"To walk the fracture, you must first break what you are."
The Hall of Silent Wards was dead quiet.
No wind. No breath. Just Adrian.
He stood at the center of a crude ritual site — built not with mystic runes or sacred ink, but with things he arranged from ruin.
The circle around him was jagged and uneven, drawn in a mix of burnt book ash and his own blood. No sigils, no language, just spirals of madness and half-forgotten symbols scrawled in a pattern only the broken might understand.
A shallow stone basin sat before him, filled with dark red blood still warm from his veins.
To his right, a bonfire burned unnaturally still, fed entirely by old paper books he had scavenged from one of the forgotten wings of the temple — brittle tomes full of half-legible rites and lost philosophies. Their words meant nothing now. They were kindling.
The flame released no smoke. Just the faint scent of crumbling parchment and scorched ink.
The bone dagger lay across his knees.
Pale. Clean. Waiting.
And in front of him, resting on a pedestal of broken stone, was the object that had brought him this far:
The Scripture of Fractured Truth.
It was bound in cracked obsidian glass. Its surface shimmered like a broken mirror that refused to settle into a single reflection.
Sometimes, it looked like a book. Sometimes, like a hole in the world.
The title didn't stay still — it flickered between Fracture and Reflection, never choosing.
Adrian knelt inside the circle.
The silence pressed in around him. Not silence as in absence of sound — but the kind that made thought itself feel disobedient.
He stared at the blood in the basin.
"No ceremony. No audience. Just me, a lie, and something sharp"
He exhaled slowly. The fire behind him hissed faintly, like it approved.
Step One: Choose the Lie
He closed his eyes.
There was no chant. No offering. No plea.
Only the quiet tension of something being decided forever.
He let the Lie rise — not in words, not in memory, but in meaning.
A truth that never was, yet carried weight like it should have been carved into the bones of the world.
He didn't speak it. He didn't even name it in thought.
The Scripture knew.
And it responded.
Glyphs flickered across his vision, imprinting themselves on the inside of his skull:
"Current Lie Used: !@#$%^&!@#$%!@#$%"
"Success Rate: 99%."
He opened his eyes.
His breath caught. Not from pain. From how right it felt — and how wrong that was.
"Ninety-nine percent," he murmured. "High stakes. High reward."
Step Two: Make the Lie Real
From a torn scrap of yellowed paper, he retrieved what looked like the remains of a temple record.
He dipped a sharpened bone sliver into the blood basin and began to write — slowly, deliberately — using his own name to anchor a false identity into existence.
The letters were foreign to his hand. The lines felt wrong. That was the point.
When the final word was etched, he stared at it for several long seconds.
"A lie doesn't become real," he whispered, "until you digest it."
He folded the paper twice, placed it on his tongue, and swallowed.
It burned all the way down. His throat tightened. His eyes watered.
The Lie was inside him now — not just believed, but consumed. His body would carry it. His blood would circulate it.
He looked down at the dagger resting across his lap.
"Step three."
"Remove the face."
Adrian picked up the bone dagger.
His hand didn't shake — not yet — but the weight of what he was about to do pressed down on him like a verdict.
He brought the blade up to his face and paused.
"Alright," he muttered. "No turning back."
He pressed it under his left eye and made the first cut.
The pain hit instantly.
"Shit—" he hissed through his teeth, clenching his jaw. The blade dug beneath the skin like a hook pulling a nerve out of place.
Blood trickled down his cheek, hot and thick.
He cut again — slower this time — tracing the bone, moving down his cheek toward the jaw.
"God, this hurts," he spat.
The dagger snagged at the corner of his mouth. He jerked it free with a sharp motion, nearly screaming.
"Keep going. You knew this wouldn't be clean."
He moved to the bridge of his nose, slicing upward toward his brow. Blood blurred his vision. He blinked fast, then cut again. The air felt colder on the exposed tissue, like it was already rejecting him.
The pain wasn't overwhelming — it was personal.
Sharp. Focused. Real.
He kept breathing through clenched teeth.
"It's just skin" he growled. "It's not who you are"
Another slice. Another groan.
His hands were slick now, but steady. Years of soul ocean torment kept them from shaking.
"You've handled worse" he lied. "You've seen worse"
He hadn't.
The face came loose in strips. He peeled it slowly, wincing every time the flesh clung too tightly.
"Come on, let go. Let go…"
The last piece — his lower jaw — tore free with a sickening sound. He nearly gagged but kept it down.
He looked down at the blood-soaked skin in his hands. It still looked like him.
That was the worst part.
"Not anymore" he said quietly.
He tossed it into the fire.
The flames surged. No smoke — just blue heat and the faint sound of something whispering.
He breathed heavily, eyes stinging, blood dripping down his neck.
The Scripture pulsed once, faintly. Then again, brighter.
A flicker ran across his vision — a reflection without a mirror.
"Face Removed."
"Fractured Identity Initiation: Acceptable."
He wiped the blood from his lips with the back of his hand and stood up, legs slightly shaking.
