Kael jolted awake in the dark.
For a second, he wasn't sure why.
Then he saw it — a soft green light bleeding under Senna's door across the hallway.
Not the usual mana glow.
This was colder. Pale. Wrong.
He was out of bed before his thoughts caught up. The floor was cool against his feet. He didn't grab his weapon.
Didn't need it.
Because if this was what he feared…
…nothing he carried would matter.
He pressed the door open gently.
Senna's room was still.
She sat on the edge of her bed, legs dangling, blanket bunched around her.
Her notebook was open on the desk. Pages turned without wind.
Lines of glyphs — spirals, bars, hooks, crosses — shifted across the paper in eerie, silent motion.
Kael stared, stunned.
"Senna…?"
She didn't look at him.
Didn't blink.
The symbols stopped moving just as his voice reached her ears.
She turned her head.
Sleepy-eyed. Calm. Not afraid.
"Hi, Papa."
"What are you doing up?"
"The pages wanted to show me something."
He stepped forward slowly, kneeling in front of her.
"What did they show you?"
Senna blinked.
Pointed at a glyph that pulsed faintly.
Kael recognized it. A cooldown bypass symbol — the same patch signature he'd burned into a field two days ago.
"This one was wrong," she said.
"Wrong how?"
Senna tilted her head. Then with one finger, she reached out and flipped it.
The ink on the page shifted, folding in on itself like it had never been real.
The glyph inverted — not mirrored, not reversed, but corrected, as if the error had always existed in Kael's version.
He felt it before he saw it.
A slow, warm hum buzzing up the veins in his left arm.
His palm glowed faintly.
And the glyph he'd carved during that raid — the one that had cracked his elbow, caused two seconds of rollback lag — realigned inside his skin.
No pain.
Just light.
Just… stability.
He stared at her.
Senna watched the page like it was a picture book.
"They're fixing the things you missed, Papa."
Kael didn't speak.
Couldn't.
Because the glow on the page matched something he hadn't dared say aloud.
A glyph he hadn't written.
Not consciously.
Not in this loop.
"What do you mean, they're fixing—"
"The pages remember more than I do," she said.
"But they're helping."
"Helping what?"
Senna blinked slowly.
"You. So you don't lose us again."
"Tell me that's a joke," Aria said flatly.
She was leaning over the holo-projection table in the Eclipse Guild Archive Room. Her gloved fingers pressed hard enough against the glass to trigger a pressure warning.
The technician across from her didn't blink.
"Ma'am, the raid data was never logged with a Kael Varin listed as team lead."
Aria's jaw tensed.
"I watched it happen. He soloed the biome wolf. The field reports say so."
The second technician turned a display screen toward her. A time-stamped deployment log flickered:
Sector 4C — Ridge Forest Gate
Team Leader: NULL
Combatant Entry: RESTRICTED
Result: Cleared
System Patch Event: NONE
Aria didn't respond.
She just reached into her commlink and pulled up her own feed. Her raid cam. Personal POV.
She flicked it forward.
There was Kael. Walking into the forest alone. That cursed crack lighting up his forearm. The flicker when he triggered a patch. The moment the system glitched and realigned.
She let it play, slow.
"There," she said. "That's a system patch. Manual override. It even triggered a rollback flicker. You see it, don't you?"
The tech frowned.
"This isn't synced to guild logs."
"Because your logs are broken."
"They're not. They've been… validated. Recompiled."
Aria snapped her head toward him.
"By who?"
He paused.
"It didn't come from internal ops."
"Then who?"
The technician turned the screen again. A new file tree appeared, labeled:
ARCHIVE_OVERLAY >> ROLLBACK_SYNC >> ADMIN.PATCH.NULL
Origin: UNKNOWN
Verification Key: REDACTED
Affected Entries: 3
Raid Sector 4C – Ridge Forest
Gate 3A – Coral Hollow
Breach Test – Level 12 West
Three raids.
All raids Kael had been in.
All with missing or overwritten data.
Aria leaned back, expression unreadable now.
