They ran.

  The world behind them was folding.

  Not colpsing in chaos, but resetting with terrible precision.

  Darius could feel it in his bones—the Thanatarchy was rewriting Vornis not to erase him… but to contain the memory of the fracture.

  The Architect of Correction still hovered over the city like a monument to inevitability, issuing silent commands to reality itself.

  The moment Darius had touched it, the script had faltered.And now, they weren’t erasing him.

  They were rewriting the concept of what he had done.

  “We’re not safe,” Ais said, her voice a low rasp as they moved through the shattered valley east of the city. “Not even out here.”

  She was right. The air was sharp, ced with the tension of unfinished memory. The birds had stopped singing. The wind had gone quiet.

  Even the sky above them looked hesitant—as if it didn’t know what world it belonged to anymore.

  Darius stopped suddenly.

  A name flickered in his mind.

  Not his own.

  Not someone alive.

  Not someone real.

  But someone… buried.

  A name from the rewrite. One that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore.

  “Lioren.”

  Ais turned, frowning. “What?”

  Darius looked pale. Haunted.

  “I saw him… when I touched the Architect.”

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  The memory came in fshes.

  Not like dreams. Not like visions.

  Like wounds being reopened.

  A figure standing over maps made of consteltions.A voice whispering code into ancient stone.Hands forging symbols that would become the logic behind the Thanatarchy’s algorithms.

  Lioren.

  He wasn’t just a name. He was one of the Writers.

  Ais shook her head. “Who is he?”

  Darius’s eyes were distant. “I think… he helped write the first rewrite.”

  Silence.

  The words hung between them like prophecy.

  “You mean,” she whispered, “you saw one of the architects of the Thanatarchy?”

  Darius nodded slowly. “He was human. Or at least… he used to be.”

  They continued deeper into the forest. The trees here were ancient—bark like petrified skin, leaves bckened from exposure to forgotten suns.

  And then, as they reached a low gorge—they found it.

  A door.

  Half-buried in the earth. Half-wrapped in symbols nearly identical to the Architect’s face.

  Ais stared. “What the hell is this?”

  Darius stepped forward, trembling.

  “This… this is one of the pces they used to write the rewrites.”

  Ais’s breath caught. “A rewrite site?”

  Darius nodded.

  “Before they used Recimers and Inquisitors. Before the rewrite process was automated... they did it manually. In pces like this.”

  He reached toward the door.

  And as his fingers touched the symbols—it opened.

  Not with sound.

  Not with movement.

  But with permission.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  The air inside the ruin was cold.

  Older than cold.

  Like it remembered the absence of things.

  Ais lit a torch. The fme flickered wildly.

  The walls were covered in inscriptions—but not in any known nguage.

  They weren’t words.

  They were commands.

  Raw data.

  Reality encoded in glyphs.

  Darius traced his hand along one of them.

  “I think this is one of the first pces the Thanatarchy rewrote.”

  Ais’s voice was hushed. “What was here before?”

  Darius looked at her.

  And for once, he didn’t have an answer.

  Then, deep within the chamber—a whisper.

  “Who remembers the beginning?”

  Ais drew her bde instantly.

  Darius turned, scanning the dark.

  And then they saw him.

  A figure hunched over the far wall.

  Wrapped in rotting robes, covered in dust.

  Skin dry as parchment.

  Eyes glowing with blue fire.

  And when he turned to face them—

  He smiled.

  “You saw me in the rewrite, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “I am Lioren.”