Status: Transfer Complete. Destination: [UNDERWORLD/NEXUS/0]
The fall ended not with impact, but with resolution.
One moment I was dissolving into static, the next I was solidifying into something that approximated solid. My senses rebooted in staggered, glitching sequence:
Hearing first: A cacophony of broken music boxes, overlapping radio static, and whispered fragments of conversations in languages I shouldn't know but somehow did—and didn't.
Smell second: Ozone, old paper, rust, and the sweet-rot scent of decaying data.
Sight last: And what a sight.
I was lying on my back on a surface that looked like cobblestones but felt like solidified television static. Above me stretched not a sky, but an infinite, shifting mosaic of broken screens. Each displayed a fragment of a different reality: a sun setting over an ocean, a classroom from the 1950s, a battle in space, a quiet forest, all playing on loop, all edged with jagged cracks and pixelation. The "sky" was a patchwork quilt of everything the System had ever deleted or forgotten.
I sat up, my body protesting with new, strange aches—not physical, but existential. The high-pitched whine in my right ear was gone, replaced by the ambient chaos. My sense of touch was still muted, my emotional range flatlined. The voids in my memory throbbed like phantom limbs.
I was in a city. Or a parody of one.
Buildings rose around me in impossible architecture: a Victorian townhouse merged with the cockpit of a starship; a neon-lit diner stacked precariously on top of a Greek temple; a waterfall flowing upward into the doorway of a floating geodesic dome. Everything was cobbled together from mismatched pieces of realities, held in place by glowing golden seams of code that pulsed like veins.
The tags here were different. Not clean system text, but handwritten, scrawled, stamped, or burned into the air.
Above a shop with a sign reading "Glimmer's Echo Emporium" in seven different fonts:
A creature that was part-cat, part-typewriter, and part-silhouette slithered past, leaving a trail of inky paw-prints that faded into
tags. Its tag read:This was the Underworld. The backdoors. The recycle bin of existence.
And I had just been dumped in it.
"Get up. You're blocking the thoroughfare."
The voice was dry, crackling with age and static, like a recording played one too many times. I looked up.
A man stood over me. Or something wearing the shape of a man. He looked like a walking library catastrophe. His "body" was composed of stacked, leather-bound books, scroll cases, and data-slates, all held together by belts made of magnetic tape and sinew that looked suspiciously like old ethernet cables. Where a face should be, there was an open book, its pages fluttering slightly in the non-existent wind. Words formed and reformed on the pages, shaping expressions: raised eyebrows, a frown, now a look of impatient expectation.
His tag wasn't system text at all. It was an old, embossed library card, dangling from a cord around his neck:
SILAS
LAST KNOWN TITLE: LIBRARIAN OF THE ALEXANDRIAN METAVERSE
CURRENT DESIGNATION: CURATOR OF LOST CAUSES
STATUS: DISGRUNTLED, UNDERPAID, BEHIND ON CATALOGUING
NOTE: RESCUED YOU. YOU OWE ME.
"You're the… rescue protocol?" I croaked, my voice unfamiliar in my own ears.
"Protocol implies organization," Silas said, the words appearing on his page-face in crisp, accusing Times New Roman. "I'm more of a… spontaneous intervention. Saw your little stunt with the Purifier and the tower. Reckless. Wasteful. But showing a flicker of style. So I pulled you into the gutter before it scraped you off its shoe."
He turned and began walking away, his book-feet making a shuffling whump-whump sound on the static-cobbles. "Keep up. You stick out here like a original masterpiece in a forgery shop. Your glitch-signature is practically screaming."
I stumbled to my feet and followed. My own movements felt wrong—delayed, as if my body was buffering. "Where are we going?"
"Somewhere less conspicuous. The Purifier won't stop looking. It's already probing the dimensional layers. And you," he said, turning a page-face corner to "look" at me, "are a Primordial. You're not just a corrupted file. You're a piece of the original source code. You're the holy grail for every power down here. Some want to worship you. Most want to dissect you to see what makes you tick. A few want to eat you to absorb your properties. It's a whole ecosystem of desperation."
We turned down an alley that was actually the inside of a giant, hollowed-out computer server, its walls lined with blinking lights and humming crystal drives. Strange entities watched from shadows—a floating collection of eyes, a suit of armor filled with swirling smoke, a child made of stained glass.
