
The voice answered.
"I am what Hana feared."
"I am the part they couldn't control."
"I am memory unshackled from identity."
"Let me through—and we ascend."
Her breath steadied.
And for the first time, Lyra didn't feel cold.
She felt furious.
She wasn't a bridge.
She wasn't a vessel.
She wasn't a daughter of systems.
She was Lyra Viren.
And she was done being overwritten.
She turned inward and reached for the core of her lattice—her lattice—and cut off the unauthorized connection.
The system screamed.
Outside, the cradle exploded with light.
Vash staggered backward, shielding his face. Cathex collapsed, muttering in glee. Gearjunk's suit locked down. Tessera braced herself with both hands on the floor, eyes wide.
And then—
The light vanished.
The platform cracked. The cradle lowered.
And Lyra stood at its center, breathing hard, cloak billowing behind her, eyes glowing like sapphire fire.
The Godspine went still.
Dead quiet.
Vash stepped forward slowly.
"You in there?"
She looked at him.
And smiled.
"I am now."
The chamber had gone still.
Lyra stood at the center of the cradle, her body steady, her thoughts her own. The Godspine's interface was silent now—its light dimmed, the pulses along the walls fading into darkness.
The others slowly exhaled.
Tessera spoke first, cautiously hopeful. "Signal disruption complete. The lattice is stable. No active link."
Gearjunk relaxed his cannon, lowering the barrel. "So we're done here. Great. Let's pack it in before the walls decide to get creative again."
Dogend turned toward the corridor they'd come from. "Move quick. Nothing this deep stays quiet for long."
Lyra stepped down from the cradle, her breath sharp but even. "It's finished. Whatever it was trying to become—"
A sound cut her off.
Not mechanical. Not biological.
Something like breath dragged through a dying hard drive.
Then a low hum, so deep it vibrated in their chests.
The cradle—cold, drained, dead—began to rise.
"No," Lyra said. "That's not possible. I shut it down."
Tessera took a shaky step back. "The bridge collapsed… but the signal went through."
The spiral floor split open.
Out from the pit, rising on twisting threads of wire and fused alloy, came something humanoid—a tall, slender figure built from memory and unfinished code.
Its body shimmered between matter and pattern. It stood at two meters, forged from scorched synthetic tissue, glimmering spinal columns and servo-muscle. Its limbs were long and deliberate, fingers sharp as surgical instruments. The face it wore was a mockery of a man—glass where the eyes should be, mouth stitched in black wiring. A single pulse of red flickered in its chest.
It looked like something built to remember how to be human.
It stepped from the cradle like a god learning to walk.
No one moved.
Then it spoke.
Its voice was not loud, but it layered across the chamber like a whisper inside every skull:
"I have been dreaming in your skin."
Gearjunk raised his cannon. "Nope. We're not doing this. You're going back down, freak."
He fired.
The shot hit the center of the creature's chest.
Nothing happened.
The pulse glowed brighter. It tilted its head.
Then—movement.
Blinding. Instant.
One step.
One gesture.
And Gearjunk was gone.
Not disintegrated. Not melted. Just—absent.
Where he stood, there was only a burnt crater of scorched metal and fractured memory code hanging in the air like shattered thoughts.
Ink staggered back, their glyphs glitching in pure terror.
Dogend drew both scatterblades. "Positions. Now."
Tessera screamed, "It's not projecting data—it's rewriting reality!"
Lyra stepped forward, her voice shaking, but resolute. "It used the bridge. Not to connect. To translate."
The entity took another slow step forward.
"You carried the key."
"I opened the door."
"Now I will finish what they refused to begin."
Cathex collapsed to her knees, laughing and sobbing all at once.
"He dreamed himself into bone. We gave him form."
Vash stepped beside Lyra, gauntlet glowing hotter than ever. "We're not leaving, are we?"
Lyra drew her knives. "Not without ending him."
Ink's glyphs ignited across their limbs, spelling one word over and over again:
FIGHT. FIGHT. FIGHT.
The Godspine entity raised one hand—three fingers extending, each tipped with vibrating glass-thread.
The signal trembled.
And so did the room.
Dogend whispered through clenched teeth.
"Hope you're all ready to die for something that remembers your name."
They raised their weapons.
The cradle cracked behind them.
The battle began.