Veilroot wasn't on any map—not because it was hidden, but because it refused to be found. The closer they traveled toward it, the more unstable the terrain became. Roads folded in on themselves. Signs reversed. Compass readings contradicted logic.
"Are we walking in circles?" Patch asked for the fourth time.
"No," Althea said, triple-checking her scanners. "We're making progress. The recursion field is warping our perception of space."
"So… yes," Patch said.
Fry tapped at her Karnyx, adjusting its quantum filter. "Veilroot's reality perimeter adapts in real-time. We're inside a living maze."
Zayn said nothing. He held the shard like a compass, each light tugging faintly in a direction. Sometimes they disagreed. Other times they pulsed in sync.
"It's not guiding us to a place," he muttered. "It's guiding us to a moment."
They finally reached it at dusk.
Not a mountain. Not a ruin.
A tree.
Massive. Petrified. Rising hundreds of meters into the sky, its trunk hollowed and twisted, bark etched with recursive runes. It didn't grow—it remained. The air around it thrummed with silent memory.
Veilroot.
Fry whistled. "That's not a tree. That's a cathedral built by memory."
Althea frowned. "I'm getting zero readings. Nothing here should exist."
Zayn approached. As he did, the shard flared.
The roots shifted.
An opening formed at the base, wide enough for a person to pass through.
He stepped inside.
The interior was... wrong.
Wood became circuitry. Walls flickered. Time staggered.
Each room they passed reflected a different fragment of Zayn's past—or possible pasts. A classroom where no one had a face. A childhood bedroom frozen in dream-logic. A hallway looping endlessly into itself.
Patch touched one wall and recoiled. "That room just showed me my birth—and I wasn't there."
Fry stared at her reflection in a flickering panel. "I just aged seventy years in the mirror."
Only Zayn remained unaffected. The shard pulled him forward.
At the core of the tree was a chamber filled with six chairs—empty, waiting. In the center hovered a projection.
Himself.
Younger. Sharper. Crueler.
The projection looked at him and smiled.
"Welcome back."
Zayn's stomach turned.
"Who are you?"
"You. The version that made all this possible."
The shard pulsed violently.
Althea and the others caught up, but they couldn't enter the chamber. An invisible barrier separated them.
Zayn stepped closer.
"You erased them," he said. "The children. The threads."
The projection nodded. "I had to. You think this world builds itself? It needed sacrifice."
"You locked them away to protect yourself."
"Isn't that what we do? Survive?"
Zayn lifted the shard.
Six lights flared.
The projection began to crack.
"You can't change what you are," it hissed.
"No," Zayn said, "but I can remember."
He thrust the shard into the center of the projection.
It exploded into light.
When it cleared, the six chairs were no longer empty.
The children sat quietly, watching him.
Riven. Laziel. Mira. Thalen. Veyra. Auron.
And a seventh.
A girl with a familiar face.
Zayn's.
"Who—?"
"The memory you never recovered," she said. "The one you erased first."
Zayn stepped back.
She smiled softly.
"It's okay. You're not meant to carry it alone anymore."