🕯️ Step Four: 𝙻𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙻𝚒𝚎
)(&^%$#@!@#$%^&()(&^%$#@#$%^&(&^%$#@#$%^&&^%$#@#$%^
--==[ !!!error::IDENTITY MISMATCH::REWRITE INITIATED!!!/ ]==--
&^%$#@!(&^%$#@!(&^%$#@!)(&^%$#@!@#$%^&(^^%$#@!!@#$%^&(
𝓘 𝓪𝓶 𝓷𝓸𝓽 𝓱𝓲𝓶 𝓘 𝓪𝓶 𝓷𝓸𝓽 𝓱𝓲𝓶 𝓘 𝓪𝓶 𝓷𝓸𝓽 %^&(**&^%$#
:: IDENT tag: REPLACED
:: Core Name: ███████
:: Anchor Protocol: BROKEN
--[DAY 1]--
step/fault: VOICE mismatch detected
subject responds to FALSE designation — accepted.
walk cycle: deviated.
limb pattern: no longer consistent with Source-Origin.
Memory ping failed: "...)|[{!... not found...}]|//..."
--[DAY 2]--
Data leak: age – NULL
Memory fragment: [MOT] — 404
Correction protocol failed.
Symptom: Internal misalignment / skeletal feedback loop
Pain source: "Who is speaking?"
Log echo: ꖎ𝙓ʬ̵̨̳̮̺̼͒͘ǁͯ̇̓̽̋ͣ͘̕̕̚ɴ𝔼∴∷∴∷❒
--[DAY 3]--
Visual anomaly: mirror registered.
Reflection anomaly: SMILE DETECTED
Skin-layer integrity: REMOVED
Identity stabilization: 0%
Truth rejection: 100%
Lie acceptance: 100%
Name collapse: ∅∅∅∅∅
Vocal trace: "My name is—" /// OVERRIDE ///
Statement: "I am..."
...&*()++__&^%$#@!{}|:"?>~_||complete.
The mirror stood waiting.
It wasn't perfectly reflective. Seven long fractures ran through the brass-backed glass, splitting Adrian's form into jagged shards. Each reflection showed a slightly different version of him — some younger, some older, one smiling, one crying, one screaming with no sound.
He ignored them all.
His focus was on the center — the one that looked back without expression. Skinless. Red. Blood drying over muscle. A face turned to raw memory.
Adrian stepped forward, blood trailing behind him.
The moment his feet crossed the final ring of the circle, the air changed.
It was like walking into a lie that had been waiting to be believed.
His thoughts didn't feel like his own. They were smoother now. Simpler. A little quieter.
There was no more contradiction.
No more Adrian.
Only the Lie, standing upright in a dead god's temple.
He looked himself in the eye — or at least, he looked at the face that no longer had skin and still had the arrogance to call itself "his."
And he spoke.
"I vow to walk the fracture where thought unravels and truth devours itself.
Let no name remain intact, no belief unbroken.
Where I step, logic weeps, and the Lie becomes Truth"
The mirror didn't shatter.
It simply ceased to reflect.
The image of him — raw, torn, red — disappeared from the glass, as if it had never been there to begin with. As if the mirror had rejected the idea that he could be seen.
Behind him, the bonfire twisted into a long tongue of flame, rising vertical, blue-white in color and utterly silent. It did not crackle. It did not burn. It just stretched higher and higher, illuminating the hall in a sterile, unholy light.
His blood shimmered under the flame's glow. The walls began to pulse — faintly — as though the stone itself recognized something had changed.
Adrian didn't move.
His eyes stayed fixed on the empty glass.
Then, from the pedestal behind him, the Scripture rose.
It lifted slowly, the cracked glass cover peeling open like petals made from mirror shards. There was no sound, yet the air vibrated with something wrong — as though silence had been pierced without a single noise.
The book hovered over the ritual circle, pages flickering in unseen wind.
And then it broke apart.
Not shattered — unraveled.
Black glass splinters rose into the air and began to orbit him, slowly at first, then faster, forming a spiral above his head. Each fragment whispered — not in words, but in sensations: contradiction, hunger, denial, reflection, fracture.
Adrian exhaled, finally, and closed his eyes.
It worked.
The thought came not with triumph, but with confirmation — cold, mechanical, exact.
There was no joy. There was no fear. Just the understanding that he had done what no one else could.
He had lied so perfectly that the Law itself believed him.
A gust of dry wind swept across the floor — though there was no source for it.
The pedestal cracked.
The blood in the basin began to rise, floating into the air in threads, pulled upward by unseen force.
The bonfire flared again.
The circle beneath him glowed faintly, lines of blood and ash reacting to the truth that was now false and the lie that had become law.
Adrian kept his eyes closed.
He let the moment pass through him like water — like something he didn't need to hold. Because it was already his.
The fragments above him formed a ring now — like a crown that hadn't yet decided it belonged to him.
The mirror behind him shattered quietly. No sound, just glass falling and never hitting the floor.
Still, he didn't move.
He just breathed.
And waited.
The vow was complete.