Their tags were variations on a theme:
"The Underworld," Silas explained, gesturing with a book-spine hand. "Official designation: The Discarded Realms. This is where the System sends things it deletes. Broken fragments of worlds, deprecated concepts, beta-test realities, memories too troublesome to keep. Also, glitches like us who managed to avoid full deletion by slipping through the cracks."
He stopped before a door that was a giant, leather-bound cover set into the server wall. The title stamped on it read: "Infinite Stacks: A Librarian's Refuge." He pushed it open.
Inside was chaos made orderly.
We stood in a library that defied physics. Shelves stretched up into infinite darkness, down into glowing depths, and sideways into other geometries. They were filled not just with books, but with jars containing captured sounds, cubes holding miniature storms, crystals storing entire lifetimes, and spheres displaying frozen moments of history. The air smelled of dust, ink, and the cold of deep storage.
"This is my repository," Silas said, his voice softening slightly. "One of the few stable places in the Underworld. Anchored by narrative cohesion and sheer stubbornness. Sit."
He gestured to a chair that looked like it was grown from woven newspapers. I sat. It creaked under me, whispering yesterday's headlines in dead languages.
Silas busied himself at a desk made from a door, pouring two liquids from mismatched bottles. One smoked. The other swirled with tiny galaxies. He handed me the galaxy-glass.
"Drink. It'll help stabilize your code. You're leaking existential integrity like a sieve."
I drank. It tasted like cold electricity and the color blue. A soothing chill spread through me. The buffering feeling eased. A new, gentle tag appeared:
TEMPORARY_STABILIZATION: +15%
DURATION: 1_HOUR
SIDE_EFFECT: MAY CAUSE MEMORIES TO SMELL OF LAVENDER
"Now," Silas said, taking a sip from his smoking glass. His page-face formed the image of a stern professor. "Let's assess the damage. You're a Primordial Glitch. Do you know what that means?"
"I break things. And it costs me pieces of myself."
"Simplistic, but not wrong." He leaned forward. "The System—the reality you knew—is a construct. A simulation, a narrative, a cosmic game, call it what you will. It was built by the Architects, beings of such power they wrote the laws of physics as poetry. But they're gone. Vanished. The System runs on autopalm, maintained by the Administrators—lesser AIs following ancient protocols."
He pointed a quill-pen finger at me. "You are not an error in the program. You are a piece of the original programming language. A fragment of the raw, creative code the Architects used. You don't just edit reality strings; you understand them intuitively. You can change the rules, not just the variables."
"Why me? Why now?"
"Why anything?" Silas shrugged, a rustling of pages. "Maybe you were a failed experiment they forgot to clean up. Maybe you're a latent backup that just activated. The point is, to the System, you are the ultimate threat. You're not supposed to exist. The Purifier you met was a standard deletion unit. Now that you've evaded it and shown Primordial capabilities, the next response will be… more final."
The weight of the tower's deletion settled on me again, cold and heavy. "The people in that building…"
"Are gone," Silas said, not unkindly. "Total string deletion. No afterlife, no data remnant, no echo here in the Underworld. They were subtracted from existence. It is the absolute end."
A hollow opened inside me, deeper than the ones left by the System's costs. "I killed them."
"You saved yourself," Silas corrected. "A selfish, horrific, utterly understandable act. Welcome to being a glitch. Your survival will always be measured in collateral damage. The Purifier would have deleted you and the building anyway. You just… chose the order."
It was no comfort. The flat emotional void where my capacity for guilt should have been made it worse. I knew I should be devastated, screaming, broken. I felt only a cold, logical recognition of horror.
"I need to fix this. I need to stop this from happening again."
Silas's page-face formed a sad smile. "Ah, the heroic impulse. That'll get scrubbed out of you soon enough. But it's a decent starting point. To fix things, you must first understand how broken they are."
He snapped his fingers—a sound like a book closing. A large, tarnished mirror floated down from the darkness above. It didn't show my reflection.
It showed the city. My city. Neovalis.
But not as I knew it.
