We were already too late.
The instant Solryn entered the vault, the notion of time distorted. I sensed it not only in the atmosphere, but in my head. Memories contorted. Names escaped my mind. Kael was talking, but I couldn't make out words.
Only pieces.
Only whispers.
"don't enter"
"dissolve identity"
"step back"
But I couldn't budge.
Because Solryn was gazing at me.
No face. Only that slow, deliberate step beneath its robes — each step heavy with gravity, as if it lived one second at a time. Across its back, dozens of masks were sewn into its robes weeping, laughing, screaming, sleeping and with every move it made, one of the masks fluttered.
Fluttered like it was alive.
"Kevin," Kael spat. "We have to get out of here now."
I backed away. My boots rubbed the stone nothing.
The Memory Vault had been stilled in all ways.
Even the air seemed to hang.
Solryn's voice was not a voice. It was an impression.
"You wear too many versions."
I attempted to respond. My throat was aflame. My voice refused to comply.
Kael stepped between us, hand up — symbols unfolding from his gloves.
"You have no right to rewrite this fragment."
Solryn cocked its head.
"Then guard it."
Spectra broke.
---
Memory strands disintegrated.
Light burst inward from silent cracks, illuminating the room in unreal, dreamlike gold. The strands once floating so tranquilly now thrashed — like strings of a dying brain, each fraying into anarchy. Visions crowded my eyes:
Kevin entering a blaze with a child in his arms.
Kevin suffocating underwater in a sea of gears and shattered time.
Kevin with black wings, all alone where thousands had run.
None of them were mine.
And yet… they were.
"Kael" I gagged. "It's in my head"
"Don't look into it!"
Too late.
Solryn flung up a hand.
Not to hit.
To delete.
Reality around us started to shrink. The floor rolled in geometric twists. A new Loop attempted to push itself over us an artificial memory field that would overwrite our lives.
But Kael stepped away.
His body glowed with a field of resistance. Scripts ignited. Ancient Watcher seals blazed.
He wasn't merely resisting.
He was holding me in place.
"Kevin, hold on to who you are. Don't look into the rewrite."
Something snapped within me.
Not fear. Not pain.
A memory.
Not one I had previously.
A moment of standing over Solryn's body.
In a desert constructed of broken glass and memory ash.
Solryn's voice:
"You killed me once. You'll do it again."
The memory ended.
I collapsed to my knees.
Kael dragged me back.
We sprinted into the collapsing corridor behind the vault the memory strands now flailing like wild snakes. Behind us, Solryn didn't pursue.
It didn't need to.
It had planted a seed.
We careened into an antechamber some levels higher walls alternating between broken stone and geometric abstraction. The Loop remained unstable. Time here consumed itself, second by second.
Kael collapsed next to me, gasping.
"That was a head-on meeting. I did not expect it to show itself so soon."
"What… what is Solryn?"
"Not a person. Not anymore. It's a Loop Editor a living echo created out of all the overwritten identities the Loop couldn't hold."
"You mean…"
"It was someone once. Then it became the product of too many rewrites."
I got ill.
"So it's what I'll become?"
Kael regarded me.
Didn't respond.
"..."
"...."
For a long time, there were a few minutes in which we didn't talk.
The Loop glimmered as if it couldn't make up its mind what this room was. A hallway. A battlefield. A cathedral. It flickered between them all.
"Solryn said I wear too many versions."
"It's true," Kael whispered. "I scanned you after the vault. You don't just recall things from past Loops. You hold pieces of different selves."
"So I'm falling apart?"
"You're converging."
------
I remained immobile.
The pressure of so many others like me bearing down on the back of my head.
What was I becoming?
A weapon
A warning
A mistake
"We have to locate Saela," Kael declared abruptly.
"The Keeper"
"Yes. She keeps still whispers. Moments that never existed — but might have. If anyone can contain what's occurring to you, it's her."
"Where?"
"The dead capital of Durnhal. The city's in quarantine."
Kael nodded. "Which means it's the last place the Loopwatchers will expect to find you."
I stood.
Shaking legs. Not with tiredness with the creeping realization that I was the most precarious piece in this tale.
Kael put a hand on my shoulder.
"You're not lost yet, Kevin."
"How do you know?"
>"Because you still ask who you are."
--------
We departed the ruins.
The surface was chilled and dark. A light green sky glowed above shards of Loop architecture floating like orbiting islands, pouring light into the sea of clouds.
We stepped across shattered bridges of obsidian.
Below, nothing. Only broken wind.
As we came to the edge of the skywalk, Kael stopped.
"We'll diverge here. You'll go to Durnhal. I'll distract the Loopwatchers."
"You think they're watching?"
"They're already on their way."
I followed his eyes.
Four red slashes across the clouds out on the horizon Reset Hunters. Quick. Trained to eliminate any deviation that made it past recall.
"Kael"
"Go."
I took off running.
Didn't dare look back.
But before I disappeared into the broken edge of the sky, I caught a whisper that I wasn't supposed to hear.
"Don't become me."