I didn't go home that night. I told myself it was because I needed to investigate the glitch—study the anomaly, check the logs. But the truth was simpler. I was afraid to sleep.
I pulled the system logs into a secure partition and reviewed the event frame by frame. At 14:32:11, the feed jumped. A spike of irregular pulses. Raw data, like noise—but there was a pattern. Almost like a signature.
I enhanced the signal, layered it against known frequency imprints. Nothing matched.
Then I ran a voice structure analysis. Something had spoken. Something outside the Convergence. The waveform was jagged, erratic—but beneath the static, I reconstructed one single word.
Nyxari.
I stared at the spectrogram, breath stuck in my throat. The word wasn't just sound—it had weight. Like it wasn't just meant to be heard. It was meant to be felt.
The lab's lights dimmed.
Then flickered.
Then plunged into total darkness.
A whisper slithered through the room—not through my ears, but through my mind. It didn't say a word. It just pressed itself into my thoughts like a virus sliding into a bloodstream.
I activated my personal core-light. A soft blue shimmer cast long shadows across the room. Every surface looked warped, stretched, as if the lab was no longer entirely in sync with physical space.
I backed up.
Something moved in the glass. Not behind it—in it. A figure, vague and shifting. Humanoid. Eyes like deep voids.
It mouthed the word.
Nyxari.
The power returned with a pop. The vision vanished. The lab returned to normal.
But the spectrogram had changed.
It no longer read one word.
It now read: "We are not sealed. The lock has seen you. You are the key."