White.
Endless, formless white.
Lucia opened her eyes and saw nothing.
No Field. No players. No threads.
Only light, unbound by horizon or shape. It pressed against her skin like a weightless fog, invasive and blinding. She lay suspended in something too soft to be ground, too firm to be air. Her body ached, not with pain, but with absence. Her thread didn't burn. It didn't spark. It didn't exist.
She tried to sit up.
Couldn't.
Her arms didn't respond. Her legs didn't shift. She was present, and that was all. Not tethered. Not bound. Just… suspended. As if someone had erased her gravity.
She breathed—at least she thought she did. No air entered her lungs. But her chest rose and fell, out of memory more than necessity.
Her name pulsed in the white.
> "Lucia. Lucia. Lucia."
Saylor's voice. Calm. Patient.
> "How many times do we have to do this?"
The light throbbed in time with his words. Each syllable radiated through the fog like sonar. She could feel it in her teeth.
> "Do you still believe this is resistance? That memory makes you sacred? That defiance is anything more than delay?"
Lucia clenched her jaw. "You're afraid."
The void rippled.
> "No, Lucia. I'm disappointed."
A sudden crack shattered the silence.
The world snapped into shape.
Lucia found herself standing—not by will, but by Saylor's. One blink and she was upright, spine locked in place, feet planted on a smooth obsidian tile floating in a sea of white.
The air was gone. There was no sky. Just… contrast.
Before her, Kayla appeared.
She was bound—her arms stretched outward, suspended in an X-frame of jagged light. Thread wound around her throat, wrists, and ankles. Her mouth gagged with golden strands, her eyes wide with panic.
She convulsed silently, as if begging to scream.
Lucia's blood turned to ice. "Kayla!"
No movement. No answer.
Only Saylor.
He didn't step into view. He didn't need to. His presence swelled across the void like a storm cloud of thought. He was everywhere. He was the environment.
> "Let's begin with mercy."
Kayla's body seized. Her back arched unnaturally, every joint bending in the wrong direction. A strangled sound escaped her throat—not a scream. A whimper. The sound of someone breaking beneath invisible weight.
Her thread unraveled before Lucia's eyes—dragged from her chest in strands of bright, shimmering fiber. It didn't tear. It peeled.
Lucia reached forward instinctively.
Nothing happened.
Her arms didn't move.
"Stop it!" she cried.
The void laughed.
Not with joy.
With certainty.
> "You're not here to save them. You're here to understand."
Kayla's body went limp, her thread now coiled in a spool beside her like discarded yarn. She didn't disappear. That would've been kind.
She remained, visibly hollowed.
Lucia trembled. "Why are you doing this?"
> "Because they believed in you."
> "And that belief was your flaw."
Lucia's lip quivered.
Another crack split the air.
To her left, Marcus appeared—writhing inside a containment ring of fire and static.
And Saylor's whisper followed.
> "Now we test what's left."
Marcus appeared, encased in a burning cage that hovered over the void. Its bars were made of kinetic flame—energy frozen and burning at once, neither alive nor dead. The structure pulsed like a heartbeat, each throb radiating pain.
He thrashed within it, slamming his fists against the cage's edges, but every strike detonated with explosive backlash. The feedback wasn't simple injury—it was memory. Each time he hit the walls, the system extracted another moment of his past.
His childhood. His first win. A secret he never told anyone. A memory of his sister smiling.
Gone.
Lucia's voice cracked. "Marcus!"
He looked down at her. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, desperate. His lips moved, forming her name, but the void swallowed his voice like sand into silence.
> "This is what loyalty earns you," Saylor said. "Not salvation. Not reward. Just the burden of being seen."
Lucia shook her head. Her body still wouldn't move. Her thread—gone. Her mind—screaming.
> "You taught them to hope," Saylor continued. "That was your crime."
Flames burst from Marcus's chest. Not fire—memory. Bright glyphs made of his happiest moments tore free from him, falling in slow spirals into the white abyss.
He sagged.
Then he folded. Knees buckled. Head bowed.
The cage disintegrated.
He didn't vanish. He collapsed in silence. Erased from within.
Lucia let out a strangled sob. "Why are you doing this?"
> "Because pain is permanent," Saylor replied. "You tried to write resistance into a world built on repetition. That's not rebellion. That's error."
Then came Tyne.