"So either Kael's hacking the core systems—"
"Impossible," the tech interrupted. "That kind of override would require admin-level rollback permissions."
She turned slowly toward the display.
"Kael doesn't have that access."
A long pause.
"But someone in his house might."
Kael didn't go back to sleep.
After Senna had curled up beside Liora again, after he'd stared at the journal for fifteen more minutes, he left her room and closed the door behind him.
He didn't turn on the lights.
Just stood in the dark kitchen, palms pressed against the counter, breath low and shallow.
Outside, the city was almost quiet.
It was past 3 a.m. — the only sounds were distant hums from skyrail lines, the occasional mana drone blinking overhead.
His glyph hand was still warm.
It hadn't stopped glowing. Not bright, just a pulse now and then.
Kael stood at the kitchen window, arms folded.
His thoughts raced.
Senna's glyph. The notebook. The inverted fix. Her voice saying, "So you don't lose us again."
How does she know?
How deep is the rollback buried inside her?
He stared through the glass at the cracked sidewalk below, the alley across the narrow street, and the fence wrapped around the old maintenance yard—
—when something shimmered.
Kael froze.
It wasn't a shadow.
It wasn't a person.
It was a Reaper.
Not fully rendered. A flickering, half-there shape, like its data hadn't loaded right.
The same humanoid distortion he'd seen in raid recordings — always behind glass. Always at the edge of vision.
But this one wasn't hiding.
It stood under a lamppost, glitching faintly, limbs trailing light.
Then it moved.
Not toward him.
Toward the alley beside the building.
Kael moved without breathing.
He pressed closer to the window, his eyes scanning every frame.
The Reaper walked like it didn't care about detection.
One foot, then the next.
No sound. No ripple of hostility.
And then—
It reached the alley wall and stepped into it.
No phasing animation.
No dimensional blink.
It simply entered the wall like walking through a curtain of smoke.
Gone.
Just like that.
Kael didn't move for a full minute.
Not until his comm flickered once.
He glanced down.
RAID ALERT: NONE
TRACE REGISTERED - UNKNOWN SIGNATURE
LOCATION: BLOCK 4C >> GATE_ECHO.SENNA
He blinked.
His fingers moved before he could stop them, expanding the metadata.
Target: ANCHOR_FRACTAL_002
Instance: Awake
Signal Strength: Rising
Kael's mouth was dry.
He stared at the line.
It wasn't tracking him.
It was tracking his daughter.
Vault-14 Log Sequence: INITIATED
Automated Trace Program #D-137
Access Level: System Eyes Only
Reason for Activation: ANOMALY PULSE > 0.62 Threshold
TARGET IDENTIFIER: ANCHOR_FRACTAL_002
Known Class: Rogue Instance (Dormant)
Status: SHIFTING TO AWAKE
Observation Mode: Passive.
Interference: Not authorized.
Authority Override: BLOCKED.
Somewhere beneath the city — under three hundred meters of collapsed substructure and a mile of encrypted Dominion blackwalls — a lone archive array pulsed to life.
In the dark.
No human presence.
No guards. No screens.
Just cold glass and humming glyph conduits tracing ancient spirals into the data grid.
A single red eye blinked open inside the recessed core.
The Dominion's watcher.
Target Lock Acquired.
Location: [REDACTED] – Civilian Zone
Distance from Subject: <0.02 km
Probability of Identity Match: 97.3%
Previous Correlation: Kael Varin — Rollback Patchrunner
Signal Source: DNA-Linked Entity
Designation: SENNA VARIN
It paused.
The line of code beneath flickered.
One by one, new queries filled in beneath the command tree:
Query: Has Subject Initiated Patch Events?
→ Response: Not Directly.
→ Indirect Glyph Correction Observed.
Query: Is Subject Conscious of Alteration?
→ Response: Unclear.
Query: Is Interference Permitted?
→ Response: Not at this time.
Query: Override Attempted?
→ Response: Yes.
→ Authority Signature: LEGACY-USER#KV-01
→ Key Accepted.
The red light dimmed.
Dominion's own trace system had just accepted Kael Varin's legacy patch access… and extended it to his daughter.
