The Ruinpoint perimeter didn't have roads — just cracked ferrocrete pathways choked in moss and conduit veins, curling like dying roots toward the city's forgotten edge.
Kael walked fast.
Every footstep echoed off rusted cargo containers and signal-towers stripped for scrap. The walls here weren't monitored — they weren't worth monitoring. Too far from the gates, too close to the wild zones. Dead WiFi. Dirty mana. No eyes.
Exactly why he came.
The door to Dren's shack hadn't changed.
Still dented at the hinge, still tagged with sigils half-melted from some long-forgotten explosion. Kael knocked twice. Then once. Then held his breath.
The wall flickered. A hidden glyph-strip lit up — then fizzled out like it forgot how to glow.
From inside, a voice rasped:
"Kael Varin. That you?"
"It is."
"You got the coffee?"
"No."
Pause.
"…Then it better be life or death."
The door clicked. Unlocked.
Kael stepped inside.
The heat hit him first — like walking into the breath of a dead server rack. The interior was lined with old hardware, some booting, some humming. Half-assembled patchpads, derelict simulation tanks, five different cracked Patchbands wired into the ceiling.
And in the center, hunched over a projector bowl, was Dren.
Mid-fifties. Bald. One eye cybernetic, glowing faint purple.
The other one blinked at Kael like he hadn't seen a person in a year.
"You look older," Dren said.
"I feel older."
"And stupider."
Kael said nothing.
Dren nodded to himself. "So it's life or death. You wouldn't be here otherwise."
He picked up a half-working thermal kettle. Clicked it on. It hissed.
Kael didn't sit.
"I need you to look at something."
Dren paused. "If it's a corrupted spell loop, you're three years late."
Kael reached into his coat. Pulled out Senna's notebook — the small cloth-bound one she'd been sketching in lately. He turned to the last page.
The glyph shimmered faintly.
Kael handed it over.
Dren took it without ceremony.
Then stopped.
Stared.
And did not move for a full five seconds.
The kettle hissed in the background. Somewhere above, a monitor glitched.
Dren blinked.
Set the notebook down.
Then locked the shack. Manual override. Steel bolts.
"Where did she see this?" he said quietly.
Kael's voice was steady. "She didn't. She drew it in her sleep."
"You're lying."
"I'm not."
Dren picked up the notebook again. Didn't open it. Just held it like it was something radioactive.
"You know what this is?"
"I've seen it once," Kael said. "In rollback code. Buried in Anchor logic."
"It's worse than that," Dren muttered. "This isn't a system glyph."
He turned the notebook slowly. Tapped it once with a cracked stylus.
"This was hand-written. Not generated. Not compiled. It's not just a key…"
He looked at Kael — really looked.
"It's a signature."
Kael frowned.
Dren pointed to the spiral at the top right of the glyph.
"See this? That's an Auth swirl. But not local. This is admin-tier. Higher than anything the Guilds ever let leak."
Kael's pulse quickened.
"She drew it like it was a reflex," he said.
"Yeah, well, that's because something's writing into her," Dren snapped. "You remember what rollback Anchors are made for, right?"
Kael nodded slowly.
"They're reference points," he said. "Fixed coordinates for memory states. So the system has something to return to."
"Right," Dren said. "So tell me this, friend — what does it mean when the Anchor point is walking around drawing its own lockkey?"
Silence.
Kael stared at the notebook.
The glyph glowed faintly. Blue.
Dren stepped back.
"You didn't just patch something, Kael."
"I know."
"You woke something."
Dren didn't sit.
He paced — one hand on the back of his neck, the other waving the notebook like it was a ticking grenade.
"I always figured rollback Anchors were hard-coded," he muttered. "Tied to fixed system timestamps. But this… this is wild."
Kael kept still. Watching.
"You said she saw this in a dream?"
"No. She drew it in her sleep. And then said something."
Kael's voice dropped. "She said the code doesn't end here."
Dren's head snapped around.
"Verbatim?"
Kael nodded.
"Those are rollback filler words," Dren said. "Buffer scripts. You know how the system stabilizes visual threads before a reset? It loops low-priority dialogue into deadspace — that phrase is a default echo."
His voice dropped. "But it's not public. That's backend."
Kael stepped closer. "You're telling me she somehow picked up system noise?"
Dren looked at him.
"No. I'm telling you she was inside the thread."
The words hit like a fist.
Kael exhaled slowly, eyes flicking to the notebook again.
"Dren," he said, "are you saying… she was part of the rollback?"
"Not part," Dren said. "She was the root. The living node the rollback centered on."
Silence.
Outside, a low wind howled across the alley behind the shack — sharp and quick, like data slicing through a cable.
Dren sat at last, gripping the edge of the desk.
"Rollback events don't just happen, Kael. You know that. The system doesn't waste that much power unless it's anchoring to a constant."
