Dominion Protocol Nexus – Layer Seven
The walls pulsed red.
Every monitor flickered with cascading error codes. The anchor trace linked to Sector 12-C had vanished mid-thread. No death signal. No energy collapse. No rollback residue.
Just absence.
The lead technician's hands trembled over the console. "I reran the trace six times. It's not a break."
"What is it then?" asked the supervisor, voice sharp.
The tech stared at the glyph feed.
"It's a… paradox."
Across the vault, Dominion's elder script engine coughed static.
ERROR 3917 – GHOST THREAD DETECTED
SOURCE: UNKNOWN
RECURSION LEVEL: EXCEEDED
ANCHOR: LOST
Then, without manual authorization, a cold voice triggered a buried protocol.
INHERITANCE PROTOCOL – STATUS: ACTIVE.
SEED THREAD OVERRIDE IN EFFECT.
ROLLBACK COMMAND: LOCKED.
Silence followed.
The kind that meant someone, somewhere, had just lost the ability to play god.
⸻
Elsewhere, in a room filled with dust and warmth—
Kael opened his eyes.
Senna lay curled beside him, her hand still looped around his wrist, the lines of their joined glyph burned faintly into the floorboards.
He blinked.
The air felt… cleaner.
Liora's voice floated in from the kitchen. "Senna, I swear if you've used up the chalk again—"
Kael shot upright.
Liora.
Alive.
Her voice. Her rhythm. But older, steadier. Weathered by something else.
Senna stirred. "She sounds happy," she murmured.
Kael could barely breathe. "She sounds real."
But he felt it even before he stood.
His body.
Different.
Not stronger. Not faster.
Just… complete.
He moved, and his hand caught a cup mid-fall before it touched the table. No thought. No effort.
Years of experience. Memories from timelines that had collapsed — decisions he never remembered making, battles he'd never fought. And yet… his body knew them.
A reflex triggered from a thousand echoes.
Senna looked up at him, eyes bright. "You're catching up."
Kael's voice cracked. "What is this place?"
Senna stepped off the couch and looked around — as if seeing the world through a different lens.
"This is the thread we earned. Not perfect. Not safe. But hidden."
Outside, the city looked familiar — towers still stretched like needles into the sky. But the guild banners were wrong. Dominion's emblems were different. Slanted. Faded. As if history had unwritten itself in places.
Kael asked, "Are they still hunting us?"
Senna shook her head.
"They can't trace us. The system doesn't know where we are."
⸻
Deep in Dominion's buried systems, invisible to all public feeds, a whisper unfurled across rollback nodes:
THE SEED HAS INHERITED ITSELF.
PROTOCOLS NO LONGER APPLY.
CONTAINMENT IMPOSSIBLE.
Kael Varin — the man they had tried to erase from history — had finally become unreadable.
Not dead.
Not gone.
Just outside the rules.
⸻
⸻
The first one came at breakfast.
Kael reached for a bowl of warm lentils, and instead of steam—
Snow.
The scent of frozen iron. His blade locked with Rex's spear mid-swing, the crack of aura-glass beneath their boots. Rex was younger here, crueler. Laughing as he pushed Kael toward a collapsing edge.
Kael moved without thought—sidestepped, parried.
The moment shattered.
Back in the kitchen, the bowl tipped and spilled across the table. Liora froze mid-step.
"Kael?"
He stared at the lentils dripping off the edge of the wood, chest rising too fast.
"I—" He wiped his hand. "Nothing. Just tired."
But he wasn't.
He felt sharper than ever.
Too sharp.
⸻
Later, as Senna napped with her notebook curled beneath her chin, Kael tried to write.
The pen trembled.
His hand remembered holding a different stylus — Dominion-grade, used in command signatures. He could see Aria standing beside him, bruised but proud. A badge on her shoulder that didn't exist here. He remembered saying:
"You didn't have to take the bullet."
And her answer:
"You didn't give me much of a choice, did you, Captain?"
He flinched.
That memory wasn't real.
Not in this life.
