The air inside the Origin Spire's core chamber was dense with a presence I couldn't describe—ancient, conscious, and watching. The crystalline console before me, now fully activated, throbbed with radiant pulses of Architect code. Each pulse traveled up my arm the moment I laid the shard onto its surface, and within seconds, my body locked in place.
Something had started.
I wasn't standing in that room anymore.
Not exactly.
My mind was pulled into a spiral of cascading lights and streaming data. Images blinked into existence around me—suspended in a translucent matrix of memory and logic. Worlds flickered and died. Massive Architect forges crumbled in the dark of space. Civilizations fell into silence.
Then I heard the voice—not spoken, but placed inside my skull like a thought already half-remembered:
"All bearers of the Catalyst must choose."
A new window bloomed within the matrix. Two paths, branching in opposite directions, each glowing with a different shade of blue.
One was Stabilization—slow, grounded evolution. Tamed growth. It promised me control. Sanity.
The other was Fracture—chaotic, rapid advancement. A leap into the unknown. Risk of collapse. Promise of transcendence.
I knew which one the Prophet had chosen. It had left scars across the planet.
Still, I didn't waver.
Fracture.
The moment the decision was made, my body screamed.
My veins lit up in a jagged lattice of Catalyst energy. My back arched violently as the shard melted and flowed into me—becoming a lattice of liquid light wrapping my bones. My skin split in a flash of energy and resealed. My muscles twitched uncontrollably. It felt like my DNA was being rewritten, burned and re-coded at the atomic level.
I collapsed.
I didn't black out. Worse—I remained conscious for every agonizing second.
The chamber dimmed. The console's lights faded into the stone. I knew, instinctively, that something irreversible had been set in motion.
I stood up slowly, breath shaky, vision sharp and alien.
*****
Mira's hand was already on my shoulder when I came back to myself. Her eyes widened at the faint glow now radiating from beneath my skin, the barely perceptible flicker of shifting patterns along my arms.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"I chose the fracture path," I said.
Korin grunted. "Are you even still you?"
I paused.
"Yes," I said, though even I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. "But changed."
Kess moved in closer, running a scanner from her wrist device. Her expression darkened.
"Neural patterns are... spiking. Reaction time, metabolism, perception—they've all been restructured. That shard rewrote your nervous system."
"It's not done," I said, feeling the Catalyst like a second spine inside me. "This is just the beginning."
*****
We continued deeper into the Spire. The walls changed as we moved. They weren't built—they'd grown. Patterns in the stone looked like veins. Sometimes, we passed chambers that flickered in and out of visibility, phasing in strange rhythmic pulses, as if the structure obeyed rules beyond time.
Gravity shifted underfoot. Occasionally, the air became too thick, or impossibly thin, for a few seconds at a time. Still, I adapted. The Catalyst adjusted with me.
No one spoke.
And then we reached the Hall of Reflections.
The chamber was enormous—smooth crystal walls rising three stories high, each one polished to a mirror's shine. But they didn't reflect us.
They reflected who we could become.
I stared at one version of myself—taller, lit with molten lines of Catalyst threading through muscle and bone, floating above a ruined cityscape. His eyes burned like stars.
Another version of me knelt in chains, the Catalyst leaking from his broken form like a dying star.
"Are these... visions?" Mira asked.
"Echoes," Lyra said, her voice carrying from behind. "Outcomes waiting to happen. The fracture path opens every possibility. Not all of them end with you intact."
I swallowed hard, staring at my reflections. I could feel the pull of each one.
"Which one is real?"
Lyra stepped beside me.
"The one you choose to become."
*****
I turned away from the mirrors.
Because none of those outcomes would be mine.
I would write a new one.
*****
We left the Hall of Reflections in silence. No one spoke about what they saw—some truths are too heavy to name out loud. The Spire didn't just show you possible futures; it tested your mind with them. Forced you to taste the person you might become.
I walked ahead, faster than before. The Catalyst pulsed like a second heart inside my chest, each beat reshaping me just a little more. I could feel the neural paths in my brain burning clearer, expanding—my thoughts branching and snapping back faster, sharper, like a weapon being honed mid-battle.
I was evolving.
Too fast.
It was exhilarating—and terrifying.