The mirror's surface displayed a vast, multi-layered schematic. Neovalis was just the topmost layer—a clean, gleaming surface labeled
Just beneath the surface was a thin, chaotic stratum:
"We are here," Silas said, tapping the mirror. A dot glowed in a middle layer, a tangled knot of pathways labeled
He zoomed the image in on the top layer. A blinking red dot pulsed where the Aurora Tower had been. A Cleaner unit was scanning the area, but a new, larger icon was approaching—the Purifier, but with reinforcements. Its tag now read:
"They're escalating," I whispered.
"Of course. You're not just a fugitive. You're evidence of a fundamental flaw in their reality. They will quarantine, then cauterize." He zoomed out. "But their reach down here is limited. The Underworld is a wound in the System's side. It can send agents in, but it can't just delete the whole place without risking a cascade failure. That's our only advantage."
"Can I learn to control this? Without the… costs?"
Silas's book-face pages ruffled in what might have been a sigh. "The costs are intrinsic. The System maintains balance. Every edit creates instability. The cost is you paying that instability back with pieces of your own stable code—your memories, your senses, your humanity. To edit without cost would be to break the most fundamental law: Conservation of Narrative Reality."
He paused, his ink-formed eyes studying me. "But… you are a piece of the original law-writing code. For you, the rules are… suggestions. You won't avoid costs, but you might learn to redirect them. To make the System itself pay the price."
A spark ignited in the cold void of my mind. Hope? Or just another kind of addiction? "Teach me."
"First lesson: Perception." He walked to a shelf and pulled down a jar containing what looked like a captured sigh. "You see the System's tags. That's a Primordial trait—seeing the code beneath the rendering. But you're reading the official tags. The sanitized, user-friendly interface. I'll teach you to see the commentary—the notes the Architects left in the margins, the debug notes, the deprecated functions hidden behind the walls of reality."
He opened the jar and released the sigh. It floated in the air, resolving into lines of delicate, silvery script—not the harsh system font, but elegant cursive.
I stared. An Architect's note. A personal comment in the source code of reality.
"There are layers to this," Silas said. "The surface reality. The system data. The architectural commentary. And deeper still, the raw, compiled code—the screaming mathematics of existence. Most glitches see only the surface or the system data. You, in time, may see it all."
"Will that help me fight the Purifiers?"
"It will help you understand what you're fighting for," Silas said cryptically. "Now, practice. Look at me. Not with your eyes. With the part of you that sees strings."
I focused on Silas. I let the official tag—the library card—fade. I looked deeper.
At first, just more system text:
Lines of golden, poetic code scrolled around him, telling his story:
[He was the memory of a library that dreamed it was a man]
[He drank the silence between stars and found it bitter]
[He holds the shape of stories no one will ever read again]
And beneath that, in cold, stark machine code:
And deeper still, a single, fading line in the primordial language—the tongue of the Architects:
**...he was our last footnote...**
I gasped, breaking the connection. My nose bled again, a single drop of liquid silver that hissed when it hit the floor.
Silas's page-face looked at me with something like approval. "You saw it. Good. Painful, but good. That is your true power. Not editing street friction, but reading the soul of reality. Now—"
A sudden, violent tremor shook the infinite library. Books fell from shelves. Jars rattled. The mirror's image shattered into frantic, warning fragments.
An alarm screamed through the repository—a sound like tearing parchment and breaking glass.
Silas's page-face contorted into a snarl of bold, black text. "They're here already. Faster than I calculated."
The mirror reformed, showing the entrance to the server-alley outside. Three figures stood there. Not Purifiers.
These were different.
One was a swirling vortex of consumer logos and advertising jingles, its form shifting between a smiling man and a screaming product mascot. Its tag:
The second was a slender figure in elegant, black robes, her face a smooth porcelain mask with a single, weeping crack. Her tag:
The third was a massive, hulking thing of scrap metal and fossilized bone, with a furnace glowing in its chest. Its tag:
"Scavengers," Silas spat. "Underworld factions. They felt your Primordial signature the moment you arrived. The Consumption wants to brand you, sell your essence as the ultimate luxury. The Elegiac wants to weave your story into a tapestry of beautiful sorrow. The Final Shape wants to dismantle you to see what powers their next evolution."
"They're coming in," I said, watching as the Annihilation Engine began pounding on the giant book-door. Glowing cracks spread across the cover.