But the weight of it settled in his chest like a scar already healed.
⸻
By the third time, Liora saw it happen.
Kael was standing by the window. Then suddenly, he dropped to a crouch, one hand flying up as if bracing against a blast.
There was nothing there.
Only silence.
She moved to him slowly. "Another one?"
He didn't look up.
"Aria died in one," he said. "She took Senna's place in a rollback blast."
Liora didn't ask who Aria was. Or what it meant. Instead, she touched his shoulder and said:
"She must have loved her."
Kael nodded.
He didn't explain how many timelines he was starting to remember. How many deaths. How many failures.
He didn't have to.
Liora's eyes already carried the answer.
⸻
That night, he walked the apartment alone.
Everything was still. Senna's breath was slow, even. Liora slept, one arm across her side.
Kael stared at his reflection in the hallway mirror.
The cracks were gone.
But he wasn't whole.
He wasn't just Kael anymore.
He was all of them.
Every version that had failed.
Every one that had fought.
And when he stepped into the hallway—
His body moved before his brain did.
He ducked. Twisted. Spun to strike—
But there was no enemy.
Only empty air.
Kael stood still, breath frozen.
That reflex wasn't from this life.
It was from a version where he died here — ambushed in this exact hallway by a Reaper while holding Senna in his arms.
The system was rewriting him.
Not to erase him.
To save him.
To consolidate its paradox.
Senna hadn't just unlocked safety.
She'd made him the convergence point.
⸻
⸻
Kael had seen Senna's notebook dozens of times.
She clutched it in her sleep. Sketched in it at breakfast. Hummed while drawing in silence, as though her hands weren't following thoughts — but threads no one else could see.
But tonight, as he tucked her in and gently slid the notebook from her arms, something changed.
It was warm.
Faintly pulsing.
Not with magic, not with rollback bleed.
With organization.
He flipped to the first page.
Glyphs, yes — but not decorative.
They formed gridlines.
Curved, spiraling, nested in odd angles. No central axis. No clear top-down logic. But Kael had patched enough timelines to know the shape of event threads.
And this wasn't just recording them.
This was connecting them.
⸻
Page after page, the images grew more detailed.
One looked like an abstract ruin — until Kael realized the wall shape matched the war room where he'd watched Aria die… in a memory that wasn't his until yesterday.
Another page showed a dome of woven light, flickering as he angled it toward the lamp. He blinked.
Only a handful of timelines ever activated light-lock glyph encoding.
Senna had no way of knowing that.
And yet, here it was. Buried between her finger-painted spirals and half-colored dreams.
⸻
Some pages shimmered like melted wax.
Burned-out glyphs. Too much energy?
Or protected?
He pressed his cracked thumb to one glyph — and it sparked, dimly, then vanished again. A rejection.
Not yet, it seemed to say.
When he reached the final page, it was blank.
Until he turned it counterclockwise, folded two corners back, and held it to the lamp.
Lines appeared.
Not random.
A web.
Each "node" bore a glyph he recognized — some from raids he'd won, some from lives he hadn't lived.
But at the center…
One symbol pulsed softly.
A curled, nested glyph.
His own anchor signature.
Not from this life.
From all of them.
⸻
Kael laid the pages across the floor, side by side, breath shallow.
They connected.
A map of echo-memories. Not places. Moments.
Losses. Forks. Choices. Failures. Sacrifices.
She had drawn them all — not with knowledge. With instinct.
Footsteps.
Liora stopped in the hallway.
Kael didn't move.
"She's not just remembering," he whispered.
Liora stepped beside him, eyes wide as the glyphs flickered in the lamplight.
"She's navigating."
⸻
The interface had started glitching two nights ago.
At first, Kael dismissed it — flickers, skipped frames, a hiccup in raid-logging latency. Dominion firewalls were tightening. It made sense.
Until his raid ID dropped mid-run.
For four entire seconds, the system forgot who he was.
And in his place… another tag flickered.
Not NULL.
Not UNKNOWN.
