The mechanical eye glinted on Kael's workbench, its aether-core iris casting fractured shadows that pulsed like a second heartbeat. Elara's note trembled in his grip, Find the Architect's key, but his mind was elsewhere.
Not his memories.
Silas's.
The lens flared.
Sterile light. The hum of refrigeration units. Earth. A lab suffocated in silence.
Volunteers strapped into reclined chairs. Monitors etched erratic brainwaves. The Clockwork God delusion had taken root- sketches of gears multiplying, Cipher runes whispered like prayers through cracked lips.
Silas had dismissed it as shared psychosis.
Until Subject 23, the gaunt librarian, thrashed against her restraints and screamed, "They're cutting out His tongue! The First Betrayal- you're writing it!"
He'd sedated her. Logged the episode. But on the edge of her file, Silas had scribbled:
Shared hallucination or shared memory?
Kael blinked, heart racing. The vision snapped away. The workshop returned, dark and pulsing with Cipher hum. The mechanical eye stared up at him, iris twitching. He cracked it open. Inside, buried in the copper coils, nestled a microfilm slide stamped with the unmistakable sigil:
Blackthorn.
He slid it beneath the lens. It bloomed like a wound.
Schematics. Annotations in Silas's handwriting. Soul-anchor prototypes. Aetheric resonance converters. The very apparatus Kael had purchased years ago in the market tunnels, illegal tech with no known origin.
But the slide was dated three years before Silas's transmigration.
His name was on the margin.
Test Subject: Silas Vorne. Parallel iteration: Aetherion-7.
His breath caught. The implications spun like knives. He hadn't stumbled into this world. He'd been threaded through it, again and again, shaped across iterations. A sculpted pawn with layered identities.
He yanked the ledger from the shelf. It hissed open, pages rifling toward a frenzied sketch, Silas's lab. Next to it, written in a cracked, frantic hand:
They're in my dreams. The ones from the other side. They say I'm a failed iteration.
He backed away, heart pounding, then froze before the cracked mirror. His face stared back, bruised, exhausted, but something deeper watched from behind the eyes.
Silas.
The reflection moved. Its mouth curled into a smirk Kael had never made.
"You were never in control."
The lens flared. The mirror shattered. Glass rained down, each shard flickering with memory.
A doorstep. Earth. A package. A note: Burn the simulation.
Silas hadn't. But the subjects had. They'd carved Cipher into their skin and called it faith.
And when they died, they didn't vanish.
They moved.
Transmigrated.
Kael gripped the edge of the table, the realization anchoring in his bones.
He wasn't an escapee of the experiment.
He was the experiment. A bridge between selves. Between loops. Between lies.
A knock cut the silence like a blade.
Mara's voice, sharp, distant, impatient.
"Sky-manor's guard shift changes in ten. You in or not?"
Kael wiped the blood from his nose, grabbed the cracked lens and the eye's core.
"I'm in."
---
The sky-manor rose above the city like a crown of thorns, impossible angles jutting from a floating foundation of layered basalt and gravity anchors. The spires shimmered with repellent wards that hissed when light touched them.
Kael and Mara clung to the underside of a floating cargo lift as it ascended through aetheric mist. Below them, the slums shrank to inkstains. Ahead, security drones shimmered in and out of reality, tethered by light-thread and guided by resonance.
Mara handed him a pulse-bomb with one hand, her other gripping the edge of the crate.
"Two at the west node. One's real. One's an illusion. Your lens'll tell which is which."
Kael peered through the cracked brass. The left figure flickered beneath Cipher light, its aura too clean. An illusion.
He activated the bomb, tossed it between them.
The drones reacted instantly, one lunged, intercepting the device midair. It dissolved. The real drone dropped, twitching as its spell-engine shorted out.
"Clean," Mara whispered.
They landed on the manor's underwalk, creeping through serpentine corridors of weightless metal. Cipher wards lined the walls like veins, pulsing with memory. They passed a guard post—two bodies slumped over a table. Mara hadn't told him they'd come early.
She grinned without apology.
"silence is not my only skill."
Arcane sensors glimmered across the next hall. Kael slotted the cracked lens over his eye and watched as the sensor beams twisted, revealing an aetheric sigil etched behind the floor panels.
"Trap rune. Dead-soul detonation," he said.
Mara shrugged. "Then don't die."
They crawled beneath the threshold, breath shallow. The lens flickered. Something stirred above them.
A Cipher-bound sentinel unfolded from the ceiling like a mechanical spider, its joints hissing with stitched whispers. Six arms. Two glowing eyes. One word seared across its chestplate:
Iteration.
Kael acted first, tossing the music-box eye into the air. It flared mid-flight. The sentinel paused, uncertain, its Cipher stuttering in confusion.
Mara lunged with twin daggers, slicing through the dampening sigils behind its eyes. Sparks showered the walls. It screamed in machine-language before collapsing into scrap.
Kael exhaled slowly, heart pounding against his ribs.
"You improvising?" she asked, wiping her blade.
"Just remembering."
They pressed on.
---
The vault was suspended in the manor's hollow heart, a gravity-neutral chamber ringed with metallic sigils. No door. Just Cipher light. The lens pulsed as Kael approached.
"Give me a reason," he muttered.
The vault responded. Groaned. Unfolded.
Inside, in a shaft of sterile blue light, sat the Architect's "key."
Not a weapon.
Not a crown.
A music box.
He lifted it with trembling hands. Turned the crank.
A lullaby unfurled.
Soft. Familiar.
Elara's voice echoed in his mind, humming it through cracked doors in their childhood home, no, Kael's Elara. Not Silas's.
He opened the lid.
Inside, a photograph.
Silas, arm draped around a much younger Elara, both standing in front of a crumbling building Kael had only ever seen in dreams.
A sign behind them, half-scorched, barely legible:
Shattered Archive
The photo was dated.
Fifty years ago.
And Kael wasn't in it.
But his fingerprints were on the frame.
Above them, perched in the rafters, the Shadow Child watched, head tilted.
Her smile was all teeth and sympathy.
"Tick-tock, liar," she whispered. "He's waiting."