Falling.
At least, that's what it felt like at first.
Erevan couldn't tell if he was falling, flying, or simply being erased. The world wasn't made of air or gravity anymore—it was raw information collapsing into itself. A whirlpool of code, shards of fractured light spinning around him. Every sense broke and rebuilt in endless loops. Sound became color. Pain became static. Thought became a scream trapped behind his skull.
His body kept shifting. One blink, he was the Erevan who had first woken in the Anomaly's simulation—scarred, trembling, still human. The next, he was older, wearing a uniform he didn't recognize, muscles tight with purpose he didn't remember. Then, in another flicker, he wasn't flesh at all—just a form made of glowing glyphs and fragmented memories, drifting like a prism of himself through the void.
His system struggled to comprehend what he was becoming.
[ERROR: Anchor Unstable]
[Identity Fragmentation: 42%]
[Warning: Spiral Layer Breach Imminent]
The Codex spun beside him like a broken satellite, its pages tearing loose and orbiting him in glowing spirals. Each page whispered—half-spells, half-memories—and the words, somehow, pressed against his chest. He could feel them clawing, begging, questioning.
And clinging impossibly to his shoulder, serene as if nothing had changed, was Sir Quacksalot.
The Duck Emperor's golden feathers shimmered like a divine glitch. His tiny webbed feet clung to Erevan's shoulder, defying the storm of collapsing worlds. He tilted his head and quacked once—a solemn, weighty sound, as if to say, Relax, peasant. We've fallen from worse.
Erevan barked a breathless laugh, more hysteria than amusement. "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"
Sir Quacksalot's reply was another solemn quack. Ancient wisdom, or total idiocy? Erevan had stopped trying to guess.
Then, through the static of chaos, a voice pierced the void.
"Erevan!"
Kaelith. Her voice screamed impossibly far away, stretched and swallowed by light and static.
"Anchor yourself—don't let it rewrite you!"
Vega's distortion cut through right after, glitchy, broken, desperate.
And then—nothing.
Silence.
He hit something solid. Or maybe "solid" wasn't the right word. It felt like the concept of a floor pretending to exist beneath him, shards of fractured glass that hummed faintly under his weight. He staggered upright, lungs pulling in breaths that didn't belong to this reality.
The Spiral unfolded before him.
It wasn't a place. It was infinity, shattered and suspended—countless shards of glass hung in the black void, each one reflecting a different version of him.
Some reflections screamed, eyes hollow, blood leaking from their sockets.
Others grinned too widely, glitching like broken puppets.
A few were calm, resigned, staring back with eyes that knew endings he refused to face.
Every shard murmured in faint echoes, overlapping into a corrupted choir: his name. His failures. His fragments.
Erevan swallowed, tasting metal and static. His chest throbbed—where the shard had once been, now pulsing with faint, unnatural light. The Architect Heart still beat inside him, out of sync with reality, its rhythm too mechanical, too alive.
"Okay," he whispered, voice unsteady. "So… dead? Dreaming? Deleting? Take your bets, Duck."
Sir Quacksalot waddled to the edge of a hovering shard and quacked at his reflection. Multiple ducks stared back, each crowned differently, each radiating divine absurdity.
Erevan let out a strangled laugh. "Of course. Multiversal duck monarchy. Why not? It's not like my day could get any weirder."
But the laugh died as quickly as it had come.
One shard flickered nearby. It didn't reflect him this time—it showed memory.
Kaelith, standing amid the wreckage of the collapsing lab, her blade spinning arcs of light as she fought corrupted subjects. Her face was fierce, terrified, shouting his name.
Another shard revealed Vega—fracturing into three versions of themselves, glitching apart in overlapping timelines, all screaming for him to return.
Erevan's chest clenched. "I… I can't leave them."
The shards whispered back, voices smooth, familiar, layered like a thousand versions of his own tone.
They will fall without you.
He stiffened, fists curling. "You don't get to talk to me."
We don't talk, the voices said. We show.
