There's always that moment—right before you uncover something world-shattering—when the air feels too still, too quiet. Like the world itself is holding its breath.Asher had just stepped into that silence.He only hoped he'd survive what came after it exhaled.
Location: Surface Sector – East Watchpoint
The sky loomed heavy and low, painted in bruised grays with swirls of purple mist curling like smoke along the distant skyline. Rain threatened, teased, but never came. Halcyon was always like that—perpetually on the edge of something catastrophic, but never quite crumbling. A city of almosts. Almost utopia. Almost peace. Almost safe.
Asher adjusted his hood, the synthetic weave damp with the cold fog rising from the street vents, and stepped out of the rusted lift that connected the decaying Underground District to one of Halcyon's surface-level eyes: East Watchpoint.
The zone was a militarized observation complex—once a gleaming part of the city's surveillance apparatus, now just a half-forgotten relic from a war no one talked about.
But tonight, it was silent.
Unnaturally silent.
He moved forward through the crumbling corridor where guards were supposed to be posted—where buzzcut enforcers once barked orders and swapped cigarettes and gossip. Now there was just the hum of dead screens and the flicker of broken lightstrips. Dust floated through beams of amber light like ghostly residue.
Too quiet.
"Alright… this is either a trap, a horror movie, or a government facility on a Sunday."
Asher's voice barely echoed, swallowed by the stale air.
He turned a corner and caught a flicker of movement in the periphery. His body tensed, heart skipping—but it was just a cracked mirror panel. He stared at his reflection. Pale. Eyes dark with sleepless nights. His stubble had grown in uneven. There were shadows beneath his eyes, and something else. Something hollower.
He looked like someone who'd already lost too much—and still hadn't stopped digging.
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Flashback: Isla's Warning
"You can't fight what you can't see."Her voice still haunted him, even now. Smooth, calm, and terrifying.
She hadn't told him everything. Just a whisper. A name.Not a person.A place.
The Core Archive.
Buried beneath the city's eastern sector, sealed off after the Mind Reformation riots decades ago. Urban myth said it was a facility for early neural rewriting experiments. The kind of place where people's minds went in—but didn't come back out.
And Asher was going in anyway.
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The Descent
He found the hidden entrance where she'd said it would be—behind an old access panel inside a crumbled utility tunnel past the fourth corridor. It looked like any other maintenance shaft, but the cold that breathed from it was unnatural.
Asher kicked open the rusted grate and lowered himself in.
The ladder groaned beneath his weight, and the descent felt longer than it should've. The deeper he went, the more the silence thickened. His own breath was the only thing he could hear, amplified by the metal walls until it sounded like a storm trapped in his lungs.
"Rachel better appreciate this if I survive. If not, I'm haunting her."
He hit bottom with a dull thud. A large subterranean vault stretched ahead, lit only by flickering red lights. The walls were lined with dead terminals and tangled wires like exposed veins.
Then the lights began to blink—slowly at first, then violently.Machines stirred.Monitors woke.
And one by one, the dead screens came alive.
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Creepy Event #12: The Echo Tapes
Dozens of old security feeds, all playing in sync. People. Faces. Lives.
Workers in labs. Children in classrooms. Military officers in suits. Families in apartments. A thousand versions of Halcyon's past. All normal… at first.
And then it changed.
Each screen glitched.Faces froze in time—mouths mid-sentence, eyes wide. Then the tapes rewound, jerking violently in reverse. Not smooth like old media. Brutal. Like bones snapping backward.
Every screen showed the same moment.3:33 AM – 14th Day of the Crimson Eclipse.
Whatever that meant, Asher didn't like it. He stepped back instinctively—and that's when he noticed.
The figures on screen—the frozen people—turned.Eyes shifted.Heads tilted.And every single one of them stared directly at him.
"Okay... cool. This is fine. This is absolutely, 100% fine. Totally not cursed."
And then the lights went out.
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The Voice in the Walls
A whisper.
Not through the speakers.
From the walls themselves.
"He rewrites what He wills."
Asher's breath caught. His hand shot to the hidden blade strapped to his lower back. Cold steel steadied his nerves. But it didn't stop the shaking.
A single monitor stayed on.
It showed Rachel.
Her eyes were hollow. She sat alone in a sterile room, mouth moving as if trying to scream through broken audio.
"Ash…her… don't trust… t-th-them… He is watching… me."
And then—static.Gone.
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The Glitch in Reality
His phone buzzed like it had been hit with a taser. He yanked it out. The screen lit up—not with messages or calls—but with his own face.
Live. Streaming.
"Wha—? No, no, no. That's not… I didn't—"
On screen, his reflection blinked.
He hadn't blinked.
Then it smirked.
And said:
"You're already being rewritten."
The phone exploded in his hand. A small burst of smoke and crackle, leaving the air thick with burnt plastic.
He flung it across the room, heart pounding like a war drum in his chest.
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The Path Forward
He stumbled toward a broken console in the corner—one of the few that hadn't lit up. Something about it felt different. It was old, unlabeled. A panel on the side was slightly ajar, wires trailing like nerves.
Inside was a single data drive.
Small. Black. Cold to the touch.
"Alright… mystery USB in a cursed underground vault. Totally logical decision to take it with me."
He pocketed it.
As he moved back to the ladder, something flashed at the edges of his vision. A stutter in the world itself. A flicker.
For just a heartbeat, the world glitched—and the chamber was replaced with a jagged void.
Floating in the dark: Thousands of red eyes.Watching.Blazing.Hungry.
Then—gone.
Reality snapped back.
He climbed fast, lungs heaving by the time he pulled himself out of the shaft. He didn't look back.
The silence had returned.But now, it was watching.
[End of Chapter 9 – Into the Eye of the Storm]
Preview for Chapter 10 – Those Who Remember
The Echo Tapes were just the beginning.With the cryptic USB drive burning a hole in his pocket and reality warping at the seams, Asher turns to the last person who might be able to help—a rogue memory hacker named Lira. But in a world of rewrites and illusions, even the act of remembering becomes a rebellion.And Asher is about to discover that the truth… is alive.