The morning tried to look normal.
It failed.
Steam curled from Kael's tea mug, clouding the air above the kitchen table. Sunlight filtered through gauzy yellow curtains, casting warm stripes across the wooden counters — the same ones Liora had scrubbed bare the night Senna learned to walk. The kitchen still smelled faintly of cinnamon and burnt toast. Familiar things. Safe things.
But Kael's sleeve was tugged lower than usual. Too low.
His forearm burned.
Not with pain — that was manageable. It was the light that terrified him now. Even under wraps, he could feel it pulse. The cracks beneath his skin weren't fading like last time. They'd spread further overnight — branching up toward the elbow, fracturing like stress lines in overloaded data glass.
Across from him, Senna kicked her legs beneath the chair, humming softly as she drew in her notebook. The crayon in her hand moved in wide, looping strokes. At a glance, it was the kind of chaotic drawing only a six-year-old could love.
But Kael had trained as a sigil-hacker.
And what Senna was drawing… were glyphs.
Real ones.
Hooks. Spirals. Directional flow bars.
Kael watched her carefully. "New design today, little star?"
She didn't look up. "This one makes things stop shaking."
He froze. "Shaking?"
Senna blinked up at him, crayon between her fingers. "Like when the ground trembles but Mama doesn't feel it. The glyph helps it stay still."
Kael managed a tight smile. "Just imagination."
Senna tilted her head. "You always say that when something's real."
Liora set a bowl of porridge in front of her daughter. "Eat before it cools."
"Mmhm." Senna didn't stop drawing.
Liora returned to the stove, but her eyes flicked back to Kael. She noticed the sleeve too. The way he flinched slightly every time he moved his arm.
Kael raised the tea to his lips. The bandage tugged up half an inch.
Just enough.
"Papa…" Senna said suddenly, blinking at him.
Kael nearly choked on his tea. "Hm?"
She pointed, not accusingly — more curious than anything. "Does it hurt? When the lines move like that?"
The world seemed to narrow.
Liora froze, her hand on a pan.
Kael set the mug down. His voice came quieter than he intended. "What lines?"
Senna looked confused, then frowned. "The ones in your arm. They blink when you're sad."
Kael's blood turned to ice. "Senna—"
"I saw them last night too," she added, still not looking at him. "But only when the light turned off. I think they follow you."
The kitchen went dead silent.
Kael rose slowly. "I'll… check the porch wards."
Senna looked up, innocent. "Okay!"
He stepped past Liora. She caught his arm gently — not stopping him, not confronting — just a squeeze of warning.
He didn't meet her eyes.
He couldn't.
The porch door clicked shut behind him, and Kael leaned hard against the wall, heart hammering against his ribs.
She saw them. Not just once. And not just by accident.
The cracks were no longer his alone.
Senna padded off to her room without protest, notebook tucked under one arm like it was a treasure.
The soft click of her door shutting might as well have been a trigger.
Liora moved the moment it latched.
No warning.
She crossed the kitchen with quiet fury and caught Kael by the wrist before he could slip away. Her grip was firm — stronger than he remembered — and her eyes didn't waver.
"Liora—" he began.
"Sit."
He sat.
Without asking permission, without ceremony, she yanked his sleeve up to the elbow.
The glow was worse than before. Hairline cracks of pale blue-white light snaked along his forearm in jagged, unnatural patterns — like something holy and broken fighting to get out.
Liora's breath caught. "Gods…"
"It's under control," Kael muttered.
"No. It's not." Her fingers hovered just above the glowing lines, not touching, as if contact might hurt him — or her.
"I'm managing it," he said.
"You're failing to manage it." Her voice sharpened, tone slicing like a cold blade. "How long?"
He looked away.
"How long, Kael?"
"The Ridge Forest raid," he admitted, quietly. "That was the first time it didn't fade after the patch."
Her hand fell to her lap. "That was weeks ago."
He nodded once.
"And it's been spreading ever since?"
"...Yes."
Silence. The kind that pulled the oxygen from the room.
Liora stared at him — not like she was angry, but like she was drowning in all the things he hadn't said. The woman who once stitched Kael's wounds after raids without blinking now sat frozen in the face of something she couldn't stitch shut.
"This isn't a glyph overload," she said eventually. "This isn't some overclocked cooldown backlash. This is wrong."
"It's a side effect," Kael whispered. "From the rollback. From patching things I shouldn't be able to."
Her voice dropped, raw. "You're breaking."
"I know."
"And you didn't tell me?" Her voice cracked.
"I didn't want to make you afraid."
"Too late," she spat.
She stood, pacing now. Her steps were tight, controlled — not storming, but burning. "You said the rollback gave us a second chance. You said we could live again. So why do I wake up every day wondering if that light under your skin will kill you before we reach Senna's next birthday?"
Kael flinched.
