The light above Rin flickered again. It wasn't the same pulse from before — this one was slow, deliberate, like a signal waiting for her to understand.
The room was empty now. The other version of herself had disappeared, but something had been left behind: a thread, soft and warm, pulsing faintly in the air like a vein just beneath skin. It wasn't hers. Not anymore.
And then:
"This is not allowed."
The voice echoed without body.
"But I need you to remember anyway."
It wasn't the Developer's tone. Not the Technician's either. It was… him.
Rin turned toward the flickering corner of the room — not a wall, but a projection folding in on itself. And through it stepped someone she didn't recognize. A young girl, older than a child but younger than herself, holding a bundle of flowers already wilting in her hand. She smiled nervously.
"You were supposed to choose me," the girl said quietly.
Rin's breath caught. The shape was familiar. So was the voice. It wasn't a memory, not fully — it was a memory she had almost made but walked away from. In some branch, she had saved this person. In others, she had let her die.
"You don't know me now," the girl said, "but I stayed in case you came back."
A signal sparked across the air behind them — bright blue, shaped like a flare, then fracturing into characters. Weaver's signature.
He had spoken.
Rin took a breath, eyes wide. The message was short, direct:
You were rewritten.
You are not alone.
Find the Anchor.
No metaphor. No guidance. Just the truth. Finally.
The child turned to look at the light. "Do you feel it too?" she asked. "Someone else is looking for you. They're...close."
Elsewhere — beneath a sky that looped endlessly over dead grass — Aro stood in a cracked field with Selene, Iris, and Alin. The chairs were gone now, but none of them remembered getting out of them.
"Something's wrong," Iris muttered, arms crossed tightly. "I can't tell if we're still inside or…"
A sound buzzed in Aro's left ear. He winced, clutching the side of his head — and then it appeared. A small object embedded in the ground. Mechanical. Ancient. Etched with symbols he shouldn't know, but somehow did.
"Touch it," Selene said, voice suddenly distant.
He did.
And in an instant, his vision fractured. Not into memories — but moments. Glimpses of Rin. Crying against a wall. Laughing in a corridor. Speaking to someone he didn't recognize — the girl with the flowers. Another world, entirely parallel, now bleeding into his.
Rin staggered back, gripping the wall.
At the same moment, her anchor — hidden inside a folded panel of her coat she didn't remember owning — activated.
She gasped.
There he was. Aro. Not a dream. Not a ghost. He looked older, tired, wiser. But his eyes—
They saw her.
Not in real time. Not perfectly. But for the first time in a thousand cycles of forgetting, they were overlapping.
And in the corner of the room, the girl smiled and whispered:
"You see him now.
Now ask yourself:
Why were they so afraid of this?"