Reality cracked open like an egg, and Cyrus tumbled back into his body. The sword Volta vibrated in his grip, its ancient metal singing a note that only he could hear—a frequency that plucked at the tangled threads of his forgotten past. His consciousness, so recently adrift in the fragmented ocean of memory, crashed against the shore of the present moment with disorienting force. The ruins around him seemed both impossibly solid and strangely ephemeral, as if the stones themselves couldn’t quite decide which reality to inhabit.

  “He’s back,” someone said, the voice swimming through the thick atmosphere that surrounded Cyrus like gelatin.

  Cyrus blinked, his eyes focusing on the face of a woman he recognized as Vela, the Wayfinder expedition leader. Her typically stolid expression had fractured into something approaching genuine concern. Behind her stood three other members of the team: Marko, the burly security specialist; Lina, their tech analyst; and Dax, the artifacts expert who had been particularly interested in Volta when they’d discovered it embedded in the crystalline altar.

  Volta. The sword itself seemed to respond to his thought, warming slightly in his grasp. Fragments of the vision still clung to him like cobwebs—a woman’s face, beautiful and beloved, twisted in fear as she was pulled away from him. A man’s cruel laughter. The sensation of dying, of darkness closing in, and then the explosive birth of something vast and terrible within him.

  “What happened?” Cyrus asked, his voice raspy, as if he’d been screaming, despite not recalling making a sound.

  “You tell us,” Vela replied. “You touched that sword and went completely catatonic for seven minutes. Then our System interfaces went haywire.”

  Lina stepped forward, her slender fingers dancing through the air as she manipulated a data display that only she could see through her system interface. “Everyone in proximity received multiple error notifications. Anomaly detection, classification failure, unauthorized energy pattern… and even a temporal instability warning. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Dax hovered near the edge of the group, eyes fixed on Volta with the gleam of professional fascination.

  “The sword appears to have bonded with you. Can you describe what you experienced?”

  Cyrus frowned, trying to sort through the kaleidoscopic impressions left by his vision. “I remembered something from before,” he said carefully. “A past life, I think. A woman—my wife—taken from me…”

  Cyrus trailed off lamely. Something felt wrong.

  Vela, watching him through narrowed eyes, asked, “And this sword is connected to these memories. How, exactly?”

  He didn’t remember a Vela, Marko, or even a Dax. Cyrus lifted his hand, and the world shattered like glass around him. He stood in the dark void. Alone. He hated being alone.

  But wait—that wasn’t right.

  Cyrus blinked, and the ruins reassembled themselves, but differently. The faces around him were wrong. These weren’t the people from his false memory. These were—

  A woman with platinum hair and sharp, scrutinizing eyes. She stood at the forefront, her body language projecting authority. The System identified her as Maija, Level 32 Healer.

  Beside her, a towering man with short blonde hair and welcoming features, despite the concern etched into them. Matti, Level 29 Transmuter.

  A pink-haired dwarf hovered anxiously nearby, his mining gear jangling softly as he shifted from foot to foot. Alor, Level 24 Pathfinder.

  To the left, a severe-featured woman with crimson hair pulled back in a high ponytail, her elegant robes of white, red, and gold marking her as someone of importance. Cassandra, Level 36 Auraweaver.

  And finally, at the edge of the group, a slender figure with rainbow-streaked pink hair and inverted eyes clutching a dark staff. Lyessa, Level 31 Necromancer.

  Cyrus knew these designations from his System interface, but the familiarity ended there. He didn’t know these people. Not really. They were strangers with names attached, classifications without memories to ground them.

  Volta pulsed in his hand, and the ruins seemed to ripple, as if reality were a pond disturbed by a falling stone.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said, his voice distant even to his own ears. “I don’t—I don’t know who you are.”

  The platinum-haired woman—Maija—stepped forward, her features hardening with alarmed suspicion. “Cyrus, what are you talking about? We’ve been traveling together for weeks.”

  “No…” Cyrus disagreed, certainty crystallizing within him. “We haven’t. Those aren’t real memories.”

  The System interface flickered in his vision, error messages spilling across it like digital blood:

  [ANOMALY DETECTED]

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  [PATTERN RECOGNITION FAILURE]

  [TIMELINE INCONSISTENCY]

  [REALITY MATRIX DESTABILIZATION: 27%]

  Volta’s humming intensified, the sound rising from subliminal to audible. The sword’s surface rippled with patterns that reminded Cyrus of equations written in alien mathematics, impossible geometries distilled into two dimensions.

  “His System’s going critical!” The dwarf—Alor—said, his accent thick with what Cyrus’s interface translated as a distant Earth analog: French. “We need to stabilize ‘im before ‘e crashes ze whole network!”

  Cyrus closed his eyes, searching for something to hold onto. The memories of his life—his true life—fluttered just beyond reach, like pages torn from a book and scattered by a cosmic wind. The woman he loved. ???????. A mysterious entity had taken her. His death and rebirth, an endless cycle of life and death burdened by… something. Was it Volta?