[Anchor Designate: VARIN.SENNA.01]
Kael froze.
The tag repeated again the next morning, when he ran a local patch script to stabilize the roof after a minor spatial quake.
The system flagged him as a ghost signature.
But the rollback registered her.
⸻
Liora found him at the kitchen table, fingers shaking over his commpad, replaying the diagnostics.
"You're not eating," she said quietly.
"I don't need to."
"You're vibrating."
He turned the screen. "Look."
The glyph line was unmistakable. Curved in Senna's exact spirals — not copied glyphs. Organic ones. Original constructs. And worse…
… the signature beside it was full access.
Thread Prime: Seed Origin — Rollback Access Level 7.
Permission status: INHERITED.
Status: Accepted.
Liora's voice barely made it above a whisper.
"She's not casting your glyphs…"
Kael nodded slowly. "She's replacing them."
⸻
Meanwhile, across the rooftops, Aria knelt behind a ventilation cluster on the tower edge. Her fingers hovered over her lens array, eyes locked on a shadow team threading through Sector 12-C.
Dominion.
But they weren't armed like raiders or clean-up squads.
These carried null-glyphs, echo-silencers, dampening rods.
Containment gear.
She whispered into her commlink. "They're not here to kill him."
Her aide on the other end asked, "Then what?"
"They're here to catch the echo before it escapes."
⸻
Kael moved too late.
By the time he crossed the living room, the hum had started.
Senna was sitting on the floor, notebook open, but untouched.
Her lips moved in soundless rhythm.
Her hands fluttered in front of her — not drawing, not casting.
Conducting.
Shapes hovered mid-air.
Glyphs suspended like glass threads, orbiting one another, folding into a single glyph the size of a doorframe.
Kael reached for her—
And the glyph flared.
His reflection twisted in the crystalized surface — but it wasn't just him.
It was every version of him.
Kael from the Ridge Raid. Kael from the null-timeline. Kael as a father, a weapon, a ruin, a myth.
All stacked. All behind her.
The glyph cracked.
Senna blinked once. The glow vanished. The room was still.
She turned to him, eyes calm. "I didn't mean to. It was… listening."
Kael's voice barely found air. "What was?"
She looked toward the window. "The one who remembers everything."
⸻
Liora arrived moments later.
The glow had faded, but the burn marks on the floor remained. Patterns. Spirals. Choices.
Choices her daughter didn't yet understand — but still made.
Kael looked up, eyes hollow. "She didn't mean to open it."
Liora knelt beside him, arms wrapping around Senna gently. "But she can, can't she?"
Kael swallowed. "She's not supposed to have access."
"But she does."
Kael nodded.
And in his silence, the truth anchored:
Senna hadn't inherited the cost.
She'd inherited everything.
⸻
⸻
There was an old myth from the early rollback wars.
Kael remembered it from the early patchrunner forums — back when they were still called "fixers" and no one knew what a Reaper was.
The story of a runner who burned out their entire thread — erased their own timeline so completely that no echo remained. Not even memory.
It wasn't death.
It was deletion.
At the time, Kael thought it was a cautionary tale.
Now, it looked like an option.
⸻
The command interface opened itself.
That's what chilled him.
He didn't activate it.
He didn't summon it.
But after Senna's glyph… the system just offered it.
No blinking warnings.
No password verification.
Just a silent prompt:
"Submit rollback signature for Full Inheritance Transfer?"
Below it, the tooltip shimmered.
"Executing will reroute anchor protocols and terminate host rollback trace.
All stored phases, combat logs, and system memory will be purged.
Seed identity will be preserved. Host signature will become NULL."
Kael stared at it, hand hovering.
Not erased from life.
Just from memory.
No Reaper would follow him.
No Dominion agent would find him.
And Senna would be safe.
Permanently.
⸻
Across the district, Aria pulled a feed from a deep system relay.
It was encrypted, but she cracked it with an old Dominion backdoor she wasn't supposed to still have.
The voice she heard made her blood run cold.