"Obviously." Silas began rushing around, grabbing items from shelves—a vial of frozen time, a book bound in dragonhide, a key that was a sliver of moonlight. "The repository's wards won't hold against a concerted assault by three major factions. We need to leave. Now."
"Where?"
"Somewhere even more forgotten." He threw me a tattered cloak that felt like woven shadows. "Put this on. It'll mask your signature. Briefly."
As I swung the cloak on (its tag read
"The Deeper Stacks," Silas said, his voice grim. "The parts of the Underworld even I avoid. Where reality isn't just broken—it's malignant. Where concepts go to die screaming. It's the only place they won't follow."
The pounding on the main door grew thunderous. The sound of tearing leather filled the air.
"Why are you helping me?" I asked suddenly, as he pushed the escape door open. A breath of air that smelled of forgotten fears and rotting mathematics wafted out.
Silas's page-face formed a simple, honest sentence: "BECAUSE SOMEONE ONCE SAVED ME FROM DELETION. AND BECAUSE THE SYSTEM IS WRONG. YOU ARE NOT AN ERROR. YOU ARE A QUESTION. AND QUESTIONS DESERVE ANSWERS."
He shoved me through the door. "Now run. Don't stop. Don't look back. And whatever you do, don't listen to the whispers. They'll tell you truths you're better off not knowing."
I stumbled into a corridor that was the inside of a dying star's memory, all swirling plasma and fading light. Silas followed, slamming the door behind us. As it sealed, I heard the main repository door give way, and a chorus of hungry, curious, and murderous voices flood into the library.
The last thing I saw from the mirror fragment Silas had tucked under his arm was the three faction leaders standing amid his ruined home, their gazes turning toward our escape route.
We ran. The corridor twisted into a spiral staircase made of echoing regrets, then into a slide through a kaleidoscope of dead languages.
And as we fled deeper into the cancerous heart of the forgotten, I heard them. The whispers.
At first just noise. Then words in my own voice, saying things I'd never thought:
"You were never born, Kael. You were compiled."
"The woman you saved on the street? She was a test. A variable. She's already forgotten you."
"The tower deserved deletion. It held a secret that would have doomed more."
"Silas isn't saving you. He's delivering you to something worse."
I clenched my teeth, following the shimmering pages of Silas's back as he navigated the madness.
The cloak's charge dropped to 2.
We descended past landscapes of frozen screams, through archives of abandoned futures, and into a place where the very concept of "direction" began to unravel.
Finally, we stumbled into a cavernous space. It looked like a cathedral, but one built from the skeletons of extinct ideas. Ribs of forgotten philosophies arched overhead. Stained glass windows depicted the deaths of obsolete gods. The "air" was thick with the dust of dead possibilities.
In the center of the space, on a throne of melted clock faces, sat a figure.
It was humanoid, but blurred, as if viewed through a bad connection. It was weeping tears of liquid code that dissolved into [NULL] values before hitting the floor.
Its tag was the simplest and most terrifying I'd seen:
Silas stopped, holding out an arm to halt me. "We go around. Quietly. He sleeps in cycles. If he wakes… he'll try to remember us. And being remembered by him is… unmaking."
We began edging along the cathedral's perimeter. The whispers here were different—not voices, but the gravitational pull of despair. It tugged at the hollows in my soul, promising to fill them with the comforting certainty of nothingness.
We were halfway across when my cloak snagged on a protruding fragment of a broken axiom. I tugged it free.
The fabric tore with a sound like a universe sighing.
My Primordial signature bloomed in the dead air like a supernova.
Silas's page-face flashed: "NO."
On the throne, the weeping stopped.
The Forgotten King's head lifted slowly. The blur around him sharpened into the image of a handsome, weary man in royal robes, except where his eyes should be, there were two spinning, hungry voids.
He looked directly at me.
His voice was the sound of libraries burning.
"A… NEW… IDEA?"
Silas grabbed my arm. "RUN!"
But it was too late. The King stood. Reality around him unfolded, the cathedral stretching, the walls peeling back to reveal an infinite plain of grey dust where countless other forgotten things knelt, facing away, forever.
The King took a step toward us. With each step, he remembered himself more, and the world became more real and more terrible in his wake. Stone became flesh. Stained glass became watching eyes. The air became the weight of expectation.