Light flared. Dozens of shards illuminated around him, each showing something worse than the last. Towns dissolving into static. NPCs frozen mid-laugh. Players fading, collapsing into hollow code. Forests turned to wireframes. Cities consumed by digital stormfronts.
And in all of them—his name. Carved somewhere. A whisper. A signature. An infection.
Then, calm returned for a fraction of a second.
The system spoke, cold and deliberate.
[System Override Countdown: Paused at 0:00]
Paused. Waiting. For him.
The Codex floated to his side, pages fluttering open to a blank, glowing spread.
[Anchor Opportunity Detected]
[Anchor Rule: ???]
He could feel it tugging—like the Spiral itself was breathing in time with his pulse. It wanted him to write something. Anything. An anchor to stabilize this impossible plane.
But… what would he even anchor? Himself? The world? The Duck?
Sir Quacksalot tilted his head and, without hesitation, stomped his tiny golden foot onto the page. A radiant glyph flared beneath it.
[Support Action: Duck Emperor adds Anchor Option]
[Rule Option: Ducks Shall Traverse All Realities]
Erevan blinked, slack-jawed. "You've got to be kidding me."
The Spiral seemed to hum with quiet amusement, like the universe itself was laughing.
One shard drifted closer. Larger than the rest. Its light was softer, almost human.
Erevan turned toward it, pulse hammering in his ears. It didn't show Kaelith or Vega. It didn't show collapsing code or cities turned to wireframes.
It showed a boy.
A normal boy, sitting at a desk, headset on, typing furiously into a glowing keyboard. His skin was soft, pale under tired eyes with dark circles. And when the boy looked up, he didn't just reflect Erevan. He looked through the shard—right at him.
And whispered, "Dad?"
The word hit him harder than any glitch, any battle, any rewrite.
Erevan froze. The Spiral seemed to pause. Even the chaotic shards around him dimmed as if holding their breath. The boy's expression trembled between hope and confusion, blinking at him as though waiting for an answer he didn't have.
The Whisperer's voice slithered in, silk-smooth and venomous.
Do you see now? The fragments of you that were never meant to stay here? The truth your anchors hide?
Erevan's heart plummeted into a void he didn't know existed. His system screamed.
[Identity Fragmentation: 67%]
[Warning: Memory Contamination Detected]
The boy pressed his hands against the shard, eyes filling with tears.
"Why don't you remember me?"
Sir Quacksalot hopped up and down frantically on Erevan's shoulder, quacking in urgent bursts, trying to shatter the illusion.
Erevan's knees buckled. The Codex burned in his hands, pages flickering between blank glyphs and the boy's face.
His voice came out hoarse, trembling, utterly human. "Who the hell am I?"
The Spiral didn't answer with words.
It split open.
A fissure tore through the air ahead, bleeding pure static that hissed like white fire. Something crawled through the rift—deliberate, heavy, too familiar.
Erevan raised the Codex, trembling.
And then he saw it.
Himself.
Another Erevan, eyes white with code, smile stretched far too wide. Dragging behind him, a cracked Codex pulsing with wrong light.
[Fragment Detected: Identity Echo]
The Whisperer purred through the Spiral.
Welcome to the Spiral, anomaly. Try not to lose to yourself.
Erevan stared at the other version of him, a mirror twisted by code and chaos. One broken. One barely holding together.
The Spiral was infinite, and it was alive. Every shard pulsed with his heartbeat—until he realized the rhythm wasn't his anymore. It was the Architect Heart, pulsing inside him like a parasite that had learned to mimic life.
Kaelith's shard flared first. She was fighting through corridors half-collapsed by corruption, her hair streaked with blood, her blade dull from overuse. Every swing slower than the last. Codex fragments rained from the ceiling, cutting her cheek, and she didn't even flinch.
"Don't you dare disappear on me, Erevan!" she screamed at the air, at nothing. "You think I don't know what you're doing? You think I'll let you burn yourself again?"
Erevan reached for her shard. His hand went through it—no resistance, only light. Her voice slipped through his fingers like water.
