The ladder groaned with the weight of five bodies descending into darkness. Rust flaked off under Lucas's grip, drifting down into the abyss below like metallic snow. The only light came from three sources:
1. The soft gold glow of Lucas's artifact.
2. The amber cracks in Dain's stone skin.
3. The carvings on the walls, Voidmark's trail, pulsing with faint violet light every ten meters.
Celine climbed below them with the eerie grace of a spider. No hesitation, no missteps. She moved like she'd memorized this descent in another life.
"How far down does this go?" Lucas called, his voice echoing in the cylindrical shaft.
"Until it doesn't," Celine replied without looking up.
Vex's growl rumbled upward. "Helpful."
They climbed in silence for what felt like an hour. Lucas's arms burned. The artifact in his chest throbbed with each rung, syncing with the pulsing carvings on the walls. He focused on them to distract himself from the growing ache in his shoulders.
The symbols were not just random markings. They formed a repeating sequence, a code. Lucas's glitching hand tingled whenever he passed one, as if recognizing a familiar pattern.
CLAVEM TENET VOIDMARK.
VOIDMARK SYSTEMA FRANGET.
VOIDMARK HIC FUIT.
Over and over. A mantra carved into the metal of the world.
Dain paused on a rung just above Lucas, his stone knuckles tightening. "Something's off."
Nyra stopped climbing. Her rabbit ears twitched violently. "The air changed."
Lucas hadn't noticed until she said it, but she was right. The stale, metallic scent of the shaft had shifted. Now there was a new smell, sweet and chemical, like rotting flowers and ozone.
Celine froze below them. "Don't move."
They hung there in the darkness, suspended on a rusted ladder over nothingness. Lucas's heart hammered against his ribs. He could hear it now, a faint humming vibration coming from the walls themselves.
Then the carvings changed.
The violet light in the symbols flared bright, then shifted color, cycling through sickly greens and corrosive yellows. The words themselves rearranged before their eyes, the metal flowing like liquid to form new sentences.
WELCOME, GLITCH-BEARER.
THE ARCHITECT AWAITS.
YOUR SOUL WILL FEED THE MACHINE.
"Trap," Vex snarled.
"No," Celine said, her voice calm. "A test. Voidmark warned about this. The descent isn't just physical. It's conceptual. The closer we get to the Core, the more the System tries to rewrite our intentions."
Lucas's glitching hand spasmed. Static crawled up his forearm. "It's trying to talk to me."
"Don't listen," Nyra said sharply. "It's a corruption echo. The System's memory of everyone who's climbed down here and failed."
The humming grew louder. The walls began to sweat a clear, viscous fluid that dripped past them into the dark. Where it touched the ladder, the rust dissolved, leaving shiny, new-looking metal behind.
"Climb faster," Celine ordered.
They descended with renewed urgency. The dripping fluid sizzled as it missed them by inches. Lucas's lungs burned. The artifact flared hotter, pushing back against the oppressive energy of the shaft.
After another twenty minutes of frantic climbing, Celine called out, "Platform! Ten meters down!"
Lucas almost sobbed with relief. His arms were trembling with exhaustion. He followed the others down, his boots finally touching solid metal with a dull clang.
They stood on a circular platform barely five meters across. In the center stood a stone pedestal, and on it rested a single, perfect blue crystal the size of a human heart. It pulsed with soft, rhythmic light.
Dain approached it cautiously. "Another trap?"
"Memory crystal," Celine said, stepping forward. "Voidmark left them as waypoints. Touch it."
Vex blocked her path with a clawed arm. "You first."
Celine gave him a look that was both annoyed and strangely fond. Without hesitation, she placed her small hand on the crystal.
It flashed bright. Images exploded into the air around them, holographic and shimmering.
A man stood where Celine had been a moment before, tall and thin, with eyes that glowed with the same violet light as the carvings. Voidmark. He looked exhausted, his clothes torn, blood dried on his temple. He was carving the symbols into the wall with a dagger made of solidified light.