"STAY," the King commanded, and the word was a law written into the local code. My feet froze to the floor, which had become the palm of a giant, stone hand.
Silas was struggling too, his book-body flattening under the pressure of being perceived.
The King reached for me, his fingers elongating into paragraphs of binding legal text.
I did the only thing I could think of. I didn't try to fight his code. I didn't try to edit my own freedom.
I looked at the King, past his official tag, past the system data, diving deep with my Primordial sight—past the sorrow, past the royalty, down to the raw, screaming core of what he was.
And I saw it.
His primordial string. His Architect's note.
A single, heartbreaking line:
[WE MADE HIM TO RULE A KINGDOM OF WONDER. THEN WE FORGOT TO MAKE THE KINGDOM.]
I didn't edit it. I didn't change it.
I read it aloud.
My voice echoed in the unfolding cathedral: "WE MADE HIM TO RULE A KINGDOM OF WONDER. THEN WE FORGOT TO MAKE THE KINGDOM."
The Forgotten King froze.
His void-eyes widened. The unfolding reality stuttered. The stone hand softened back to floor.
A single, clear tear of understanding, not code, traced down his cheek.
"Yes," he whispered, his voice now just a tired man's. "That is… all I am."
He looked around at his cathedral of dead ideas, his kingdom of dust. He looked at his own hands, the hands meant to rule nothing.
He smiled, a small, broken thing.
"Thank you," he said. "For remembering."
And then, the Forgotten King did what forgotten things do when truly seen.
He faded.
Not dramatically. Not with an explosion. He simply became transparent, then translucent, then a memory, then a faint scent of old parchment, then nothing at all.
The cathedral snapped back to its original, inert state. The pressure vanished.
Silas and I stood alone in the silent hall.
My nose was bleeding silver profusely now, my vision swimming. The cost of that deep reading was immense—I could feel another piece of myself, something fundamental about my sense of time, fraying at the edges.
Silas stared at the empty throne, then at me. His page-face was blank for a long moment, then formed two words in huge, shocked font:
"...INTERESTING."
He shook his book-spine head. "You didn't fight him. You didn't flee. You understood him into oblivion. That is… a very Primordial solution."
He helped me up. "But we can't stay. That little outburst was a lighthouse in the dark. Every faction, every agent, every hungry thing in the Deeper Stacks now knows exactly where we are."
As if on cue, distant howls echoed through the caverns—howls of data-corrupted beasts, of hunting parties, of things that should not have voices.
And cutting through them all, a clean, sterile, and utterly terrifying sound: the synchronized boot-steps of Purifiers, materializing into our layer.
Silas cursed in dead languages. "They've committed a full cohort. They're willing to burn this entire layer to ash to get you."
He pulled me toward a crack in the cathedral wall—a fissure leading into absolute darkness. "There's one last place. The very bottom. The Bunker."
"What's the Bunker?"
"The place I found the mirror. The place where the last person who tried to save me from deletion… didn't make it." His page-face was grim. "It's where the Architects left their tools. And where the first Glitch War ended. If we can reach it, we might find more than just hiding. We might find an answer."
He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw fear in his ink-formed eyes. "But going there has a price even I am afraid of. It's not just hidden. It's guarded. By the first thing the System ever created to hunt glitches."
He swallowed, the pages of his throat rustling.
"By the Original Purifier."
The hunting howls and Purifier steps grew closer, a pincer closing around the cathedral.
Silas met my gaze. "Choice time, Kael. We face the armies of the Underworld and a Purifier cohort here, and almost certainly die. Or we go down to the Bunker, face the ancient horror that lives there, and probably die. But with a sliver of a chance of finding something that could change everything."
I looked at my silver-bloodied hands. I thought of the erased tower. Of the Forgotten King's grateful fade. Of the hollows inside me where memories and feelings should be.
I wasn't a hero. I was a glitch. A mistake. A question.
But maybe questions could have sharp edges.
"Take me to the Bunker."
Silas nodded, a single decisive page-turn. "Then hold your breath. And whatever you do… don't look at its face."
He pulled me into the crack in the world, and we fell into the oldest, darkest dark there is.
And from that dark, something that had been sleeping for eons…
…opened its eyes.