"You're saying… it wasn't me?"
"You wished for it," Dren admitted. "You said the words. Your patch glitched enough to open a window. But that rollback? That cascade? It didn't lock to you."
He opened the notebook again.
"It locked to her."
Kael's hands curled into fists.
Dren kept talking — voice quiet now, like the realization scared even him.
"The Anchor glyph isn't a spell. It's a permission. A system-level designation."
He pointed to the corner spiral again — the same curve Senna had drawn instinctively.
"You've been using system cracks to alter cooldowns. Minor stuff. But this?"
Dren's eyes narrowed.
"This means she isn't just marked. She was authorized."
Kael stared.
"Authorized by what?"
"That," Dren whispered, "is the question that keeps me up at night."
Another pause.
Then Kael asked, very quietly:
"Can this be undone?"
Dren laughed — once. Bitter.
"You mean erased? Like a patch?"
Kael said nothing.
"Kael," Dren said, "if your daughter is an Anchor… she's not riding the system."
"What is she riding?"
Dren met his eyes.
"The system is riding her."
The terminal room in Guild Annex 4 was dead quiet — save for the gentle hum of archival servers and the soft breath of Aria's focused exhale.
She'd locked the door.
Not because she had something to hide.
But because she knew someone else did.
The server flickered to life with a pulse of deep blue light. Aria leaned in — fingers dancing across the translucent interface like she'd done a thousand times before.
ACCESS: ROLLLOG 87-B/VARIN
The log fed through like always.
Kael Varin.
Mid-tier Awakener. Late 20s. Former cooldown runner, now solo queue irregular.
Visual data: ✅
Spectral feed: ✅
Kill timestamps: ✅
Patch activity: ✅
And then—
Rollback Record: ❌ NULL
"What the hell," she whispered.
She expanded the rollback column.
A red warning flickered.
ANCHOR POINT NOT FOUND
ERROR: USER RECORD ABSENT IN TEMPORAL FLAG
She ran it again.
Same raid. Same data. Same error.
It said Kael wasn't there.
Even though she could see him in the recording. Hear his voice. Watch his kill cam.
"No anchor?" she muttered. "That doesn't make sense."
She opened the raid footage. Slowed it to x0.5.
Kael moved like usual. Clean strikes. No excessive flourish. No wasted energy. If anything, he looked slower than some top-tier guilders.
But then the kill frame hit.
Frame 71,344 — the wolf lunges.
Frame 71,345 — Kael side-steps.
Frame 71,346 — the wolf is dead.
No animation. No in-between.
Just gone.
Her hand paused over the play bar.
"That's not possible…"
She tabbed to the system trace again.
Something else flickered on the side.
ECHO THREAD PENDING — 2 Suppressed Events
She blinked.
Suppressed rollback echoes were rare. Usually flagged when users operated outside sync — latency spikes, cross-guild interference, that kind of thing.
She clicked open the trace path.
It wasn't a raid location.
It was Kael's home district.
"Why would the system ping rollback near his residence…?"
She zoomed out.
Both suppressed events happened within a six-hour window of the raid. Not during combat — during downtime.
And one of them was flagged with a subheader she hadn't seen in years.
— CHILD SAFETY PROTOCOL ENACTED [HIDDEN LAYER 03]
Her blood ran cold.
That was an admin-level flag. Reserved for lockdowns — system-level failsafes to protect minors during catastrophic rollbacks.
But no child was listed on Kael's profile.
No mention of family. No dependents. No civilian ties logged.
It was blank.
As if someone had scrubbed the records.
She leaned back slowly, heart thudding in her ears.
Kael Varin wasn't just bypassing cooldown logic.
He was ghosting rollback detection entirely.
And the system — or someone deep inside it — was trying to hide that fact.
She stared at the blinking cursor at the bottom of the audit window.
Would you like to report anomaly? [Y/N]
She didn't answer.
Instead, she pulled up her comms.
Typed one name.
Kael Varin
[Direct Line: Encrypted Override]
She hit CALL.
The apartment was too quiet.
Liora stood in the hallway with a warm mug in hand, watching her daughter crouch by the wall mirror again.
Senna hadn't said a word in twenty minutes.
She'd eaten dinner in slow silence, stared out the window during her bath, and now sat — barefoot, knees tucked — in front of the long mirror outside Kael's study.
Her fingers moved slowly against the glass.
Drawing something.
Tracing.
Liora's breath caught as she recognized the shapes. The same curved spiral Kael had shown her the night before.
"Senna?" she asked softly.
No answer.
The girl didn't flinch. Didn't blink.
Her index finger pressed against the mirror like it was warm. Almost like it was responding.
"Sweetheart, you shouldn't be—"
Senna spoke without turning.
"He's watching."