"I don't know if anyone will ever find this," Voidmark's recorded voice said, echoing in the small space. "But if you're hearing this, you're close. The Architect's influence is strong here. It will try to make you doubt. It will show you things that aren't real."
He paused, looking directly at where Lucas stood, as if seeing through time.
"Especially you, Glitch-Bearer. It will show you your world. It will show you the life you lost. It will offer it back to you in exchange for turning back. Don't believe it. That world is already infected. The System is seeping through the cracks. My presence there is proof."
The image flickered. Voidmark grimaced in pain, clutching his chest where Lucas now had the artifact.
"The descent has three trials. You've passed the first, the Trial of Doubt. The walls tried to rewrite you. You resisted. The second trial is ahead, the Trial of Memory. The System will use your past against you. Your regrets. Your shames. It will give them form and set them against you."
He coughed, and violet light spilled from his lips.
"The third trial is the Trial of Self. That one, I cannot prepare you for. It is different for everyone. But remember this: the System feeds on what makes you you. Your identity is your weapon. Your glitch is your shield. Do not let it homogenize you."
The crystal pulsed one final time, and Voidmark's last words hung in the air like a promise and a threat.
"The Architect is not a god. It is a prisoner, same as us. It built this cage, and now it's trapped inside. It is hungry, and lonely, and insane. But it can be killed. I've seen the blueprint in the Core's code. There is a weakness. A single line of original programming that even it cannot rewrite. Find it. Exploit it."
The hologram faded. The crystal went dark.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Nyra broke the silence. "Three trials. We passed one without even knowing it."
"That means the second one starts now," Vex said, his eyes scanning the darkness beyond the platform.
Celine pointed. There was an archway on the far side of the platform, leading into a tunnel. The walls of the tunnel glowed with a soft, warm light, and the air from it smelled familiar to Lucas. Like old books and synthetic carpet and the faint ozone of a computer left running too long.
His dorm room.
"That's not possible," Lucas whispered.
The tunnel's entrance shimmered, and for a moment, Lucas saw his own bedroom at the edge of his university campus. The faded poster of a game he loved, the messy desk, the window overlooking the parking lot.
"The Trial of Memory," Celine said quietly. "It's pulling from your mind."
"I'm not going in there," Lucas said, taking a step back.
"You have to," Celine said. "The trial is personalized. For you, it's your old world. For someone else, it would be different. But we all have to face our own tunnel."
Dain flexed his stone hands. "What's in there?"
"Echoes," Celine said. "Fragments of memory given form. They'll try to convince you to stay. To give up. To accept a comfortable lie instead of the painful truth."
Vex sniffed the air. "I smell wet fur and steel. My old pack's den." His expression darkened. "Clever."
Nyra's ears were flat against her head. "I hear marketplace bells. And my mother's voice."
They all stood at the entrance to their own personal tunnels, visible only to each individual. Lucas could see the others staring at different archways that he couldn't see, each leading to a different nightmare.
"Stay together," Celine said. "The tunnels might try to separate us, but if we hold to each other's presence, we can navigate them."
She reached out and took Vex's hand. He flinched but didn't pull away. Nyra took Lucas's glitching hand, and Dain placed a stone palm on Lucas's shoulder.
"We go in together," Celine said.
They stepped forward.
The world dissolved.
***
Lucas stood in his dorm room.
Sunlight streamed through the window. His computer hummed on the desk, a game paused on the monitor. His bed was unmade. A half-eaten sandwich sat on a plate next to his keyboard.
It was so perfect, so exactly as he remembered it, that for a moment he forgot it was an illusion.
"Lucas?" a voice called from the doorway.
He turned. His mother stood there, holding a laundry basket. She looked tired but smiled at him. "You going to class today? Or just gaming all afternoon?"
Lucas's throat tightened. "Mom?"
"Who else?" she said, rolling her eyes fondly. "I brought your laundry up. Try to keep it off the floor this time, okay?"
