Kael burst through the apartment door, patch-light still leaking from his left palm. The flicker hadn't stopped since the Minotaur Gate fractured. Static crawled under his skin. Every rollback thread around him felt tight—like stretched fabric waiting to tear.
The silence in the apartment felt worse.
No humming. No crayon clatter. No Liora's voice softening the edge of the world.
Just… stillness.
He found Liora standing at the edge of the hallway. Her hands clutched the wall like she wasn't sure what was real anymore.
"She hasn't said a word," she whispered, eyes wide. "All day."
Kael moved past her, into the living room.
And stopped cold.
Senna sat cross-legged in the center of the room. Paper scattered around her like fallen leaves. Dozens of them. Maybe more. Each with a different glyph.
They hovered.
They actually hovered—midair, spinning slow, defying gravity and logic and everything the world should still obey.
And Senna?
She was completely still. Eyes open. Staring ahead. Breathing shallow. Glowing, just faintly, around the edges. Not like Kael's glitchlight — more like soft candlelight behind glass.
"Senna," Kael said, kneeling slowly. "Hey. It's Papa."
She didn't blink.
He reached forward — hand hovering just above her shoulder.
One of the glyphs twitched in the air.
Moved.
Deflected his hand gently away, like a mother pushing away danger.
Kael's heart dropped.
"Senna," he whispered again.
Then her head tilted slightly — not up, not toward him, but to the side, like she was listening to something beneath the floorboards.
She reached out, picked up a blank sheet, and in a single motion—
—drew.
The glyph was clean. Too clean.
It burned into the paper like the ink remembered where it had been in a different timeline.
And when she was done, she held it out.
Kael took it, hands trembling.
It wasn't like her usual spirals.
It wasn't even chaotic.
It was precise.
And at its center — etched in rollback fracture lines — was his name.
⸻
Kael stared at the paper.
The glyph wasn't just a name. It was his thread signature—the unique rollback ID only visible during cast diagnostics or in the deepstack memory of a rollback instance. He'd seen it once before—buried in a Dominion server log, tied to a dead man's rollback failure.
How the hell had she drawn this?
He looked up at Senna.
She was still quiet. Still glowing faintly. But now she was watching him.
Not absent. Not in trance.
Just… quiet.
"Where did you see this?" he asked, voice soft.
Senna didn't answer.
She picked up another paper. Drew again.
This one came faster.
A spiral. Then a tear. Then a date.
It wasn't today's.
It wasn't even this thread.
Kael's hand tightened around the glyph.
It was a future rollback point.
Something that hadn't happened yet.
Something that maybe shouldn't happen.
"Senna," he said again, firmer. "You're drawing rollback instances. That's not safe."
Still no response.
Liora appeared in the doorway behind him. "She won't talk," she said. "But she hears everything."
Kael stood, facing her. "She drew my thread ID, Li. Not my name — my rollback anchor. Do you know what that means?"
Liora's lips pressed into a thin line. "It means she sees more than you want her to."
Kael didn't reply.
Senna was already sketching again. Faster now. Pages lifting, dancing in orbit around her. Some began to glow.
Liora stepped back instinctively. Kael didn't.
One page floated down in front of him. This one was different. It wasn't his name.
It was a warning.
"This is where you die."
Kael's heart stopped.
The glyph wasn't just a warning — it was a map.
The lines twisted inward, spiraling around a fixed point… a convergence marker.
It was a Death Spiral.
Kael had seen one drawn in blood, long ago, in the hands of a Choir prophet during a Dominion purge.
But this one was in code.
And it had his heartbeat written inside it.
The glyph shimmered once—just faintly—then cracked down the center.
Kael caught it as it fell.
And as he held the broken glyph in both hands, Senna finally spoke.
Her voice was quiet.
Barely audible.
But clear:
"You won't survive unless you diverge."
Kael looked at her.
But Senna had already turned away.
Drawing again.
Kael sat in silence for over an hour.
He hadn't moved. The cracked glyph rested on the table, its code fractal still whispering back at him — faint rollback echoes humming through the lines like trapped static. He'd tried to decipher it, manually layering filters across his HUD… but the core pattern shifted every time.
Senna's spiral wasn't made to be read.
It was meant to break the reader.
A divergence glyph.
But how did she know it?
How could she make it?
Across the room, she still drew. No crayon now — charcoal, smeared ink, old marker stubs. Anything she could grab.
And Liora, after trying once more to coax her into speaking, had finally retreated to the kitchen — silently watching from the doorway, eyes darting between her daughter and the man she barely recognized anymore.
Kael activated his commframe.
The signal cracked.
Too much interference.
He moved to the back hall — the dead zone behind the breaker panel. No cameras. No feedback loops.
There, he rerouted a private channel to an old guild server.
Not his.
Aria's.
[PatchTrace: INITIATE]
[CIPHER: BLACKTHREAD-04]
[SECURITY OVERRIDE REQUEST: GUILD HISTORIC ARCHIVE - CLASSIFIED]
[Query: Death Spiral Glyph (Variant: 12-point Anchor Collapse)]
The server hesitated.
Then responded.