Liora stopped, back still to him. "She sees it, Kael. She's six and she sees everything. You think she doesn't notice you clenching your fist to keep the glow in? You think she doesn't hear the way you whisper at night like you're trying to bargain with the world?"
"I'm trying to protect you."
"No." She turned now, tears burning in her eyes. "You're trying to shield us from a storm that's already inside our walls. You think by hiding this, you're sparing us. But you're teaching her — to lie, to bear it in silence, to copy the things that will destroy her."
That landed like a blade.
Kael opened his mouth — then shut it again.
The cracks on his arm pulsed faintly, syncing with his heartbeat. Or maybe with hers.
"She's drawing the glyphs, Kael," Liora whispered. "Real ones. Complex ones. I caught her stabilizing a broken cup yesterday. Not with glue. With a binding seal I haven't seen since my days in archives."
Kael blinked. "She did what?"
Liora just nodded.
"She's syncing with you," she said. "Isn't she?"
He said nothing.
The silence was its own confession.
Liora sank back into the chair across from him. Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "You said this rollback was your burden to carry. That you wouldn't let it touch us again."
"I'm still trying to keep that promise."
"You're failing," she said — not cruel, not angry. Just broken.
Kael looked down at his hand. The cracks had dimmed slightly, the glow barely perceptible in the daylight. But he felt them always now. Not as pain, but as presence. As hunger.
"I can't stop patching," he said, finally. "If I do, the damage accelerates. The system will collapse. The raid loops. And we go back."
"To that night?" Liora asked.
He nodded. Slowly.
Her eyes glistened. "We're already back in it. You just can't see it."
He couldn't argue.
So he didn't.
Liora didn't speak again.
She simply stood.
Kael reached for her wrist as she passed, but she slipped free with a gentleness that hurt more than resistance.
"Liora—"
She paused at the hallway door, looking back. Her voice was a ghost. "If this is what surviving looks like… I'm not sure it's living anymore."
Then she left.
Not slammed doors. Not weeping. Just silence.
Kael sat alone in the kitchen long after the sun dipped behind the skyline, the fading light casting fractured lines across the counters — cracks that matched the ones on his arm. He watched the glow pulse through his sleeve in soft rhythm.
He couldn't tell if it matched his heartbeat anymore.
Or Senna's.
The house was quiet.
Not peaceful. Just quiet.
He stood in her doorway that night, long after Liora had curled up alone in bed, back turned to him.
Senna slept curled around her notebook. Her breathing was soft. Even.
But the notebook wasn't still.
Faint lines shimmered across the pages — glyphs he didn't remember showing her. Glyphs he barely understood. Curved strokes and fracture-lines that looked almost like the patchscript code he used to reroute Raid logic during live fights.
He stepped closer. Slowly.
One glyph shifted.
Not moved. Updated. Like it was reacting.
His heart skipped.
He reached out, hesitated. The lines pulsed once, dim blue, then faded — just like the glow beneath the bandages on his arm.
Kael reeled back.
She's syncing with me.
Not copying.
Not mimicking.
Syncing.
The Debt wasn't isolated.
It wasn't just cracking him.
It was extending to her. Growing, like roots shared between bodies. Like the rollback had spilled beyond his second chance and begun rewriting the future through her.
He didn't sleep.
Couldn't.
He stood by the living room window as dawn crept up behind the skyline — neon blues fading into early gray.
The city shimmered in silence. Screens still pulsed. Comms still broadcast their sanitized feeds. Nothing seemed broken.
Except everything was.
He looked down at his arm. Unwrapped the bandage. Let the glow breathe.
The cracks ran deeper now, branching up toward his shoulder. Not just spreading. Thickening. The light had weight. Substance. As if the system was laying threads inside him — threads that didn't belong in this version of reality.
And Senna…
His fist tightened.
"Please," he whispered, forehead resting against the cold glass. "Not her. Take everything from me. But not her."
Meanwhile…
In a tower lined with obsidian glass and Dominion-grade encryption, Aria leaned over her private console.
The raid logs had lied again.
She had raw footage from three angles showing Kael disrupting the Ridge Forest collapse — glyph patterns flaring, beast behavior warped, an entire phase skipped.
And yet the official logs returned nothing.
Combatant: NULL
System Event: NONE
Patch Trigger: INVALID
She tapped into the dev layer. Backdoor protocols.
A flicker of hidden code scrolled across her screen:
ORIGIN: REDACTED
ROLLBACK SYNC ENABLED
VARIANT SIGNATURE: V-03 / Patchrunner (Live)
SECURITY TIER: Administrator Override
LOG INDEX: CORRUPTED
Her heart stopped.
Variant-03.
That wasn't a common rollback flag.
That was a Patchrunner class anomaly.
Which only one operator had ever triggered — and his name was buried under fifteen layers of Dominion classified files.
And now it pointed to Kael Varin.
Aria sat back, blood cold.
"If this is real," she whispered, "then he's not just cheating fate…"
She glanced out over the city.
"He's rewriting it."