There was no road forward.
But the world bent with every step I took.
The more I walked, the more real it became. Not because it welcomed me. But because I was now part of its memory.
I had been witnessed. And now, the realm remembered me.
---
The path ahead shimmered like a river of glass, suspended in nothing. Above me: echoes that hadn't yet happened. Below me: versions of myself I had never become.
I tried not to look down.
I tried not to see the version of me who had given up. Who stayed behind. Who never built the Core.
But one of them… one version… looked up at me. And smiled.
It wasn't cruel. Just sad.
"You will return here," he mouthed.
"Eventually."
---
The air began to change.
It wasn't wind I felt. It was pull. A soft, steady tug in my chest. Not physical. But emotional.
A call.
Like someone whispering my name in a language older than sound.
At first, it was gentle. Then it burned.
A need. Not to find. But to be found.
---
I came to a field where the sky bent downward like a dome of melting crystal. At its center stood a figure in white.
Not glowing. Not divine.
Just still.
They didn't move. But I knew they had been waiting for me.
Maybe for years. Maybe forever.
Their face was hidden beneath a veil of symbols—each one alive, shifting in and out of meaning.
I stepped closer.
The pull in my chest became unbearable. I felt like my heart was being rewritten with every beat.
"You heard me," the figure said.
Their voice was not loud. But it pierced every part of me.
"Even from the other side of silence. Even before the Core awoke."
"You were always meant to hear."
I couldn't speak.
I didn't need to.
They raised a hand, and between their fingers bloomed a single symbol— a spiral folding into itself, humming with light.
"This is not your power," they said. "This is your anchor."
"It will keep your name intact as you move deeper."
The symbol floated toward me. It hovered above my palm.
And when I touched it—
---
I remembered a name I had never known.
Not mine. Hers.
A girl. From before the Core. From a life I never lived.
She had waited in the dark with me. Helped me solder wires in a tiny basement. Laughed when I got shocked.
She had said:
"One day, Lyan, you'll see the world not as it is… but as it remembers itself."
And then she was gone.
Not dead. Not lost.
Just… erased.
From time. From history. From me.
Until now.
"You've regained your first echo," the figure said. "You are beginning to Resonate."
---
I fell to my knees.
Not from pain. From weight.
From the heaviness of remembrance.
The sky above shifted. The field folded into itself.
And I stood again. Not alone.
I had remembered her.
And with that, the Witness Realm remembered me.
---