The doors at the edge of the amphitheater opened silently.
No gears. No magic. Just quiet inevitability.
Zayn—no longer merely Zero—stepped through them with Fry and Patch close behind. He felt the core Karnyx glyph warm against his chest, subtly humming in rhythm with his pulse.
Patch glanced around. "So, uh, Archive of Echoes. That sounds... comforting. Like a haunted library run by depressed poets."
Fry sighed. "It's worse."
The Archive was not a place. It was a layer.
As they passed through the threshold, the environment changed. The air became thin, crackling with half-formed thoughts. The sky flickered between color palettes, and the ground reshaped itself to reflect memory imprints. Walls formed around them—glass corridors suspended in a void, lined with glowing nodes, each pulsing with someone's voice.
Zayn paused beside a node.
"I wish I hadn't left her alone."
Another one whispered:
"The code didn't break. I did."
Thousands of them.
Patch stopped mid-step. "Okay, that's enough for me. I'm emotionally full, thank you. Time to leave, digest, maybe cry a little."
"Keep moving," Fry said, voice tight. "The Archive reacts to thought. If you linger too long, it starts thinking back."
At the center of the shifting corridors, they found it: a glowing prism the size of a small house, suspended in a beam of recursive light. Surrounding it were data tendrils rooted in fragmented floor glyphs.
Fry gasped. "This is an echo prism. A final vault. These are unauthorized records. Wiped thoughts. Regrets. Ghosts that never made it into recursion logs."
Zayn touched the surface.
The prism responded.
Welcome, ZAYN. Identity integration confirmed. Host memory access: UNLOCKED.
A spiral of data encircled him.
Memories he hadn't known he possessed flooded forward—half-dreamed moments, faded voices, and most damning of all... a name spoken in fear.
"ALTHEA."
Zayn's knees buckled.
Fry caught him. "What did you see?"
"I remembered someone else. Not my mother. Not a false memory. Someone I was meant to forget."
Patch squinted. "Like a weird aunt?"
Zayn looked up, haunted. "No. Someone the Karnyx hid. She called herself Althea. And she warned me about the others."
Fry paled. "What others?"
Zayn looked back at the prism.
And the image changed.
A table.
Five figures.
One child at the center.
Each figure bore a different glyph on their forehead—five Karnyx hosts.
Zayn pointed. "That's me. But... who are they?"
Fry leaned in, jaw tight. "Those are the other vessels. The failed ones."
Patch muttered, "So why are they moving?"
They were.
The figures blinked. Breathed.
And one—an older boy with silver eyes—looked directly at them.
"You found the Archive," the boy said, voice echoing across dimensions. "Took you long enough."
Zayn stumbled back. "They're alive?"
"No," Fry whispered. "They're something worse."
The prism fractured.
A glyph burst into the air—a broken spiral overlaid with a crown.
Zayn reached for it instinctively.
New Thread Unlocked: KARNYX CONVERGENCE // CODE NAME: REGENT SHARD
Patch flinched. "Oh no. Code names are never good."
Zayn clenched his fists. "They're not just fragments. They're trying to reform the Karnyx through me."
Fry stepped back. "Then we're in more danger than we thought. This isn't just your past. It's a summons."
From behind them, the Archive trembled.
A corridor collapsed.
And a voice—cold, regal—spoke from the fracture.
"He was never meant to be alone."
A silhouette stepped through the broken corridor—tall, silver-eyed.
One of the others.
Alive.