She set the basket down and turned to leave.
"Wait," Lucas said.
She paused. "What is it, honey?"
"This isn't real," Lucas said, his voice barely above a whisper.
His mother's smile didn't waver. "Of course it's real. You've been studying too hard. Maybe take a break." She walked out, closing the door behind her.
Lucas looked down at his hands. They were his hands, not glitching, not glowing. Just normal hands. He was wearing his favorite hoodie, the one with the torn pocket he'd never gotten around to fixing.
He could stay here.
He could go to class. He could finish his degree. He could live his life. The artifact in his chest was silent, dormant. The System felt like a distant dream.
Then he heard Nyra's voice, faint and distorted, as if through water. "Lucas. Don't believe it."
He looked around. The room wavered at the edges, like a video glitching. For a split second, he saw stone walls instead of drywall, dirt floor instead of carpet.
He took a step toward the door, then stopped.
On his desk, his phone buzzed. He picked it up. A text from his roommate Nick.
"Hey man, sorry about the sandwich thing. Didn't know you were that allergic. My bad."
Another text followed. "Wanna grab pizza later? My treat."
Lucas stared at the screen. This was the apology he'd never gotten. The reconciliation that never happened because he'd died.
He could have this. He could have the forgiveness. The friendship.
"Lucas." This time it was Dain's voice, gruff and strained. "It's a cage. A pretty cage."
Lucas closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked not at the room, but at the artifact's interface in his mind. The one only he could see.
[VOIDMARK'S INTEGRATION: 89%]
[TIME REMAINING: ≈11 HOURS]
[WARNING: MEMORY ASSIMILATION DETECTED]
The numbers grounded him. This was a trap. A delicious, comforting, perfect trap.
He walked to the door and opened it.
Instead of the dorm hallway, he saw a long corridor made of shifting memories. To his left, a scene from his childhood birthday party. To his right, his first kiss behind the school gym. Ahead, his graduation, his parents smiling proudly.
Each memory called to him. Each one promised comfort, belonging, home.
He saw Nyra standing frozen before a memory of her own. A bustling marketplace, a rabbit-eared woman who looked like an older version of Nyra beckoning her forward. Nyra took a step toward her.
"Nyra, no!" Lucas shouted.
He reached out with his glitching hand. Static leapt from his fingers and arced through the memory corridor. The image of the marketplace flickered.
Nyra shook her head as if waking from a dream. She looked at Lucas, her eyes clearing. "Thanks."
Dain stood before a memory of a training yard, a younger version of himself sparring with a laughing woman. His stone fists were clenched.
Vex was crouched before the entrance to a wolf den, his body halfway shifted, tears streaming down his face.
Celine was the only one moving forward. She walked through her memories without pausing, without looking. She passed a memory of herself older, teaching children in a sunlit room. She didn't even glance at it.
"Follow me," Celine called back. "Don't look at them. They're anchors. They're meant to weigh you down."
Lucas focused on her small form ahead. He walked forward, ignoring the birthday party, the graduation, the proud smiles. Each step was harder than the last, as if the memories were physically trying to hold him back.
His mother appeared in front of him again. "Lucas, where are you going? Dinner's almost ready."
"I'm not hungry," Lucas said, pushing past her.
The memory dissolved into static.
They regrouped in a circular chamber where the memory corridors converged. Everyone looked shaken.
"Everyone still here?" Celine asked.
Vex nodded, wiping his face roughly. "Still here."
Dain flexed his hands. "Still here."
Nyra's ears were drooping. "Still here."
Lucas took a deep breath. "Still here."
The chamber had one exit, a simple wooden door. On it was carved a single word:
SELF.
"The third trial," Celine said. "Are you ready?"
No one answered.
Lucas looked at the door. The Trial of Self. Whatever waited behind it was the last barrier between them and the Core. Between them and the Architect.
Between them and ending this.
He reached for the handle.