  When he opened his eyes again, the ruins had changed once more. The walls were melting; stone flowed like wax down a burning candle. The floor beneath him rippled, solid and liquid simultaneously. The five members of the Wayfinder Expeditions team stood frozen, their forms distorted as if viewed through curved glass.

  Their System interfaces sparked and stuttered around them, digital ghosts of a reality losing its coherence. Error messages multiplied exponentially, creating halos of glitched data around each person.

  “This isn’t real,” Cyrus whispered. Volta sang in agreement; its note was perfect and terrible. “None of this is real.”

  He raised the sword, and something inside him responded—a power older than the System, older than any System, maybe. Whatever slumbered within him across all of his countless, tragic, futile lives stirred when he called.

  Cyrus didn’t swing the sword. He held it before him, and reality peeled away from its edge like skin from a wound. The fabricated memories of his time with the Wayfinders dissolved into mist. The carefully constructed narrative of who he was supposed to be—a newly discovered talent with mysterious abilities, found in a crashed ship—tattered and tore.

  The platinum-haired healer reached for him, her mouth forming words that never reached his ears. The crimson-haired warrior drew her blade—Galatine, his System helpfully informed him—but seemed unable to move forward. The necromancer’s staff glowed with a cold light, but the power found no purchase in the disintegrating reality around them.

  And then, with a silence more profound than any ought to be, everything stopped.

  The ruins hung suspended in mid-dissolution. The Wayfinders stood frozen like mannequins. Even the System interface paused, and errors were captured in digital amber.

  In that moment between moments, Cyrus felt something vast and terrible press against the membrane of reality—the thing that had been hiding behind the fa?ade all along. The entity that had constructed this elaborate trap for him, this false narrative designed to… what? Contain him? Study him? Delay him?

  Volta pulled in his hand, not with physical force but with a significance that transcended the material. The sword was trying to tell him something, to show him the way out.

  Cyrus turned the blade, catching the light that seemed to emenate from nowhere and everywhere. In its polished surface, he saw not his reflection but a doorway—a tear in the fabric of this constructed reality that led… elsewhere.

  Without hesitation, he stepped through.

  Reality shattered like a mirror struck by a hammer. The ruins, the Wayfinders, the entire narrative construct exploded into fragments, each shard containing a piece of the lie he had been living. They spun around him in a chaotic dance, glittering with false memories and fabricated emotions.

  And then they were gone, leaving Cyrus suspended in a void between spaces and times. The sword Volta remained clutched in his hand, the only solid thing in a realm of absolute emptiness.

  Here, in this non-place, Cyrus could see more clearly. The false reality had been just that—false—but it had been built upon fragments of the truth. He glanced at the false images as they swirled around him. Whoever it was had made thousands of attempts to delay him, even if he could only remember a few. Success, sex, wealth, happiness… all the temptations had been pulled out, and not one had stopped him.

  Volta.. Volta was perhaps the only purely true thing he had encountered, since touching the blade.

  The void stretched in all directions, a canvas awaiting creation. Within it, Cyrus hung suspended, a single point of consciousness in an infinite expanse. The sword in his hand pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat, his heartbeat, though whether it followed or led, he couldn’t tell.

  This was not death, he knew. Nor was it life as he understood it. This was a liminal space, a threshold between states of being. Here, poised between what was and what might be, Cyrus felt the weight of all his past lives pressing against him, a burden heavier than any mountain.

  Something deep within him, no longer slumbering but not yet awake, recognized this place. This state of being. It had been here before—in the spaces between his lives?

  The void pulsed around him in time with Volta’s humming, and Cyrus wondered whether he should let those memories in. Should he remember who and what he was, especially all at once? Or would such knowledge, absorbed in a single moment, burn away what remained of his humanity?

  In response to his thoughts, the Void began to change. Not filling with matter or energy, but organizing itself, transforming random chaos into something with pattern and significance. The emptiness became pregnant with potential, and in that potential, Cyrus sensed his next move forming—a return, but not to the false reality he had shattered.

  A return to something far more dangerous and far more authentic. Cyrus felt a pull, a directionality in the void, as if something beyond it demanded his presence with an urgency that defied comprehension. The invitation was undeniable, but along with it came a warning that resonated at the edges of his awareness. Each beat of the potential universe around him sang with possibility and peril, harmonizing with the note of Volta’s hum.

  He understood. Returning would mean confronting the true nature of what was happening, a reality stripped of comforting illusions and safety nets. The System’s lies had been calculated to contain him, but the truth would not be so easily managed. If the constructed narrative had been a trap, the reality he approached was a battlefield—one where the forces aligned against him would be more relentless and committed than ever before.

  The sense of danger sparked a thrill inside of him. For the first time in lifetimes, he felt… ready. Ready to face whatever waited on the other side of this threshold. Ready to wield the power within him with full knowledge of what it meant—whatever power it was, and whatever it did mean. Knowledge, alas, had not become his, but he would face the mystery, the System, Yaerellis and any other enigma or force that got in his way.

  With that certainty, Cyrus let the momentum of the void carry him forward. The sword pulsed perfectly with his resolve, a constant and faithful companion. His fingers tightened around Volta, and he crossed the final threshold. The glow of treacherous reality enveloped him.