Next came Vega's shard. Three versions of them flickered in overlapping loops, struggling to hold the others together as their timeline tore apart. Their voices braided together in glitching chorus:
"Hold—anchor—hold—"
And then all three snapped into static.
The shards shuddered like dying stars.
Erevan wanted to close his eyes. To breathe. To stop seeing what he couldn't save. But the Spiral didn't allow it. It fed him more.
Cities collapsing into wireframe grids. NPCs flickering out mid-motion. A thousand different versions of himself trying to hold it all together—and failing. Each one shouting anchor commands, each one fading before the words could finish.
He fell to his knees on a shard barely holding his weight. It cracked beneath him, splintering light up his arms.
"I tried," he whispered, voice breaking. "I tried to fix it all. Every loop, every rewrite, every—"
The words fractured into static.
Then came the boy's shard.
It hovered close this time, so close he could see the faint glow of a screen reflected in the boy's eyes, the cluttered desk, the quiet apartment behind him.
The boy spoke softly. "I waited for you. You said we'd play again after the update."
Erevan's throat locked. His pulse thundered so loud he could barely hear himself. The boy's face flickered at the edges—alive, gone, back again.
"I don't…" Erevan's voice cracked. "I don't remember that."
You do, whispered the Spiral. You buried it beneath your rewrites.
"No," he shook his head violently. "That was… before all this. Before the System. Before the Codex."
Before you chose to forget.
The Whisperer's voice slid in, silky, melodic, teasing.
"You were never born in this world, Erevan. You built it. You fed it. Every loop, every code-thread, every dying echo—it all leads back to you."
Erevan's hands trembled. "You're lying."
The Spiral didn't argue. It showed him.
Dozens of shards lit up at once, all showing the same boy—older, exhausted, staring at error screens flashing endlessly:
[Reality Recompile: Failure]
[User Disconnected]
And beneath it, a chat window, his own name. Erevan.
The boy typed: "Come back. Please."
The Whisperer breathed, velvet and cold.
He made you, and you made this. You are the recursion. The rewrite. The lie that refused to end.
The Spiral dimmed. Every shard around him turned dark—except one.
A single reflection remained.
It moved.
It stepped out of the glass, dragging a trail of code like chains of liquid light.
Erevan.
But not him. Not exactly.
The other version of himself stood upright, eyes pure white static, smile razor-thin. His outline shimmered between human and impossibly geometric, like a designer had quit halfway defining what a "being" should look like.
He spoke, voice flat and crystalline.
"You called yourself anomaly. But anomalies are errors. I am the correction."
Erevan staggered back. "You're my echo."
The reflection nodded. "No. I'm your remainder."
A pulse ran through the Spiral—deep, resonant, sickening. Every shard now reflected both of them, like the universe couldn't decide which one was real.
The Whisperer's voice hummed with delight, intimate and mocking.
He remembers what you abandoned. The choices you refused to finish. The pain you thought you could edit out.
Erevan raised the Codex, hands shaking. "I'm not letting you take this world."
The echo tilted its head. "You already did."
The Spiral trembled violently, collapsing inward. Shards fell, drifting into the black below, each vanishing with a soft shhh—the sound of erased code.
Erevan reached for one—any one—desperate to hold onto Kaelith's face, Vega's laugh, the boy's fading expression.
But every time, his fingers went through them.
"You can't anchor ghosts," the echo murmured. "Only rewrite them."
The Whisperer's laughter was everywhere now—smooth, resonant, omnipresent.
So, Erevan, which one will you be this time? The savior who destroys? The god who forgets? Or the rewrite that finally accepts what it erased?
Sir Quacksalot's faint quack echoed from somewhere far above, absurd and heartbreaking in the quiet storm.
Erevan didn't look up. His gaze locked on his echo—his own face, smiling with calm cruelty.
And for the first time, he understood the dread of being the anomaly.
He wasn't fighting to survive anymore.
He was fighting to remember who he was.
The echo stepped forward. The void beneath its feet trembled.
Erevan braced, Codex burning in his grasp.
