The Dominion spire towered above the skyline like a monolith carved from glass and shadow. No blinking logos. No fluttering banners. Just a singular matte-black surface that seemed to devour the light around it.
High above the streets—above the guild districts, above the noise—the Guildmaster sat in a windowless room, lit only by the pale curve of a display screen.
No one knew the Guildmaster's real name anymore.
To most, he was known only as Elyon.
Elyon leaned forward now, fingers steepled under his chin, his expression unreadable. On the screen before him, paused mid-motion, was a man he'd seen before—but not like this.
Kael Varin. Mid-tier. Unremarkable by metrics.
And yet…
The screen played forward in stuttering silence. Kael twisted mid-combat, light rippling across his arm, glyphs unraveling and reweaving mid-strike. The Reaper flickered beside him—no audio, but the distortion on the screen was unmistakable. The stasis bubble ignited, fracturing like glass, then rebuilt itself from code Kael had no right to control.
Elyon rewound the feed.
Watched again.
Slowed the frame.
There. The moment Kael's cracked arm moved through the broken weave of reality—glyphs shimmered and bent, but not in pre-coded ways. They adapted to him. As though reacting. As though learning.
His lips parted just slightly, eyes narrowing.
"He's not running a hack," he said aloud, the words quiet but absolute. "He is the hack."
Across the room, a smaller console blinked.
A quiet chime.
INQUIRY RESPONSE: ARCHIVE_OVERLAY FILE CORRUPTION — CONFIRMED
He tapped the feed, pulling up battle logs.
Ridge Forest Gate.
Coral Hollow Gate.
West Breach Test.
All altered. All tagged with rollback overlays not filed through internal Dominion channels.
That was the part that unnerved him. Not Kael. Not even the Reaper.
But this: whoever was rewriting Dominion logs from the outside wasn't leaving breadcrumbs.
They were scrubbing the trail entirely.
Elyon leaned back in his chair, exhaling through his nose.
"Who are you really, Varin?" he murmured.
He tapped a silent command on the console.
On a separate screen, Senna's school profile loaded.
Low-risk civilian. Daughter of Kael Varin. Recently flagged for anomalous glyph mimicry in primary-level diagnostics. Not marked as a threat. Yet.
Her last drawing—an incomplete glyph string—hung unresolved in the background scan. Elyon's eyes narrowed at the final two symbols. He recognized the structure.
A rollback tether.
Not complete.
But… close.
He closed the file without comment.
Instead, he opened a window most in Dominion never dared access.
Rollback Variant Registry
→ [ 1 entry ]
→ ID: UNKNOWN
→ Status: REDACTED
→ System Tag: ROLLBACK_SYNC.PATCHRUNNER.NULL
"Still just one," he said quietly.
He stared at the name for a long time.
Then, for the first time in years, the Guildmaster smiled.
Not warm. Not cruel.
Just… interested.
The meeting chamber was deep beneath the tower—far from screens, surveillance, or echo.
Only six seats were filled.
Each belonged to a Dominion core handler, the kind whose names never appeared on public registries. The kind who decided what the world would remember.
Elyon stood at the head of the table, hands folded behind his back, his expression carved from ice.
"Report," he said.
The first to speak was Kora, her eyes cyber-lit, scrolling feeds across her retina. "We have inconsistencies across three raid logs. Null tags on combatant data. Patch events showing as invalid or never triggered. Our own systems mark them as overwritten—externally."
"External from where?" someone asked.
Kora shook her head. "That's the problem. Not from guild interference. Not even Choir tampering. The signal comes from a rollback depth level we've never seen. It's rewriting history clean—as if the data was never there."
A murmur rippled around the table.
The oldest man present, Myros, tapped a finger on the wood. "So we have a ghost."
"Not a ghost," Kora muttered. "A variable. Something inserted after-the-fact, with admin permissions. Higher than our clearance."
Another operative—black coat, scars across his throat—spoke up. "Then it's internal. High level. Someone with root."
Elyon's eyes flicked to him. "And yet even my key flags the logs as restricted."
The silence deepened.
That wasn't supposed to be possible.
"Have we considered Choir manipulation?" someone offered weakly. "There's precedent. Their relics—"
"No." Elyon's voice was steel. "The Choir is loud. This is silence. Surgical. Precise. They don't erase—they martyr. This isn't spiritual. It's system."
Kora shifted in her seat. "Sir… Kael Varin's daughter—"
"Is a child," someone cut in.
"—who draws rollback glyphs from memory," Kora finished. "And stabilizes corrupted sigils subconsciously."
The room paused.
"She shouldn't be able to do that," someone whispered.
"No," Elyon agreed. "She shouldn't."
A long breath. A long stillness.
Then he walked around the table slowly, eyes grazing over them all.
"Kael Varin has appeared in three raids with impossible outcomes. Has survived events rated terminal. His logs show PATCH events with rollback markers. He is flagged by the system as a Rollback Variant, a designation thought impossible to replicate."
"Then he's like the first one," Myros said quietly. "The ghost."
Elyon didn't answer. He reached the end of the table and turned.
"What do we do?" someone asked.
"Nothing," Elyon said.
They stared.