Liora froze.
"Who?"
Senna tilted her head.
"The one with no face."
The hallway light flickered.
A hum passed through the air — so faint it might've been the pipes, or the mana conduits behind the walls, or—
No.
Liora stepped forward.
"Baby, look at me. You're safe, okay? Mama's here."
Senna blinked.
The spiral completed.
And then the mirror… shivered.
Liora nearly dropped the mug.
It didn't crack. It didn't bend. It didn't break.
It just… moved. From inside.
Like water. Like static. Like something on the other side had shifted.
And then the reflection of her daughter—
—kept drawing.
Even though Senna's hand had dropped.
The girl in the mirror, identical in face and clothes and posture, kept moving her finger along the glass. Drawing a second glyph, one Liora didn't recognize.
"Senna," she whispered, stepping forward, "what is that?"
Senna didn't look at her mother.
Instead, she tilted her head.
"It's not me," she said softly. "It's learning how to be."
Liora's throat tightened.
She crouched, gripping her daughter's shoulders gently.
"Who told you that? Who's learning?"
Senna blinked.
And for the first time in her six years of life, her eyes didn't look like a child's.
They looked like witnesses.
"It said… we used to be one person. A long time ago. Before Daddy changed the code."
Liora pulled her into her arms.
Held her tight.
Didn't look at the mirror.
Didn't see the reflection still watching her.
Didn't see the second glyph finish and glow.
Didn't see the faint outline of a second figure appear behind the mirrored Senna — taller than Kael, skin like smoke, and glyphs stitched across its face like broken seams.
She just held her daughter.
And whispered:
"I won't let anything take you. Not again."
The air in Dren's alley always smelled like copper and ozone.
Kael shoved his hands in his coat pockets and walked in silence, Dren's last words still hammering in his head.
"She wasn't part of the system. She was the root."
The phrase looped like corrupted code.
He pulled out his comm interface.
1 Missed Call – Aria Fenn
*Message: "Kael. This is serious. You need to see this."
He stared at it.
Debated.
And then pocketed it again.
Not tonight.
He passed a half-dead mana lamp flickering near the alley bend. The shadows it threw danced like they had extra joints.
Kael didn't flinch.
He was too used to glitches now.
But something still felt… off.
He slowed his pace.
The air buzzed slightly — not loud, but high-pitched, like a mosquito caught in a forcefield.
He turned.
No one there.
No footsteps. No movement. Just the alley stretching empty behind him.
And above—
—a shape crouched on the rooftop ledge, barely visible in the broken light.
Tall.
Thin.
Bent at the knees like an animal waiting to spring.
Not moving. Not breathing.
Watching.
Kael didn't blink.
Didn't reach for a weapon. Didn't run.
He just stared.
And the Reaper stared back.
No attack. No shriek. No distortion burst.
It simply… observed.
Kael tilted his head slightly.
"You've been quiet lately," he muttered.
The Reaper's head twitched a few millimeters.
Almost like it was acknowledging the comment.
Then Kael saw it — barely glowing, flickering across the Reaper's forehead like a branded burn.
A glyph.
Curved. Familiar.
The same spiral Senna drew. The same one from the mirror.
His blood ran cold.
"What the hell are you learning from her…?"
The Reaper shifted.
Then vanished — not with a leap or blink, but like static scrubbed from a screen. The distortion snapped closed.
Kael stood alone in the alley.
A wind passed overhead.
Somewhere far off, his comm buzzed again.
This time, he didn't check it.
The apartment lights were dimmed.
Liora had finally gotten Senna to sleep after the mirror incident, though not without tears.
Now only the faint amber glow of the mana-charged nightlight pulsed in her room.
It was quiet.
Too quiet.
The wind outside had stopped, as if the city itself was holding its breath.
In the corner of Senna's shelf, tucked behind a stuffed animal and a half-filled water bottle, her notebook shuddered.
Not violently.
Not physically.
Digitally.
Pages flipped — one by one.
The air around it buzzed faintly, like audio feedback in a room with no microphone.
And then the pages stopped.
Blank sheet.
Center of the journal.
A glow began to spread from the middle of the page — not drawn, not inked.
Written from nowhere.
A glyph emerged.
Curved. Angular. Too complex for a child's hand.
It pulsed once in soft green light.
Then again.
And then stopped — leaving only silence.
Rollback Echo Registered.
Location: Child Anchor Instance [Suppressed]
Time Drift: 00:00:00.02
...Echo Complete.
Across the apartment, in the hallway mirror outside Kael's office, a faint shimmer passed across the surface.
Something inside watched the door.
It didn't smile.
Didn't blink.
It only mirrored Kael's glyph… but upside down, with a crack stitched straight through the spiral.
And when the lights flickered once, the reflection remained for just a second longer than it should've.
Then it was gone.