"Some artifacts were never meant to be touched. The Chair remembers not to preserve, but to warn."
The hatch groaned open like a wound being pried apart.
It wasn't just a doorway—it was a fracture in the world. A soft, humming scar beneath the shell of a grocery store that had long outlived its purpose. And what waited beyond wasn't decay or storage.
It was memory.
Dust poured from the spiral stairwell as the seal broke. Cold air hissed upward like breath returning to lungs that had been held for too long. The light from Junie's scavenged flashlight trembled as it met the descent—a dark stone passage coiled into the earth like a fossilized root.
Neither of them moved at first.
Orin stared downward, heart pounding, throat dry.
He didn't know why the sight of that stairwell terrified him more than Diver Zero's smile.
Maybe because Lira had spoken.
But this place?
It remembered.
And it didn't forget gently.
Junie was the first to break the stillness. Her voice came softly, barely above a whisper.
"This was drawn once."
He turned.
Junie's hand trembled slightly as she held up one of her older sketches—creased, smeared, edges curled. It showed a coil descending into darkness, shaped almost identically to the stairwell in front of them. But in her sketch, each step was inscribed with names—names smudged or erased entirely, as if the page itself couldn't retain them.
"I didn't know what it meant then," she said. "But now... I think I do."
Orin swallowed. "This is where they put it, isn't it? The artifact. The one Kaito accessed."
Junie nodded once. "The Chair."
The stairs moaned underfoot.
Each step was coated in layers of dust and faded glyphs. Not System-made—but hand-etched, possibly by other Divers. Some were symbols, others tally marks. One entire landing was filled with spiralling circles, almost like fingerprints burned into stone.
And Orin began to notice something unsettling.
The further they went, the quieter the world became.
No hum from the city grid. No echo of breath. Even the light from the flashlight seemed dulled, struggling to reach more than a few feet ahead, as if the very air resisted illumination.
"This place is layered," Junie whispered at one point. "Folded beneath time. Memory sinks here. It collects."
Orin glanced back at her. "You mean like a vault?"
"No. I mean like a grave."
When the stairwell ended, they stepped into a chamber unlike anything aboveground.
It wasn't large—but it was dense with presence.
Cables wound across the walls like roots overtaking an ancient tree. Old server racks, long dead, blinked with erratic pulses of dying blue and red light. Moss had crept in through cracks in the ceiling, twisting around conduit lines, fusing plant and machine.
The hum in the air was no longer a sound. It was heartbeat-level energy. A sensation beneath the skin. In the bones. As if the room itself was waiting.
And at the centre of it all…
…was the Chair.
It was less a throne and more a convergence point—raw metal fused with obsidian glass, laced with ancient code etched into every surface. It had no cushioning, no controls. It didn't invite. It dared.
A ring of data-worn stone encircled it, cracked with age, patterned with runes that responded faintly to Orin's proximity—symbols flickering like embers as he passed.
"This isn't a machine," Junie said quietly. "It's a memory forge."
Orin stepped forward slowly.
"It's also a prison."
He didn't remember making the decision to sit. Only that one moment he stood before it—then the next, he felt the Chair beneath him, cold and electric.
The instant he made contact, the world didn't explode.
It contracted.
His breath caught.
His spine arched back.
And then everything stopped.
[SYSTEM INTERRUPTION – DIVER LINK INITIATED]
[RECURSION NODE – CHAIR ACCESS POINT 00-PRIME]
[WARNING: UNSTABLE MEMORY INTEGRITY. PROCEEDING ANYWAY…]
He stood in a field of stars.
Not space. Not sky.
But thought.
Points of light surrounded him, blinking in chaotic rhythm, suspended in an ocean of dark. Each one pulsed in time with a heartbeat—sometimes his, sometimes another's. Orin floated, his body weightless, his form flickering between versions—ages, scars, postures—as if the Chair couldn't decide which iteration of him it had accessed.
Then the lights shifted.
Began to arrange.
Into a corridor.
And at its end—Kaito.
He stood before the same Chair, but in a brighter time. Everything was pristine. The walls shimmered with intention, the floor smooth and unmarred. A woman stood beside him—her face blurred, but her presence unmistakably familiar.
Seira.
Even without seeing her features, Orin knew.
She spoke, but the memory didn't provide sound.
Instead, the sensation of her words passed through his chest like vibrations in a tuning fork.
You can't fix the loop if you lose yourself trying to remember it all.
Kaito reached for the Chair.
Seira grabbed his arm.
Promise me—if another finds this, if another sits—you won't let them carry your pain.
Kaito's voice echoed for the first time.
Soft. Fractured. Full of guilt.
I'm sorry. But I already have.
The vision shifted.
Orin was in the Chair again—present, breathing, shaking.
Junie was kneeling beside him, her voice distant. "Orin. Orin—snap out of it!"
He blinked. Sat forward.
The chamber was pulsing now.
Faster. Brighter.
Glyphs across the walls were shifting on their own.
"What did you see?" she asked.
"I was him," he said. "I mean—I wasn't. But I was inside his memory. Kaito sat in this Chair. He bound something to it. Not just his memories. A warning. A scar. A piece of himself."
Junie held up her sketchbook.
And there—across the page she hadn't drawn—was a fresh image.
The Chair.
And a burning eye inside it.
And above the eye, a single phrase etched in thick, urgent strokes:
"The First Diver Failed—But He Didn't Fall Alone."
Orin's palm ached.
He looked down.
The mark was clearer now.
The Diver emblem—circle, eye, five slashes—glowing faintly on his skin.
But now… one of the slashes had extended.
It looked more like a branch.
A choice.
Junie stared at it.
"You're evolving," she said. "The system hasn't recognized it yet. But you're changing."
Orin stood slowly.
"No," he said.
"I'm remembering."
The Chair has awakened not just memory—but identity. And buried inside it is a branch of choices Kaito never finished. But some roots don't want to stay buried…
© 2025 Ofelia B Webb. All rights reserved.
This is an original work published on WebNovel.