Ari Solen had died. That much he was sure of.
He remembered fire—cold, impossibly bright. He remembered a lab, a circle of salt and silver wire, and the feeling of reality blinking. A voice had whispered from the speakers before they melted:
"If language can shape consciousness… what shapes the language?"
Then—darkness.
Then—syntax.
He awakened beneath a sky that shouldn't exist.
It was nighttime, maybe, but instead of stars, glowing code drifted across the atmosphere like auroras written in programming logic. The ground was a crystalline surface etched with shifting symbols, faintly humming. Mountains in the distance glitched—literally glitched, shifting one pixel to the left and back every few seconds.
The world wasn't broken. It was running.
And something about it felt alive.
Ari sat up slowly. His body responded, but it was off. Not sore. Not injured. Just… unsaved.
Like a file that had loaded, but hadn't finished compiling.
He stood. His balance was fine. No pain. No gravity shift. But something was wrong beneath the skin of the world. Like he wasn't where he belonged. Or worse—he was in a place that didn't have rules for him yet.
Then, across the sky, glowing text unrolled like a command line:
BOOT: SIG:0 > ENVIRONMENT: ACTIVE
ENTITY DETECTED: THREADLESS ANOMALY
STATUS: UNDEFINED
ACCESS LEVEL: ROOT
PROTOCOL: OBSERVATION MODE — ENGAGED
Ari stepped back instinctively.
"What the hell...?"
The words hovered for a moment, then vanished. Not faded. Just unwritten.
A menu flickered into view in front of him—no device, no glass. Just hovering interface.
It had no buttons. No UI. Only one question:
DEFINE YOURSELF: _
He reached out without thinking and tapped the prompt. As soon as he did, the input shattered like a failed equation, and a new message scrolled across his vision:
ERROR: NO THREAD DETECTED.
CLASS: NONE
SIG ACCESS: NULL
RECOMMENDATION: TERMINATE INSTANCE OR ASSIGN BASELINE IDENTITY.
"Terminate—wait, no." Ari stepped back. "No, no, I'm not—"
The ground beneath him shifted, and for a second, it felt like his existence was being judged by a system that wasn't human. Not malicious. Just logical.
Ari didn't know what a "Thread" was, but apparently he didn't have one—and whatever that meant, the world didn't like it.
"A Threadless," he whispered. "I'm an unthreaded instance in a system that only accepts connected users."
Ari wasn't dead. He wasn't alive either.
He was booted. In a world that ran like software.
Far above, reality compiled.
A humanoid shape emerged from the sky. Not descending. Just appearing, like a code module slotted into a runtime environment.
Its face was blank. Its eyes were data glyphs. Its skin was wireframe and shimmering glass.
COMPILER UNIT 03: SANITIZER
PURPOSE: ANOMALY RESOLUTION
"Wait," Ari said, backing up. "What did I do?"
The entity's voice wasn't sound. It was a system message, injected straight into thought.
"QUERY: Why does the anomaly presume relevance?"
"TARGET UNCLASSIFIED. STATUS: THREADLESS. ROOT ACCESS — UNAUTHORIZED."
It raised a hand. Runes burst into the air around its palm, assembling into code blocks.
Ari could read them—not as words, but as structures:
⟨terminate⟩ + ⟨null⟩ + ⟨anchor⟩ + ⟨purge⟩
And something inside Ari clicked. Not intellectually. Instinctually.
He reached—not with his body, but with his will—and touched the code.
Lines unspooled in front of his mind. Editable. Glitchable.
He didn't know how he was doing it. But he did.
override: ⟨null⟩ → ⟨redirect⟩
execute
The spell misfired. The Compiler flinched mid-cast, staggered, and shuddered. A flicker of code tore through its chest like static through an old TV.
INTERNAL LOOP: UNSAFE
DECOMPILING INSTANCE...
With a final flicker, the entity burst into light and unloaded.
Ari dropped to his knees. His hands trembled. "I just rewrote a spell."
No. Not a spell.
A system command.
The sky above flickered again—textless this time, but pulsing. Watching.
He stood slowly, staring at the world.
The land wasn't natural. Everything was symbolic. The rivers were logic streams, flowing with concepts. The trees weren't trees—they were syntax trees, branches made of conditional clauses. A nearby boulder shimmered faintly, its surface etched in a looped glyph:
IF [touched] THEN [emit:light]
He knelt and placed his hand on it.
The rock began to glow.
"This whole world," he whispered. "It's running on rules."
He couldn't see it all. Not yet. But his mind was tuning to it—like a radio catching distant frequencies.
He felt it: a network, a kind of omnipresent system humming just below the surface of everything.
The Arkanet.
A magical framework that wasn't taught, but compiled into reality.
And everyone else in this world—whoever they were—must have access to it through these so-called "Threads."
He didn't have one.
Instead, he had something worse.
root access: enabled
restrictions: none
risk: total system instability
He should've been afraid.
Instead, a grin crept onto his face.
"I don't know the rules of this world," he said softly. "But I can see the code."
The air shimmered. A glowing glyph formed at the edge of his vision.
⟨hello⟩
Not because he cast it. Because the world did.
It had recognized him.
And it was saying:
Hello, Rootwalker. Let's see what you can break.