The final stair dissolved beneath his foot as Kael stepped forward—and then there was nothing.
No floor.
No wall.
No fall.
Just… gray.
It wasn't fog, and it wasn't shadow. It was absence—a space that refused to define itself.
But then, as he exhaled, the world responded.
With every breath, the gray shifted—subtly shaping itself around him, like ink on invisible paper. A floor formed beneath his boots, smooth and cold. A ceiling above, made of broken mirror shards. Walls bled into view, covered in markings that looked like both writing and veins.
Kael stood in the Room With No Door.
He didn't know how he knew the name. He just did. Like it had been implanted. Or remembered.
The room was silent, but it wasn't still.
The mirrors above watched him.
Not reflecting. Not copying. Watching.
Kael looked up.
In one mirror, he saw himself as a child—hooked to wires in a hospital bed.
In another, he saw himself killing someone.
In the third, he was sitting across from someone that looked like… Syla. Subject #02.
He had never met her.
But he remembered her.
> "Is this what the fragments do?" he asked aloud.
"Bleed the old cycles into the new?"
The mirrors didn't answer.
Instead, the room changed again.
A soft pulse came from the cube in his pocket—
> Tick…
And a desk appeared in front of him. Made of the same bone-glass as the trees from the surface. On it, a second cube. Smaller than the first.
This one was… black.
Kael reached toward it—
And the mirrors shattered.
Not violently. Surgically. As if something cut through their perception of him and didn't like what it saw.
And out from the fragments came a figure.
Not like the last. Not a version of himself.
Not a guard.
Not a memory.
This thing didn't walk.
It folded.
Each step was a crease in reality, folding space inward to move closer.
It had no face—only a surface of constantly shifting reflections. Kael could see thousands of himself in its skin. All in pain. All failing.
And the room suddenly felt too loud, though no sound was made.
> Tick.
The black cube pulsed.
And then Kael heard the words—not from the creature, but from the Protocol itself:
> "You are not authorized to hold two fragments."
Kael stood his ground.
> "Then delete me."
Silence.
And then, a new word appeared on the surface of the cube:
> ECHOLOCK
The creature stopped.
Its reflection-skin began to peel away, revealing something underneath—not metal. Not flesh.
Script.
Moving code. Written in a dead language. Wrapping around a core of light too bright to look at.
Kael realized what it was.
> "You're a part of the system too."
> "But you forgot what you were."
The creature twitched.
> Tick.
The mark on Kael's hand began spinning in reverse.
And suddenly—he understood what the Echo was:
Not a monster.
Not a glitch.
The Echo was the system's memory of its own failure—a living record of every time a Subject broke containment, every time the Protocol faltered, every time someone saw behind the curtain and kept going.
And now it was standing in front of him, trying to stop the 18th cycle from breaking like the others.
Kael took the black cube.
The room shuddered.
His mind exploded with images:
– Syla, bleeding from her eyes.
– Subject 05 walking into fire willingly.
– A control panel marked "FRACTURE CORE – LOCKED"
– A map of the Glass World, and its layers.
– A voice whispering in a panic: "We didn't make this. We just found it and built over it."
And then—
Kael opened his eyes.
The creature was gone.
So was the room.
He was somewhere new.
A desert of floating architecture. Towers hanging upside down. Bridges that looped into themselves. A sun that set in four directions at once.
And in the sky above, a giant symbol burned into the clouds:
> ⊗ PROTOCOL SHIFT DETECTED
The System had changed the rules again.
Because now, Kael wasn't just progressing.
He was infecting the world with memory.
---
End of Chapter Six