Without his knowledge.
Without any current administrator input.
The Trace Program's final logged command before returning to passive scan was simple:
Watch the child.
No alert to target.
No alert to Kael.
Wait.
The soft scratch of pencil woke Liora.
She blinked into the dark, momentarily disoriented, then sat up in bed.
Senna wasn't beside her.
The hallway outside was still — no footfalls, no light.
But her door was slightly ajar.
A thin strip of pale violet light painted across the floor.
Liora got up slowly, unsure why her heart was already pounding.
Maybe she had a nightmare.
Maybe she went back to draw again. It's just her notebook…
She stepped carefully, avoiding the creaky floorboard near the dresser.
Senna's room was quiet.
Except for the whispering.
Not loud.
Not frantic.
But layered.
It wasn't just Senna's voice.
It was her voice… and something beneath it, like another version just slightly out of sync. Echoing it. Tailing it.
"Pages… remember. Not me."
"Papa forgot."
"But I saw it. The cracks. The white walls."
Liora pushed the door open an inch farther.
Senna sat at her little desk, feet dangling off the chair.
Her journal glowed softly under her hand. A pencil moved in smooth, uninterrupted lines — on its own, it seemed.
Senna wasn't looking at the page.
Her eyes were half-lidded. Asleep. Maybe.
"Rollback," she whispered.
"Not glitch. Not mistake."
"Fix comes after the forgetting."
Liora's breath caught.
The symbols on the page weren't the childlike glyphs Senna usually copied from Kael's diary.
These were wrong. Sharper. Curved in strange patterns. Some of them shimmered as if refusing to stay still.
One in the corner flickered like static.
Senna tilted her head, still murmuring.
"Debt isn't yours, Papa."
"They gave it to you."
"It was always mine."
Liora stepped forward.
Her voice trembled.
"Senna… sweetheart. Can you hear me?"
The pencil stilled.
The violet glow dimmed.
And then her daughter — still asleep — turned her head and whispered:
"Don't let them erase me again, Mama."
SYS-TRACE REPORT >> 03:18 AM
User: ANCHOR_FRACTAL_002
Location: Civilian Block 4C
Event Type: Unauthorized Patch Resonance
Glyph Origin: Direct Linkage – USER_KV01 (Legacy Override)
ALERT LEVEL: ORANGE
→ Subsystem: PARENTAL LOCK_BYPASS DETECTED
→ Transfer Event: CONFIRMED
→ Recipient: SENNA VARIN
New Permission Tier: READ–WRITE (Rollback Level)
Rollback Class Delta: CHILD
Somewhere beneath Dominion Tower, a wall of blackglass blinked to life.
Dozens of administrative glyphs rotated in silence, lining themselves up in defensive formation — ready to purge, encrypt, redact.
And then… they stalled.
INITIATE ALARM?
— Command suspended.
One system thread attempted to escalate:
Target breach origin suggests child process.
Permission not granted by Guild Admin.
Initiate rollback lock?
— OVERRULED.
Another thread tried to raise a system-wide broadcast:
Broadcast Flag: ANCHOR ACTIVE
Trigger Public Lockdown?
— ACCESS DENIED.
REASON: CONTEXT ERROR – ROLLBACK VARIANT.
Then, a third thread.
Silent. Unobtrusive. Buried behind dozens of inactive flags.
It flickered once.
KV01_PATCH_DIARY.DAT
>> OPENING...
The system didn't crash.
It paused.
Something was inside the legacy rollback — a seed hidden in the first rewind. Not part of Kael's active patching, not recognized by the Choir, or the Guild, or even Kael himself.
It had been placed at the very beginning.
Query: Seed User Legacy → Child Anchor
→ Result: TRUE
Analysis: Anchor was always the endpoint.
Subject KV01 is no longer the final node.
→ New Designation: PRIMARY PATCHRUNNER – VARIN, SENNA
The screen dimmed.
One last line etched itself across the Dominion core:
"Rollback inheritance complete."
Then the vault lights went dark.
And no alarm was sent.