Morning came with static in the air.
Not the kind you heard—the kind you felt.
Every step down Elderfall's narrow alleys buzzed under my boots like the ground itself was trying to sync back into reality and couldn't.
I kept one hand on the Lexicon, letting it hover close, pages twitching faintly like it was bracing for something.
Lyra walked beside me, hood up even though no rain fell. Her outline flickered once—a glitch around the edges of her cape—but when I blinked, it was gone.
Neither of us spoke as we reached the marketplace.
It should've been loud.
Vendors shouting prices, players bartering, the distant clang of hammer on forge.
Instead?
Muffled noise.
Muted, wrong, like hearing a conversation underwater.
I scanned the square.
Dozens of merchant stalls stood in neat rows.
Half of them were...off.
Not broken.
Just misplaced.
A potion vendor offered bottles with no color.
An armor smith hung up chestplates tagged with Version Numbers:[Item ID: Chainmail.Base_V1.03_TEST]
A general store displayed Placeholder: Bread Asset signs instead of real food.
And the players—
The players didn't notice.
They bought.
They laughed.
They haggled over items that shouldn't even exist anymore.
"Is this how it starts?" Lyra asked, her voice low.
I turned to her.
"The forgetting?"
I nodded once.
She pulled her cloak tighter, eyes scanning the crowd. "Then we're already too late."
The Lexicon fluttered open in front of me.
No HUD notification.No SYSTEM permission.
Just a short pulse of thought:
Anchor or observe?
Anchor the zone—or let it slide further into instability.
I hesitated.
Because anchoring meant locking it as it was—glitches and all.
Observing meant risking it collapsing altogether.
Before I could decide, something else caught my attention.
Near the eastern side of the market—where the fence once separated Elderfall proper from the undeveloped test fields—
a new stall had appeared.
Small.
Tarp stretched too tightly over bent poles.
And behind the counter, an NPC I didn't recognize.
Older.
Thinner.
Eyes milky, like old marble.
He wasn't selling anything immediately visible.
He just sat.
Waiting.
I approached slowly, Lexicon hovering closer to my side.
As I drew near, the air grew colder—not environmental settings.Deeper.More fundamental.
Like standing next to a file trying desperately not to be deleted.
The NPC tilted his head slightly.
No SYSTEM tag hovered above him.
No vendor name.
No faction alignment.
Just a faint line of script across the tarp:
Items from Threads That Never Lived.
Lyra caught up to me, frowning.
"This isn't right," she whispered.
I ignored her.
And stepped closer.
The merchant's wares flickered into existence as I did.
Laid out carefully on black velvet:
A rusted sword tagged as belonging to a player guild that no longer existed.
A sealed letter addressed to a quest-giver from a town wiped in early patches.
A memory bottle, swirling faintly with captured light—marked only:
"Dungeon Run — Elderfall Beta Timeline"
My breath caught.
I recognized the bottle's glow.
It wasn't just any memory.
It was my first dungeon run.
From before the rollback.
From before the world forgot who I'd been.
I reached out, hand trembling.
The merchant smiled—slow, cracked, like an animation barely rigged together.
"No refunds," he rasped.
And placed the bottle gently into my hands.
The Lexicon flared.
Not alarmed.
Not warning.
Almost... welcoming.
Like it had been waiting for me to find this piece.
A SYSTEM message blinked briefly across my vision:
[Memory Fragment Retrieved – Thread.ROOT Variant Confirmed]
[Playback available at user discretion.]
I tucked the bottle carefully into my inventory.
Beside me, Lyra hadn't moved.
She stared at the merchant with an expression I couldn't quite read.
Fear.
Recognition.
Grief.
All tangled into one.
She turned away sharply, pulling her hood further down.
"Let's go," she said.
But the merchant was already fading—tarp, poles, wares—all peeling away into mist like they'd never existed.
We made it halfway across the market square before Lyra spoke again.
Her voice was quiet. Fragile.
"You weren't the same back then, were you?"
I slowed.
"What do you mean?"
She didn't look at me.
"The person you were. Before all this. Before... memory started fighting back."
I thought about the memory bottle.
About the choices I made that first run.
The players I left behind to save myself.
The ones no one remembered anymore because the SYSTEM decided failure wasn't marketable.
I thought about the way the Lexicon trembled when it recognized fragments of my past.
I thought about Lyra, standing beside me now—someone who shouldn't even know to ask that question.
"No," I said finally.
"I wasn't the same."
She nodded like she'd known the answer all along.
And didn't hold it against me.
But somewhere deep in the lines of her face,beneath the calm,beneath the loyalty—
I could see it:
The first crack of doubt.
Not doubt in me.
Doubt in who we'd both have to becometo survive what was coming.
As we left the market, the Lexicon floated higher.
It flipped a single page.
New glyphs inked themselves into existence across the parchment without sound, without permission:
Memory is not a record.It is a weapon.
Somewhere in the real world—inside a dark room—a Lexicon-shaped icon blinked twice.
And a message appeared on a black screen:
[Cross-Domain Instability Detected.]
[Prepare Contingency Protocol: Archive Prime.]