*****
We descended into the next level of the Spire through a gravity well, a spiraling tunnel of light and pressure that dropped us down in a swirl of translucent particles. When we emerged, the architecture changed completely.
Gone were the glowing stone walls and spiraling circuits.
This floor looked like a battlefield.
Dark metal tiles, scorched by blast marks. Fallen automatons littered the hallway—twisted metal forms with fractured crystalline cores. Architect constructs, long dead.
Kess knelt beside one of them, her eyes scanning its frame. "They weren't deactivated," she murmured. "They were torn apart from the inside."
"By what?" Korin asked, already raising his weapon.
As if in answer, the lights above us flickered once—twice—then went out.
Darkness swallowed the hallway whole.
We heard it before we saw it.
A deep, irregular scraping sound.
Metal dragged across metal.
And then: breathing. Ragged, unnatural.
I activated the Catalyst without thinking, my hand erupting in a faint blue glow as I reached into the structure around us. The Spire's systems responded—reluctantly. I wasn't a true Architect, just a cracked vessel riding their long-dead machinery. But it was enough.
The lights flickered back.
The creature stood at the far end of the hallway.
Or maybe it used to be a creature. Now, it was a twisted fusion of man and machine—half its face fused with plating, glowing veins of corrupted Catalyst coiling around its limbs like parasitic roots. It had no eyes, only a pulsing gem in the center of its forehead. Its chest was caved in, held open by jagged metal ribs that pulsed with a warped form of energy.
Lyra stepped beside me. "An Echo of Rejection," she whispered. "Someone who chose the fracture... and lost."
The Echo lunged.
It moved like lightning—one instant far, the next barreling through the center of our group.
Mira fired off three shots, each one hitting center mass. The Echo staggered but didn't fall. Korin tried to flank, but its arm extended unnaturally, slamming him into the wall.
I surged forward.
The Catalyst flared at full force—energy radiating from my skin in a wave that made the floor tremble. I lashed out with a pulse of kinetic force, blasting the Echo back. But it adapted instantly—its body liquefied at the joints, bending around the energy like smoke through a net.
Then it was in front of me.
Its hand gripped my throat.
And I saw it—flashes of what it had once been. A bearer like me. A warrior. A leader. Then the fracture—too deep, too fast. He had drowned in his own power, body consumed by the Catalyst's hunger, soul lost.
"End it," it rasped.
I didn't hesitate.
My hand shot up, fingers pressed to the gem in its head. I pushed.
The shard within me reacted. The energy around my fingers pulsed once—and released a fracturing wave that tore through the Echo's corrupted form.
The creature let out a distorted, half-human cry and disintegrated into dust and fractured data.
Silence fell again.
Mira helped Korin up. Kess was already scanning the fragments left behind.
"They're becoming more common," she said grimly. "More Echos. More failures."
"They were like me," I said, watching the dust settle. "They didn't evolve fast enough."
"No," Lyra said. "They evolved wrong."
*****
The next chamber wasn't a battlefield—it was a cathedral.
Massive stone columns curved upward into a glass dome filled with roiling energy. An altar stood at the center, and resting upon it was a sphere. Pale. Humble.
But the moment I looked at it, the Catalyst in me went silent.
Not dormant. Awed.
"The First Fracture," Lyra whispered.
"What is it?" Mira asked.
"A raw core. The first time a human survived the full evolution cycle. What's left of him… is in that sphere."
"Another Echo?" I asked.
"No. The origin," Lyra said. "The Prophet was second. This was the first."
I stepped toward it. The sphere pulsed faintly. The Catalyst within me responded, tuning itself to a deeper rhythm.
And then a voice—calm, ancient—spoke from the sphere:
"You are not ready."
I clenched my fists.
"I've come too far to be told that now."
"Then take it. And prove your path was not a mistake."
I reached out.
The moment my fingers touched the surface of the sphere, pain—again. Not physical. Existential.
I saw myself at every stage—child, soldier, murderer, savior. I saw every path not taken.
And still, I held on.
I became the First Fracture for a breath of time.
When I pulled back, the sphere had vanished.
In its place, I held a fragment.
Not power. Not knowledge.
A key.
*****
The cathedral doors opened on their own.
Ahead, the next stage of the Spire waited.
And I knew—I wasn't just evolving anymore.
I was beginning to fracture.