The day after the Spiral Memory awakened, the air around Myrridan throbbed with residual pulses of unstable time. While the city remained visibly unchanged, the weave beneath its streets—the multiversal lattice—had thinned.
Astra stared out from the temporal terrace of the Concord Spire. "It's fraying," she whispered. "The lattice isn't just weakening… it's bleeding."
Arin walked up beside her, the Spiral Memory bracelet pulsing lightly on his wrist. "It's them. The Architects of the Unmade. We knew they were coming, but not this soon."
Archive appeared behind them, her robe shimmering with glyphs from the Origin Era. "Prepare yourselves. The Architects don't arrive—they extract. They remove meaning, rewrite cause, and unbirth the foundation of all realities they cross."
---
The Unmaking Pulse
The Chrono-System flared in warning:
> System Alert: Null-Pulse detected across 7 adjacent timelines.
> Initiating Paradox Shield: 42% integrity.
The team rushed to the city's central vault, where the Dimensional Beacon kept Myrridan anchored in the primary stream. But its heart—a crystalline spiral—was cracking.
"Its resonance is being pulled backward," Astra said. "Like someone's erasing the moment it was created."
Arin called upon the Spiral Memory.
> Memory-Link: Eradis, Guardian of Seed Epoch.
A figure emerged in shimmering flame, a forgotten ally from a pre-linear age. "You called too late, Timebound," Eradis said. "The Architects have nested."
---
The Forbidden Nest
Arin, Astra, and Eradis jumped into a reverse-temporal corridor that led them into the Forbidden Nest—a hollow void constructed from stolen causality. The moment they entered, memories flickered.
Astra staggered. "I… I was never born here."
Eradis anchored them with a burning crest of remembrance.
> "This is how the Architects win," Eradis explained. "Not through force. Through silence. Through unbeing."
They traversed a world where days unexisted, where architecture melted backward into raw thought. And there, amidst the shattered scaffold of collapsed potential, hovered the first Architect.
A thing of absolute white. A being whose face contained every possibility denied.
---
Confronting Nullborn
"You remember us," it said without speaking.
"You erased my sister's future," Arin replied. "You devoured Astra's echoes."
"We simply released them from choice."
The battle began. No blades. No explosions. A war of concepts. Of identities.
The Architect turned Arin into a version who never rebelled.
Astra became a ghost of her own hesitation.
Eradis fractured into a thousand doubts.
But then the Spiral Memory glowed.
> System Trigger: Unity Recall—Invocation of Forgotten Will.
Memories of every timeline Arin touched flooded him. Not just victories, but regrets embraced. Losses accepted. Sacrifices honored.
"I remember them all," Arin said. "Even the ones I failed."
Light exploded across the void. The Architect screeched, its body unraveling as the core of remembrance defied oblivion.
---
Aftermath and Revelation
Back in Myrridan, the Dimensional Beacon stabilized. But the crystal's center now bore a scar—a black spiral.
Archive watched it with dread. "We stopped one. But the others... they build."
Eradis turned to Arin. "There's one place left. The Dawn Chasm. The first moment of all time. If we go there, we might rewrite the war before it begins."
Arin looked at Astra, then the stars.
"Then we make our stand… at the start."