The elevator groaned down into the belly of the forgotten lab. Neither Theo nor Ayen spoke as the lights flickered overhead, casting them in and out of shadow. The deeper they went, the warmer it became—not from heat, but from memory. Theo could feel it pressing at the edges of his mind, like old voices trapped in the walls, whispering stories no one had listened to in decades.
When the lift finally halted, the doors creaked open with a sigh.
The corridor ahead was narrow, ribbed with conduit and reinforced glass. Strips of rusted metal lined the floor. Threadlines coated the walls—dense here, tangled, some glowing faintly. The deeper you went, the closer you got to the heart of the thing.
To the wound.
"This is it," Theo said quietly. "The primary core. The place where Project Origin first pulled the threadline into artificial contact."
Ayen scanned the hallway with narrowed eyes. "And fractured it."
Theo nodded.
They moved slowly. Every step felt like a descent into a question no one had been brave enough to ask. The hallway opened into a wide observation room, its window looking down into a sunken chamber below.
And there it was.
The Origin Core.
Still intact.
It floated above a recessed dais, held aloft by what looked like nothing—and everything. Threads of silver light webbed around it like veins, like scars. The core was spherical, obsidian at its center, but layered with shifting patterns of light. Like time made visible. Like a pulse that never stopped beating.
Theo stepped to the window. "It's still alive."
Ayen stood beside him, arms crossed. "So why hasn't it collapsed the entire timeline yet?"
Theo looked down. "Because it's waiting. Watching. I think… it doesn't move unless we do."
They found a terminal still active near the glass. Theo tapped in a query, and the old system responded with surprising ease. Logs appeared—recent ones. More recent than they should have been.
Someone had been here.
:: ACCESS LOG — 3 MONTHS AGOUSER: UNREGISTEREDCHANGES MADE TO STABILIZER SEQUENCESUBROUTINE UPLOADED: "ECHO RETURN"
Theo frowned. "Someone tried to stabilize it again."
Ayen leaned over his shoulder. "Unregistered? Could it have been another Keeper?"
"No." Theo hesitated. "This command string… it's Warden architecture."
She stiffened. "The Seer."
Theo's stomach sank. "They weren't just tracking us. They were preparing for something."
He pulled up the subroutine and parsed the code. What he found made his blood chill.
"It's a feedback loop," he said. "One that targets me."
"What?"
"This loop—it's tied to my signature. My resets. Every time I've jumped back, this code recorded the anomalies. My failures. My divergence points."
"Wait—how? You never connected to a Warden node."
Theo turned to her, eyes wide. "I didn't have to. The threadline remembers. Every time I altered something, it left a ripple. And they built this trap to follow the ripples back to me."
Ayen's hand went to her blade. "So they don't just want to stop you. They want to erase every version of you."
He looked at her, a grim smile tugging at his lips. "They're not sending someone to kill me. They're trying to make it so I was never born."
The room fell silent.
Theo sat on the edge of the console, mind racing. "That means there's still a way to stop it."
"How?"
"They need the core to finish the loop. Without it, the deletion remains theoretical. If we corrupt the core's resonance layer before they finalize the feedback—"
"We scramble the path," Ayen finished. "You become invisible to the loop."
Theo nodded. "But there's a cost. Damaging the core could accelerate the fracture."
Ayen met his eyes. "And not doing it means you die in every timeline."
For a moment, the weight of it all settled between them. Then Ayen reached down, pulled a fusion override from her pack, and handed it to him.
"If we're doing this," she said, "we do it together."
Theo looked at her. And despite everything—the ghosts, the threat, the ache of what he'd lost—he smiled.
Not a big smile.
But a real one.
He stood, override in hand, and turned toward the access stairs leading to the core chamber.
"I've spent so long trying to fix time," he said quietly. "Maybe what it needed wasn't to be fixed."
Ayen followed him down. "Maybe it just needed someone to finally understand it."
They stepped into the dark.
And time held its breath.