He raised a hand. "Nothing direct. No contact. No detainment. We observe. We listen. And we let the city do what cities do best: chew up its miracles and spit out its monsters."
"And if he breaks containment?" Kora asked.
"If he reaches that point…" Elyon finally allowed a shadow of emotion into his voice.
It wasn't fear.
It was fascination.
"Then we'll know the rollback wasn't an error," he said. "It was a test."
The chamber re-formed around him in shadows and static.
Elyon stood alone now, in a relay vault sealed from every known access point. Even the Dominion Guildmaster needed layered authorizations to enter—a biometric signature, a temporal cipher, and a rollback-locked token.
This wasn't where he ruled.
This was where he questioned everything.
The interface spiraled to life before him, pulsing with the soft red glow of classified communication threads. Each one carried a voice no longer alive in public records—handlers, architects, even early rollback engineers whose existence had been scrubbed when their projects crossed the wrong line.
He keyed in the thread manually.
ARCHIVIST THREAD: 000-P4TH-R01
The response came faster than expected.
UNKNOWN:
This thread is deprecated.
ELYON:
So was rollback.
And yet here we are.
Silence. Then:
UNKNOWN:
You found another.
Elyon didn't blink. "Variant. The logs designate him one."
UNKNOWN:
Name?
"Kael Varin. Mid-tier. No known anomalies until the last 90-day cycle."
The interface flickered. Elyon didn't move.
UNKNOWN:
Then the sync has begun again.
The system is folding.
This one's timing is different. Earlier.
That caught him off guard.
"Earlier than what?"
UNKNOWN:
Than the last.
The first rollback didn't trigger until 203 days after initial corruption.
This one starts at 90.
"Explain."
UNKNOWN:
The system adapts. It's recursive.
Last time it took half a year to fracture.
This time, it took three months.
Next time? Three weeks.
And after that? There won't be a next time.
Elyon exhaled slowly.
The archivist's words landed like falling stones in deep water. He had studied rollback theory for years—understood its cost, its unpredictability, and the cracks it left in both systems and minds. But this was different. This wasn't theory.
This was inevitability.
"You're saying the system is trying to correct itself sooner. Why?"
UNKNOWN:
Because the Patchrunners are getting better.
And worse.
UNKNOWN:
They're surviving.
A long beat of static.
UNKNOWN:
If this Kael isn't stopped…
He'll outpace the recursion model.
Break rollback containment.
Drag others into the bleed.
Elyon's gaze sharpened. "You mean his daughter."
No reply.
The screen shimmered faintly.
UNKNOWN:
She's not the first to see the cracks.
She might be the first to shape them.
Elyon stared at the fading thread.
"Then what do we do?"
UNKNOWN:
Pray this one chooses differently.
Because the first Patchrunner didn't stop the system.
He became it.
The thread severed.
No logs saved. No backup allowed. Even for him.
Elyon stood in silence.
Then, quietly, he whispered the word: "Patchrunner."
It felt like naming a god.
Or a curse.
The door to the surveillance deck hissed open.
Elyon's presence drew silence like gravity. Conversations choked off. Monitors froze mid-feed. Analysts straightened in their chairs, suddenly aware of every breath, every blinking cursor.
No Guildmaster ever came here—not without reason.
He didn't raise his voice. "Status on the Ridgeway breach?"
The lead operator cleared his throat. "Cleared, sir. Official logs show minor anomalies—unexplained visual distortion, combatant collapse, but no structural fallout. We tagged the data as a Class-2 variance."
"And the combatant?"
"Kael Varin. Mid-tier awakener. Unregistered enhancements. Rumors are escalating. We've intercepted five major streams calling him a glitch manipulator. Two are sponsored."
Elyon nodded once. "Good. Let them spread."
That silenced the room harder than a command.
The operator blinked. "Sir?"
"Every system needs its scapegoat. The more they argue about what he is, the fewer will ask why the system fails around him."
He stepped toward the main monitor, gaze scanning the stream feeds. Civilians yelling over commlines. Guild raiders whispering about Reapers. A child's voice in the background, echoing off a public archive: "Papa, you're glowing again."
Elyon's fingers brushed the edge of the console. "Tag the daughter."
The operator paled. "With respect—sir, she's six."
"She's also already syncing with rollback frequency."
A stunned hush. Someone at the back dropped a stylus.
Elyon turned, expression unreadable. "We observe only. No contact. No escalation. No record edits without my directive."
"But… sir," another voice said slowly, "if the recursion model is accelerating, and this Variant outpaces containment…"
Elyon looked back at the screen.
Kael walked through a rain-slick street, hood low, unaware he was being recorded from four angles. The glow under his sleeve flickered with each step. A rhythm. A beat.
Beside him, his daughter ran ahead—spirals drawn in chalk on the pavement, unaware her shapes matched patterns from corrupted rollback logs Dominion had sealed five years ago.
"If he breaks containment," Elyon said softly, "then he becomes the fulcrum."
"And the girl?" the analyst asked.
Elyon didn't answer at first.
Then: "The system's future doesn't hinge on Kael alone."
He stepped away, cloak whispering behind him.
"Some echoes are born after the collapse."
The door closed on the surveillance floor.
No further orders were needed.