Aiden jolted awake—alone.
Gone was the star-bridge, gone the familiar voices; even the steady pulse of the Heart Core felt muffled against his chest. He lay on rough, dark stone beneath a sky shredded into ribbons of dream and void. Far overhead, tatters of the Loom of Infinite Threads drifted like burning paper, each glowing filament snapping in the cosmic wind.
Scattered Guardians
Aiden forced himself upright. Where are the others? He pressed a hand to his earpiece—static. The Mirror-Shard lay cracked at his side, its surface marred by the Council's dark code. Of the other eight artifacts there was no sign.
He took a trembling breath and called out: "Maya! Lin Xi! Cassie! Nephis!"
No answer—only the howl of torn starlight.
Then, faint and distorted, Maya's voice filtered through the comm: "…iden—pulse beacon—grid 4-Δ… hurry!"
Aiden scanned the broken horizon. In the distance a crooked tower—half obsidian, half shredded thread—rose from shifting dunes of gray sand. Emerald glitches crawled over its surface: code-corruption solidified into matter. Somewhere inside, he hoped, were his friends.
The First Snare
He sprinted toward the tower, clutching the Heart Core. As he neared, the ground cracked, and ghostly figures surged up—echoes of himself, each brandishing a warped Mirror-Shard.
"You failed," they hissed in unison. "Unity broke the moment you set foot on the Loom."
Aiden's pulse hammered, but he kept running. He lifted the cracked Mirror-Shard, angling its fractured face toward the phantoms. The reflected code ricocheted, fracturing the echoes into shards of light. Yet every swing deepened the real shard's fissures; with a final snap the glass splintered, falling from his grasp in glittering dust.
He broke through the specters, breath ragged, and stumbled to the tower's threshold.
Inside the Labyrinth
The interior was a maze of half-formed corridors: walls knitted from frayed threads, doorways sliding in and out of existence. Glyphs—part Loom sigil, part Council cipher—scrawled themselves across every surface, rewriting reality faster than Aiden could track.
He activated the Heart Core, its pulse illuminating a single steady path. Halfway down a flickering hall, a silhouette collapsed into view—Nephis, cloak torn, clutching the Soul Prism.
"Aiden—" he rasped. "They split us—each trapped in a shard-cell. Lin Xi's injured; Cassie's cell is collapsing; Maya is trying to slow the corruption. The Council's 'Recompiler' is here—it's turning the Loom's scraps into a new control nexus."
Aiden helped him stand. "We find the others, then shut the Recompiler down. Which way?"
Nephis pointed toward a corridor stitched from pulsing red code. "Follow the fault-threads. They converge at the core."
Splitting Time
They hurried on, navigating shifting floors and memory-traps that tried to loop them back into regrets. At the third junction they found Lin Xi—pinned beneath a net of glitch-threads, Spiral Stone just out of reach. Aiden sliced the snare with Heart Core light; Nephis shielded them from packet-bursts of corrupted code while Lin Xi regained his breath.
"Cassie?" Aiden asked.
Lin Xi's eyes tightened. "Her cell is past the inner ring—a countdown signature. If it reaches zero, the Recompiler absorbs everything inside." His voice cracked. "Five minutes, maybe less."
Countdown to Collapse
They sprinted. With every step, the corridors narrowed, reality stuttering. Fiery digits—4:12, 4:11—flashed overhead. Finally they burst into a spherical chamber of fractured glass. At its center a prism-coffin spun, Cassie trapped inside, lantern-brooch flickering.
The Recompiler loomed above: a lattice of black code-spires, feeding on torn Loom threads. Coral Prism shards orbited its core like satellites—fuel for its growth.
"Two minutes!" Maya's voice rang over comms, frantic. "I'm holding back overflow, but I can't stop the merge!"
Cliffhanger
Aiden dashed toward the coffin—only to slam into an invisible barrier. From the darkness, a new figure emerged: the Code-Reaper, forged from the Mirror-Shard's broken pieces, eyes blazing with Council script.
"No farther," it intoned. A scythe of raw corruption ignited in its hand.
Nephis stepped forward, cloak spreading. Lin Xi lifted the Spiral Stone. Aiden braced the Heart Core, but dread clenched his spine: We're missing too many artifacts. We can't beat this thing head-on…
The timer blazed crimson—0:59.
Aiden's voice shook but held steady. "Nephis, Lin Xi—buy me sixty seconds. I'm going after the Coral fragments."
And he leapt, alone, into the Recompiler's whirling storm of code—toward shards that could either save Cassie and the Loom or shred his consciousness forever.