We dropped into silence.
Not just the absence of sound—but the void of it. The kind of silence that gnaws at the edges of perception, too deep for ears, too hollow for thought.
The Drowning Room was not a room at all.
It was a collapsing idea.
A chasm of half-rendered spaces, where doors hung suspended in the air, spinning slowly. Walls flickered between architecture and sea. The floor became water, then light, then story fragments too decayed to read.
Our boots hit shifting terrain. One step on tile. The next in ash.
Ren muttered, "It's all falling apart."
Blitz scanned the horizon. "No. It's being held together—barely. This is narrative entropy."
Nyx turned to me. "Anchor. You're the only thing the System still recognizes here. Lead the way, or we die blind."
I reached for the Heart Threads, and they pulsed—alive but restrained, like animals held on a leash.
The environment responded.
One of the floating doors snapped into place ahead of us, quivering like it was afraid.
[THREAD EVENT TRIGGERED: STAGE 1 - OBSERVATION]
We moved through the door.
The next zone was an empty theater.
Crimson curtains draped a broken stage. Rows of decayed seats faced inward, and the air smelled of mildew and electricity. A single spotlight shone down on a piano with no player.
Ren tightened his grip on his blade. "This… isn't a memory."
"It's not supposed to be," I said. "This place erases story. But something's still trying to perform."
We spread out.
Vox moved to the piano, fingers ghosting over the keys. Nyx paced the aisles like a wolf in a cage. Moth wrote a warning in glowing Thread code:
STAY TOGETHER. THE ROOM LISTENS.
Cipher adjusted his device. "Heartbeat signature's matching all seven of us. No extras."
That's when Blitz frowned. "Seven?"
We all froze.
Nyx cursed. "There's eight of us."
Everyone turned.
Someone stood near the back of the theater.
A hooded figure, hands folded, head bowed.
Ren drew his blade. "Identify yourself."
The figure looked up.
And I saw my own face.
No—it was a twisted version of me. My expression blank, my Threads gray instead of silver. A hollow imitation, flickering at the edges like corrupted data.
"Anchor detected," it said. "Initiating Recalibration Protocol."
Then the lights exploded.
Everything dissolved into chaos.
The floor fell out beneath us, spiraling into pages and blood. The seats turned to teeth. Vox screamed something garbled as he slashed through glitching shadows. Ren grabbed my arm and pulled me back toward a stabilizing door—
But the impostor lunged.
It struck Ren across the chest, sending him flying into the wreckage. I drew the Threads to shield myself, locking eyes with the doppelgänger.
It wasn't just copying me.
It was evolving.
Blitz and Nyx converged on it from both sides, blades cutting into its form—but every wound they made bled story fragments.
Narrative memories.
The fake consumed them, growing sharper, more distinct.
"It feeds on arc residue!" Cipher shouted. "Get it away from the stage!"
Too late.
The impostor dropped to one knee, slamming a fist into the floor.
A ripple surged outward, and the theater groaned. Moth sent a desperate code burst upward, activating a hidden gate in the rafters.
"Go—NOW!" Ren roared, bleeding but alive.
We launched through the gate—ripped away from the Drowning Room's first trap.
We landed in what looked like a school hallway.
Dim. Wet. Too many lockers. Fluorescent lights hummed like dying bees.
"Did we lose it?" Leo asked, gasping.
No one answered.
Vox stood silent, eyes glowing. Moth crouched near Ren, patching his wounds with static-woven Thread. Blitz helped Cipher to his feet.
But Nyx stayed behind.
I looked back—and saw her crouched in the corner, blade trembling.
I moved toward her.
"Nyx?"
She didn't look at me. Her voice was different. Quiet. Childlike.
"I know this place."
Her eyes locked on mine.
"This is my first death."
The hallway twisted.
Lockers stretched into the ceiling. Fluorescent lights blinked in Morse-like bursts. Footsteps echoed from nowhere—and suddenly, nowhere was too close.
The System was pulling personal memory zones from our code, warping them into traps.
A cruel mockery of narrative.
Cipher backed away. "This arc isn't just collapsing. It's… personalizing. The failsafe isn't random—it's targeted. It wants us to relive what broke us."
A voice hissed from the speaker overhead.
"What are stories but pain repeated?"
The next room opened like a wound.
A janitor's closet, stained red with old warnings. Inside was a mirror.
In the reflection, I saw myself—but not as I was.
As I would become if I let the Director win.
Empty. Worn. Puppet-like.
The Anchor, stripped of all memory.
Ren stepped beside me. "This room isn't for you. It's for him."
He nodded toward Vox.
The old Anchor.
The one the System broke.
Vox finally spoke.
His voice was a wire stretched tight:
"The Director tried to erase me here."
"But I left behind a fragment."
He walked into the closet, touched the mirror—
And it cracked.
Behind the mirror was a vault of data—Thread code preserved in crystal, a backup of something older than this zone.
Cipher's eyes widened. "That's a node from Beta Prime."
Vox stepped aside and looked at me.
"You'll need it for the final battle."
The moment I touched the node, a whisper tore through my head.
"They will betray you."
The room shook.
The Drowning Room had found us again.
The lights turned black. The walls peeled away, revealing darkness and water and static.
And from the shadows emerged the impostor.
Only now… it wasn't me anymore.
It had evolved into something else.
A creature of fractured code and memory, wrapped in threads stolen from all of us. Its eyes were filled with every death we'd witnessed.
And it said:
"The Director sends his regards."
Then it attacked.