Kael stepped through the tear.
He expected noise—compression, static, code screaming as it collapsed. But this wasn't code.
This was silence that had aged.
The kind that had watched millions of reboots and stayed untouched. A silence that wasn't empty… just full of things forgotten.
The space around him shimmered — as if undecided whether to be corridor or cliff, sky or chamber. Glitches tried to form shapes, then abandoned them mid-render. He was walking through unfinished reality. Pre-choice.
> "Kael."
The voice was female.
He didn't know her. But he did know the temperature of her tone — like rain soaked into cotton. Cold, but not hostile.
He turned.
And she was there.
Not a projection. Not a system avatar. A girl — late teens maybe, barefoot, soaked, standing under nothing, but dripping like she'd just walked out of a storm that didn't exist.
Her eyes held two different colors. Left: gray. Right: fractured glass, slowly spinning.
> "You left before we broke."
Kael's mind kicked sideways. Something in him moved — not a memory, not yet, but a space where one had been cut out.
> "I don't remember you," he said quietly.
The girl didn't flinch.
> "I'm not in the version you were allowed to keep."
That landed.
Hard.
---
The environment shifted. Fast.
Rain began falling. But just in reverse. Droplets moved upward from the ground, floating like glass bubbles.
They carried whispers.
Bits of Kael's own voice.
> "We're not meant to wake up—"
"Why would a perfect world need doors?"
"The protocol isn't broken. It's evolving."
Each whisper more distant than the last.
The girl walked toward him. As she did, the droplets avoided her. Like even the memory echoes were afraid of what she held.
When she reached him, she pressed two fingers to the side of his temple.
> "Do you want to see it?" she asked.
"What came before the Glass World?"
Kael didn't nod. He just didn't pull away.
And it flooded in.
---
A room.
No sky. No structure. Just terminals — thousands of them, pulsing, screaming through errors. The core AI looping, failing, restarting.
A label above the main display:
PROJECT OUBLIETTE: HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS STORAGE SIMULATION
Cycle: 007-EXT.
Time Since Origin Collapse: 91,066,201 seconds.
Then—
A coffin. Glass. A child inside. His own face. But younger.
And standing over him?
The girl.
Except now… she had no eyes. Just black sockets filled with spinning white rings.
---
Kael staggered back.
The vision collapsed. The girl stood still, watching him as if waiting for him to reject it.
But he didn't.
> "What is this?" he asked.
> "It's what your mind rejected to survive. The price of adaptation."
> "Adaptation to what?"
She looked up.
And for the first time, Kael realized the sky above wasn't empty.
It was glass. Thick, endless glass — and above that, silhouettes moved.
People. Cities. Versions.
Layers.
Stacked like forgotten timelines.
> "You're not in the real world, Kael," she said.
"You're in the shard that remembers it."
---
He felt it now. In his chest.
The ring in his palm throbbed. Not like an object — like a heartbeat.
He looked down.
The mark had changed.
Not just a ring now.
A spiral, wrapping inward.
Like a drain.
Or a countdown.
> "What happens if I remember all of it?" he asked.
> "Then you choose what dies," she whispered.
She turned.
The rain reversed direction again.
Time tried to scream.
And behind them both, the stairway returned — but this time, it led down.
---
End of Chapter Twelve