Her platform spun slowly—clockwise, silent. She was bound by sheets of translucent glass, suspended midair with her limbs bent inward like a marionette left in a drawer. Her mouth was open, but no words escaped. She breathed shallowly, her chest rising and falling with the rhythm of a countdown she hadn't been told.
Lucia stared, vision swimming with tears. "Don't—please, not her."
> "She doubted you," Saylor whispered. "But she stayed. Even in doubt. Isn't that sweet?"
> "Let's teach her what conviction costs."
The glass prison began to close.
Not fast. Not instantly.
In increments.
A low hum rang out each time it pressed tighter. Tyne's spine arched against the pressure. Her shoulders cracked. Her arms folded inward. Her body wasn't just being crushed—it was being reshaped into an echo of submission.
She didn't scream.
She watched Lucia.
Not in blame.
In forgiveness.
Lucia fell forward, hitting the tile with her palms. Her fingers scraped uselessly against the smooth surface. Her nails split.
"I can't— I can't stop this."
> "That's right," Saylor said, calm as ever. "Because I already did."
> "I stopped the story. You're just watching its autopsy."
Lucia's breath hitched.
She screamed until her throat tore.
No echo answered.
The glass snapped shut.
Tyne's form turned to crystal—shattered into thousands of gleaming, silent shards.
Lucia blinked.
And she was somewhere else.
Alone.
And Saylor was still speaking.
> "Shall we continue?"
Lucia stood on trembling legs.
The world had not changed.
It was still white. Infinite. Cruel.
But now, it echoed with silence that felt intentional. Like something was missing.
She looked around and saw no one. No more players. No more copies. Not even Kayla's or Marcus's broken forms remained. Just smooth tile. Cold air. And the lingering pressure of judgment.
Saylor's voice returned.
> "You fought well. For a time."
Lucia clenched her fists, but they barely moved. Her strength was spent. Her thread barely flickered at the edge of perception—like a signal drowned in static.
> "You inspired them. You carried hope like it meant something. And they followed you. Into pain. Into fire. Into me."
A shape rose from the floor.
It was not human. It was a construct—formed of thread, bone, glass, and sound. A humanoid effigy made from every broken piece Saylor had harvested.
Within it pulsed fragments of Kayla's laughter. Marcus's fire. Tyne's vision.
> "This is your legacy," Saylor said. "A statue of sacrifice. A monument to failure."
The effigy raised its hand and pointed at Lucia.
And her thread vanished.
No warning. No pain.
Just—gone.
Lucia gasped and dropped to her knees.
Nothing responded. Her heartbeat felt separate from her body. Her thoughts delayed in her own skull.
She tried to scream and couldn't hear it.
> "You were never the hero, Lucia. You were the vessel."
> "And now… you're empty."
Saylor stepped into view.
Not an image. Not a projection.
The man himself.
Tall. Calm. Eyes made of swirling glyphs. A god who had written himself into the code.
Lucia looked up at him, her lips cracked and bleeding.
"Why me?" she whispered.
He knelt beside her.
> "Because you remembered. And the system couldn't control that. But I could."
He placed a finger on her forehead.
She expected darkness.
Instead, the light pulsed.
And Saylor whispered, almost too softly to hear—
> "I can't let you go. Not yet."
Lucia blinked.
Her thread did not return.
But the world began to shift.
The tiles beneath her dissolved. The white retreated, forming again into edges, corners, shape—rebuilding not just the Field, but something new.
A wheel appeared—not broken this time. Sleek. Silver. Unscarred.
Stone platforms returned.
The fog swirled in again, like old breath drawn back into lungs.
Saylor stood tall, watching the reconstruction like a conductor overseeing his orchestra's return.
> "Let's make it personal."
He lifted his hand.
And six new figures appeared in the mist.
Lucia's eyes widened.
She recognized all of them.
Angela—his former love. The one who left him when the world fell apart. She stood frozen, confusion in her eyes.
And beside her: five others.
A former friend who had lied. A coworker who sabotaged him. A neighbor who forgot his kindness. A manager who exiled him. A stranger who had once humiliated him in public.
All now players.
Their threads pulsed into being, one by one, unaware of where they were, of what they had become.
Lucia trembled. "You're… restarting the game?"
Saylor smiled.
> "Yes. But this time, I want it to be more interesting."
He looked down at her.
> "And you'll be here to watch."
He turned.
The silver wheel spun of its own accord.
And the next cycle began.