The walls were no longer solid.
Glyphs crawled across them like veins—pulsing red, then black, then blank.
Valen pushed deeper into the spiral, ignoring the warning sigils that now flickered in the corners of his vision.
> [Codex Structure: Fractured]
[User Interference Detected – Foreign Protocol Active]
Stability Risk: Increasing.
He barely registered the messages anymore.
The Unmaking Thread trembled in his fingers.
The spell was complete—but not obedient.
Its glyph-string had grown too long.
Too tangled.
And in the last cast, Valen saw something he refused to believe:
> His own memory…
…of the day he was rejected…
…with Lyle watching from the shadows.
Smiling.
"Fake," Valen muttered. "You weren't there. You couldn't have been."
But the memory didn't vanish.
It repeated.
Louder. Sharper.
Until Valen snapped his fingers and burned it out of the air.
But it reformed.
Because the Codex wasn't just showing him Lyle.
It was showing him what he believed Lyle to be.
And now, that belief was shaping reality.
---
He stumbled to a halt in a rot chamber—its walls made of crumbling knowledge.
Shattered glyphs. Blank pages.
And in the center—
A mirror.
But it didn't reflect him.
It showed a version of Valen with Lyle's face—smiling. Warm. Laughing beside Juno. Wearing his robes. Holding his parents' sigils.
"No…"
The reflection spoke.
"You always thought you were better. But I didn't need to be better."
"I just had to be chosen."
---
Valen screamed and threw the Thread like a javelin.
The mirror shattered.
The air around him cracked open like glass.
> [User Instability Detected – Identity Breach: 17%]
[Codex Response: Adaptive Rewrite Engaged]
You are becoming what you hate.
His breathing hitched.
His glyphs stuttered.
He dropped to one knee—and for the first time, he felt the Codex inside him.
Writing.
One line at a time.
Not as a hero.
Not as a villain.
But as a warning.
---
And far ahead, Lyle jolted.
The Codex in his grip spasmed, a page tearing itself free and evaporating in midair.
"Something's wrong," he muttered.
Juno spun. "Valen?"
"He's not just close. He's being changed."
Juno's eyes narrowed. "Into what?"
The Codex responded for him:
> [Shadow Thread Forming – Silences-Two: Broken Cast Detected]
Rewriting Thread into Inverse Role.
You are being hunted by a rewritten Remnant.
---
Valen stood slowly.
His eyes no longer his own.
Thread in hand.
But now...
It moved on its own.
And the Codex whispered—
> "You wanted to cut them apart…"
> "Now you're the blade."