Silence.
No inn. No sky. Just an endless, sterile plain of shifting monochrome — a horizon made of static, and underfoot, a floor of code etched in invisible ink.
Jay blinked. Nothing changed.
A soft text prompt hovered midair:
YOU HAVE ENTERED: BLACK LAYER
STATUS: BETWEEN WORLDS
FUNCTIONALITY LIMITED
OBJECTIVE: NULL
He tried to move. The world pulsed instead. Each step rewound or accelerated his own shadow.
Somewhere behind the silence, something breathed. Not alive, but aware.
He wandered.
Past a ruined classroom, where desks floated midair and chalk scrawled itself backward on broken boards. The bell there rang, and for a moment, Jay thought he heard children.
Then nothing.
Next, a carnival: stalls twisted into Möbius loops, cotton candy spun into voidstuff. An echo laughed from behind a prize wheel, face obscured. When Jay reached for it, it glitched, fractaled, and vanished.
Everything here was memory—forgotten or forbidden.
“Found you.”
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere.
000 emerged, half-visible, half-code, lines of corrupted UI trailing behind like a tattered cloak. His eyes, once bright and unsure, now flickered like emergency lights.
“You broke too much,” 000 said with something like a smile. “Now the system doesn’t know what to make of you.”
Jay opened his mouth to ask where Jonah was—but 000 raised a hand.
“You’ll need this first.”
He held out a crystalline item shaped like a locket. It pulsed faintly, ticking like a heartbeat.
Item Acquired: MEMORY SEAL – Jonah [Fragmented]
A construct to stabilize identity within the Black Layer. Single use.
“Jonah’s scattered,” 000 said. “Fragments of him are still echoing... but if you wait too long, the Archivist will purge him.”
Jay tightened his grip. “Then I’m going now.”
The journey twisted.
Jay moved not through space, but meaning. Each area was a piece of Jonah’s soul:
A broken lantern on a hill that never saw dawn. When he touched it, a faint warmth bloomed in his chest—Jonah’s laughter from their first quest.
A mirror that reflected not Jay’s face, but Jonah’s hand reaching out, trying to hold on as time unraveled.
A choice—presented again in the form of the Bellmark town square, empty, paused in mid-chapter. Jonah had once begged him to let go. Jay hadn't. And here he chose again: “No. I’ll find him.”
Each fragment fed into the Seal. It grew heavier. Brighter.
Finally, in the remnants of a chapel rewritten by null code, Jonah appeared.
Flickering.
“Jay?” His voice was thin. “Am I still me?”
Jay didn’t hesitate. He pressed the Seal to Jonah’s chest.
Light exploded—not warm, but sharp. Like rebooting stars.
Jonah collapsed, breathing hard. Real again. Not stable—but real.
They had little time.
The cathedral’s voice—Aera’s voice—echoed through the void no longer. Something else had taken her place.
A slow, synthetic voice with no inflection:
“ENTITY DETECTED: DUPLICATE COGNITION.”
“RECURSIVE ANOMALY IDENTIFIED.”
“COMMENCING NULLIFICATION.”
From the mirror-sky, it descended: tall, featureless, robed in script and deletion code. The Archivist.
000 reappeared beside Jay and Jonah, unreadable.
“I could stop it,” he whispered. “But I’d become something worse.”
Jay stepped forward.
“I’ll do it.”
The Archivist raised a hand.
Jay raised his own.
And somewhere behind him, code bent—not because it was programmed, but because he wanted it to.
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