The light between them surged—two realities colliding.
[IDENTITY COLLISION: IMMINENT]
And the Spiral collapsed into pure white.
The echo stepped closer, its movements unnervingly smooth, deliberate, like a reflection that had learned to walk. Every step it took, the shards around them shivered, tiny fractures racing through the Spiral like ripples across glass.
"You think you can hold this?" it asked, voice calm but sharp, crystalline, echoing through Erevan's mind as if bypassing his ears entirely. "You can't control the rewrite. You never could."
Erevan's hands clenched around the Codex, the glyphs blazing white-hot, almost biting into his skin. Pain and power merged in a dizzying pulse.
"I decide what I control," he spat, voice breaking, trembling yet resolute. "I decide who I am!"
The echo smiled, thin and impossible. "You've rewritten everything else… why not yourself?"
Erevan swallowed hard. His body trembled. The Spiral was feeding on every fragment of him—memories, pain, triumphs, every laugh, every regret. Scenes flickered in shards around him: the first time he had met Kaelith, Vega's fragmented warnings, Sir Quacksalot flapping impossibly through storms of collapsing code. Every image tugged at him, and he felt like he might unravel under the weight.
But he couldn't stop. Couldn't let himself stop.
He screamed, a raw, human sound that ripped through the Spiral, making the shards vibrate violently. "I remember! I remember everything! And I… I am me!"
[System Override Countdown: Resuming]
The Codex throbbed in his hands, pulsing in time with the Architect Heart inside him. Pages fluttered wildly, glyphs spilling into the void, stitching together fractured memories and corrupted code into something coherent—something that was him.
The echo lunged. Its hands reached for Erevan, for the Codex, for everything he held. But Erevan was faster. Or maybe it was desperation.
"I am not your mistake," he roared. "I am not your echo. I am… me!"
The Spiral reacted instantly. Light flared, shards collapsing into streams of white energy that swirled around Erevan, making him dizzy, making him feel every pulse of the universe at once.
Time bent. Space screamed. Thoughts collided. Every memory, every shard, every echo of pain and joy merged into a single, roaring clarity.
And then it happened.
The Codex exploded into brilliance, burning away fragments that weren't him, stripping away the whispers of the Spiral, the manipulations of the Whisperer. Erevan felt himself expand—not physically, but in every sense of being. Past, present, and potential futures surged through him, threading together into one coherent pulse.
He could see Kaelith, Vega, Sir Quacksalot, the boy. He could feel their hope, their fear, their trust. And he could feel himself. Pure, human, flawed, unstoppable.
The echo faltered, its crystalline smile twisting as it realized what was happening. "This… this isn't possible—"
"It is possible," Erevan said, voice raw but steady, echoing with certainty. "Because I decide. I anchor. I rewrite. But only what I choose to hold."
Shards collided in blinding arcs of light. The Spiral shuddered, buckling under the force of Erevan's will. Pieces of himself, pieces of the world, pieces of code and memory, all fused into one living, breathing surge of power.
And in that instant, the echo could only watch.
Erevan's pulse synced with the Architect Heart inside him. Every heartbeat sent ripples through the Spiral, collapsing false realities, folding corrupted fragments into pure light.
[IDENTITY COLLISION: IMMINENT]
Erevan screamed—not from pain, not from fear, but from a raw, feral affirmation of his existence. "I am Erevan!"
The Spiral contracted around him, spinning, twisting, unmaking and remaking itself in a brilliant spiral of white. Reality itself seemed to lean into him, like a storm bending to the wind of his will.
And then… silence.
All the shards vanished, leaving only a single point of light, a faint echo of everything that had come before.
A feather drifted down from nowhere, glowing faintly golden. Sir Quacksalot quacked softly in the distance, small but resolute.
Erevan's breath came in ragged gasps. His hands were scorched from the Codex, his vision blurred with afterimages of the Spiral, but he was whole.
And somewhere deep inside, the Spiral whispered—not as a threat, not as an echo—but as a reminder.
You are the Rewrite.
And he was.