---
The wind in the Fracture Zone howled like a wounded beast.
Ash danced across the sky—shapes and shadows flickering in the clouds, like memories refusing to die. The System's threadlines, once pristine, now trembled in the background of reality—glitching in and out, leaking sparks like frayed nerves.
Shiku stood on the edge of a ruined cliff, overlooking a place he had only read about in whispers: the Hollow Corridor, where failed rewrites went to die.
Kaeli emerged behind him, her boots crunching against powdered stone. "This wasn't on the map."
"It's not supposed to exist," Shiku murmured. "Which means it's exactly where we need to be."
The moment they stepped into the Hollow Corridor, the air thickened. Like walking into a memory that didn't want to be remembered.
---
Elsewhere, the Ash Moves
In a different quadrant of the Fracture Zone, far from the broken fortress and Shiku's silent march, Riven advanced with fire curling around his fingers. His body still bore the markings of the ritual—the sigil burns, the fractured glyphs now dormant across his arms like scars of war.
But it was the thing behind him that turned heads.
A creature made of discarded system code—walking, snarling, mutating every few seconds. Riven had bound it. Barely.
"A living fail-safe," he muttered. "Of course they'd leave you to wander after I burned their archive."
It hissed and spat corrupted data into the wind, its voice broken between machine and beast.
> "He… walks… threadless…"
Riven turned his back on it. "Let him. I walk with flame."
With a flash of molten light, he vanished.
---
Shiku Faces the Echobeasts
The Hollow Corridor was alive.
Shiku blinked—and the air shimmered. Then split.
Echobeasts rose from the cracks in reality—monstrous remnants of rewritten code, trapped between what they were and what the System tried to make them. Their bodies twisted like corrupted geometry, half-shadow, half-organic algorithm.
One charged.
Shiku raised his wand.
But the magic didn't respond. Not fully.
The rewrite he'd begun in the Core had altered the connection.
He was no longer a user of the System. He was rewriting it—and the System was resisting.
Kaeli jumped into the fray with her arcblades slicing the air. "Still getting used to that godlike power, huh?"
Shiku gritted his teeth and slammed his hand against the ground. Threads spiraled out—but instead of code, they responded like living veins.
"I don't command," he whispered. "I ask."
The Wand pulsed.
The world rippled.
And then the beasts froze—as if time took a breath to listen.
---
The Fire Moves Again
That same moment, Riven turned.
He'd felt it—across the ash, across the broken world.
Someone had stilled the Echobeasts.
Not destroyed.
Not rewritten.
Asked.
He narrowed his eyes. "Threadbreaker…"
Emberwake hissed at his side. It was time to move.
---