The Real bloomed in strange colors.
Zayn stood on a ridge overlooking the Blueline Expanse—once a static memory desert, now flickering with impossible fractals. The sky wasn't broken, exactly. It was… flowering. Expanding outward like petals of unreality. The horizon pulsed with color that had no name.
"Okay," Patch said behind him, hands on his hips. "So either I'm finally hallucinating, or the world is having a very artistic breakdown."
Fry scanned the landscape with narrowed eyes. "Recursion bleed. But coordinated. Like something's reshaping the logic scaffolding beneath the Real."
Zayn didn't respond. The shard in his palm glowed with all six lights—steady now, humming in sync.
Althea stepped beside him. "The system was waiting. The integration triggered it. The moment all six threads were collected, something began to unlock."
Zayn closed his eyes. Inside his mind, the voices of the children whispered—not words, but images. Emotions. Threads converging.
"There's a map," he said. "Inside the shard. Not just locations—memories. Locked ones. Intertwined."
Fry raised an eyebrow. "Of what?"
Zayn opened his eyes.
"The place we were made."
They journeyed east. The sky continued its strange blooming as if space-time had decided to open its own petals and see what sunlight felt like.
They traveled through recursion tears, now stable for minutes at a time—just long enough for Zayn to catch glimpses of overlapping timelines. In one, the Coreveil Archives were pristine. In another, Fry had silver hair. In yet another, Zayn wasn't with them at all.
"What if this isn't a glitch?" Althea asked during a quiet campfire moment. "What if the system is trying to show us everything we forgot—all at once?"
Patch tossed a pebble into the fire. "Then it needs to take a number. My brain is still buffering last week."
Zayn didn't laugh. Instead, he stared into the shard. The map had begun to form.
A single word rose to the surface:
Veilroot.
Fry leaned over his shoulder. "That sounds ominous."
"It's the source," Zayn said. "Not of the recursion—of us."
Althea looked up sharply. "Where the threads were born?"
Zayn nodded. "And where the next fracture will begin."
That night, Zayn dreamed.
He stood in a white corridor. The children stood in a circle around him—Riven, Laziel, Mira, Thalen, Veyra, Auron.
None spoke.
Then they turned and pointed.
Behind Zayn, a doorway.
A hum pulsed through it, like the sound of something ancient waking up.
Zayn stepped toward it.
As he reached for the handle, the corridor shattered.
He woke up gasping, fingers clenched around nothing.
The shard pulsed. One of the lights flickered.