"We have the girl's thread signature. The glitch trace was real."
Another voice responded. Older. Colder.
"If the father activates a transfer, initiate Tier Black protocol.
Memory-wipe the seed.
Burn her thread."
Aria muted the line.
"This isn't a containment," she muttered. "This is a culling."
She closed her case and ran.
⸻
In the apartment, Kael reached for the command.
Just one touch.
His cracked fingers hovered over the interface.
"I can give her a life," he whispered to no one.
And then—
A pulse behind him.
He turned.
Senna stood in the hallway, arms at her side.
Not humming.
Not drawing.
Just… glowing.
In front of her, a glyph spun into the air.
Not hers.
His.
The old glyph from his first recorded rollback. One he hadn't shown her. One that saved Liora in timeline three.
She cast it perfectly.
And she hadn't even seen it.
He fell to his knees.
Because it wasn't his anymore.
It was hers.
⸻
The interface blinked.
Rollback Transfer: Canceled
Echo Sync: Re-established
Thread Type: Dual Anchor
Kael's vision blurred.
He didn't need to erase himself to save her.
Because she had already chosen to carry him.
Not his burden.
His memory.
And that… meant Dominion hadn't prepared for this outcome.
They had prepared for a weapon.
Not a daughter.
⸻
The system should have crashed.
That's what Kael kept telling himself.
His override glyph — the failsafe — had always severed active rollback threads. The one thing that could safely disconnect a corrupted sync.
He activated it now.
Nothing happened.
Worse: Senna's echo responded instead.
The rollback field didn't collapse.
It opened.
⸻
At first, it felt like a hum in the air — deep, vibrating through the bones of the house.
The lights flickered.
Glass rattled.
Liora shouted from the other room.
But Kael couldn't move.
Senna stood in the center of the living room, one hand lifted.
The glyph she'd drawn now hovered mid-air — radiant and spinning.
Her voice was calm.
"Something's listening."
Kael stepped forward. "What is?"
The glyph cracked.
And the world folded inward.
⸻
There was no transition.
One breath they were standing in the house.
The next — a space of white and shadow, where floor and sky were the same thing.
Kael turned fast.
Senna floated inches above the mirrored surface, eyes wide but not afraid.
"Where are we?" she asked.
Kael looked up. "Inside the rollback thread."
"But… it's not just code."
"No," Kael said. "It's everything the system remembers. Every path. Every reset."
He stepped forward — and the space reacted.
A vision snapped into place:
Kael, kneeling over Liora's body — the first timeline. Blood soaking his hands. The Reaper hovering above him.
He turned away.
A second vision opened:
Senna alone. No glow. No glyphs. Living with strangers in a high-rise warded by Dominion.
A third:
Kael wearing Dominion black, glyph branded onto his neck like a collar. Rewriting breach logs on command.
He fell to one knee.
Senna came beside him, quiet. "They're not real?"
"They're real," Kael said. "Just not ours."
He reached out — and the memory shattered like glass.
More surrounded them.
A thousand timelines. Fractured echoes.
Some where they lived. Some where they died.
Some where rollback had never been discovered at all.
And at the center of them all:
A still point. A waiting figure. Cloaked in glitch. Eyes void-black.
A Reaper.
⸻
Kael stepped in front of Senna.
But the Reaper didn't move.
It watched.
Its voice was the whisper of static.
"You walk the threads you once severed."
Kael's fists clenched. "We didn't come here."
"No.
You were pulled.
Two echoes syncing in defiance."
Kael growled. "You want to stop us?"
The Reaper tilted its head.
"We want to see if you understand."
A new vision unfolded — Kael and Senna together, back to back in a breach, glyphs flying between them in perfect sync.
It shimmered.
Broke.
"You've seen what can be," the Reaper said.
"Will you choose what must be?"
Kael turned to Senna.
Her glow flickered — scared, yes, but steady.
She reached out.
Took his hand.
Their glyphs overlapped.
Two echoes. One path.
They stepped forward.
And the Convergence shattered around them.