❖ FILE FOUND ❖
ORIGIN: ARCHIVE REDACTED (Eclipse Dominion)
TAG: DO NOT ENGAGE / DO NOT REPLICATE / DO NOT RECORD
🔒 Requisitioned from Choir Remnant (Artifact #00412)
STATUS: TERMINATED / SINGULAR EVENT
GLYPH TYPE: DIVERGENCE-WARNING / THREAD ANCHOR-CORRUPTION
REPORT: Variant glyphs emerged during the 'False Messiah Incident' — a subject marked for rollback divergence attempted to circumvent standard anchor decay by destabilizing his own thread. Results were unrepeatable. System failure logged. Thread destroyed.
Kael stared.
This wasn't a warning glyph.
It was a self-erasure glyph.
A last-ditch patch to rewrite fate by burning the anchor entirely.
But Senna hadn't just seen it…
She'd redrawn it.
By memory.
Kael ran the algorithm again. Matched the code lines. And the results chilled him.
MATCH CONFIRMED – 94.8%
Source: Senna Varin
Type: Natural Thread Divergence Map
Not copied.
Original.
"Thread Divergence," Kael whispered. "She's not just reading rollback."
He touched the fractured glyph.
"She's seeing beyond it."
Behind him, Senna dropped her pen.
Kael turned.
Her eyes were glowing again. But not bright. Just dim flickers — soft pulses, slow enough to count.
Eight.
Then seven.
Then six.
A countdown.
The underground vault was silent except for the hum of the deactivated pulse fields around them. Aria stood beside a rusted console, her breath fogging slightly from the condensation, her gaze locked on the thin page Kael had unrolled in front of her.
A drawing.
Crude, but alive.
Senna's glyph.
She hadn't said anything for a full minute.
Then two.
Then three.
Finally, Kael broke the silence. "You recognize it."
Her eyes didn't move.
"Worse," she said. "I remember it."
Kael narrowed his gaze. "From where?"
Aria stepped back and activated an encrypted holo-key on her wrist. The wall flickered, displaying a sealed Dominion file stamped with warning glyphs Kael had never seen before.
CLASS BLACK – THREADLOCKED CONTENT
CODENAME: ZERO LOOP
She didn't open it.
She didn't have to.
"I saw it once," she said quietly. "Top-level Guildmaster briefing. Five years ago. We were told never to speak of it. Never to record it. That glyph—your daughter's sketch—it's part of the contingency scenario."
"Contingency for what?" Kael asked, his voice low.
Aria finally looked up at him.
"When the rollback system becomes unstable beyond recovery," she said, "the Loop resets everything."
Kael frowned. "You mean, wipes the timeline?"
She nodded. "Not just time. Everything connected to the rollback threads. All divergences. All echoes. All lives... past and future. Gone. Like they never existed."
Kael's hands curled into fists. "That's a failsafe."
"No," Aria said. "That's a weapon."
She tapped the corner of the sketch.
"The shape of the spiral, the runes around it—those weren't designed to warn. They were designed to trigger. This is the kind of glyph Dominion buries under kill orders."
Kael stepped forward, voice tense. "She drew it in charcoal. While humming a lullaby. She said it came to her in a dream."
Aria was pale now. "Dreams shouldn't be able to access rollback protocol memory."
"They don't," Kael said. "Unless…"
Aria stared at him.
"Unless she's already connected to the source."
They stood in silence.
Then Aria whispered, "She's not the Anchor anymore."
Kael looked at the glyph one last time.
"She's the override key."
The room was dim, lit only by the pale shimmer of ambient glyph-light tracing Kael's forearm. He hadn't meant to fall asleep. Not with the glyph still clutched in his palm. But exhaustion had claimed him in slow waves.
Senna slept peacefully in the bed beside him, her breath shallow and even, a stuffed glyph-bear tucked under one arm.
The page crackled faintly in his grip.
Still warm.
Still… alive.
Kael's eyelids drooped.
And then the world shifted.
He stood on broken ground.
Ruined streets. Cracked skyline. The sky above was burnt orange — like the light had forgotten how to be blue.
Kael blinked.
He was in the city. But not his city.
There were glyphs carved into buildings. Spinning overhead like anti-sigils. The Dominion towers were gone, replaced with floating monoliths tethered by chainlight.
And then he saw her.
Senna.
But older.
Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Leaner. Taller. Hair braided in tight cords down her back, arms scrawled with control glyphs she'd inked by hand.
She was in battle.
Reapers surrounded her.
But she wasn't afraid.
She danced between them like Kael once had — with the precision of someone who'd died a thousand times to learn every angle.
Each step she took traced light through the air. Glyphs that unfolded mid-motion, like blooming paper flowers, shielding her, striking them down.
Kael tried to move. To speak.
But he couldn't.
He wasn't… real here.
He was watching a thread that never birthed him.
A future where he died in that first raid.
And Senna survived.
She walked to the edge of the cracked bridge. Looked up at the shattered sky.
And whispered, "I'll find you."
The air shimmered.
And for a moment — she turned. Looked straight at Kael.
No — through him.
Like she felt the echo.
Then the glyph on her palm lit up.
The same one from her drawing.
Kael woke with a gasp.
The paper flared in his hand — then dissolved into light.
He staggered up from the chair, sweat pouring from his neck, breath ragged.
Senna was still asleep.
But the wall behind her glowed.
A new glyph.
Drawn in her sleep.
Kael stared.
It was a welcome symbol. An anchor glyph. Stabilizing, recursive, and written not just in her style… but his.
Merged.
Not her dream.
Their dream.
With this dream now reality, Kael knew it was time to descend into the minotaur gate.