Duskridge felt different after the chapel.
Not just quieter—emptier. Like something had been cut out of the zone and the game hadn't filled the gap.
I stood near the town's edge while Lyra finished bartering at a vendor. The trees swayed in the wind, but their leaves didn't rustle. A goat wandered past with no collision physics. Something was… off.
Still, quests didn't wait for existential dread.
We took a low-level mission from the village board:
[Quest Accepted: Whispers in the Orchard]Find the lost child NPC: Kaelin. Last seen near Windgrove Orchard.Difficulty: E | Reward: Basic gear, 500 EXP
Easy. Or it should've been.
Windgrove sat a few minutes northeast. The orchard was supposed to be picturesque—fruit trees, a gentle breeze, a lazy river that ran behind the hill.
Instead, we arrived to find a glitched loop playing across the field.
A little girl ran between the trees, crying.Then she tripped.Froze mid-fall.Then reset.
Again.
And again.
And again.
[SYSTEM NOTE: Memory Fragment Detected – Class: Echo]This content is deprecated and not linked to an active questline.No action required.
Lyra blinked. "That's… not Kaelin. That's not even her model."
I swallowed. "I've seen this before. Not in-game—in a dev stream. Early pre-alpha footage."
She turned. "Wait, seriously?"
"Yeah. This orchard event was cut before launch. The scene never made it to live servers."
So why was it here now?
The Lexicon opened itself.
Not dramatically. Just a page turning, like a dog-eared book trying to remember what chapter it was on.
New glyphs began to sketch themselves across the margins—faint, unstable, unclaimed.
[Spell Discovered: Echo Snare – Rank F+]Captures a visual/audio snapshot of a localized SYSTEM memory thread for later playback.Warning: Use may expose unseen system layers.
I didn't even touch the ink.
It just formed.
I cast it without thinking.
[Spell Cast: Echo Snare]
A wave of distortion shimmered across the orchard. The broken loop halted. For a second, the girl's model stabilized. She looked at us—directly at us—and mouthed something we couldn't hear.
Then she vanished.
And something cold passed through the air behind me.
Lyra stood dead still. "You felt that too, right?"
"Yeah."
"It felt like—" She didn't finish. "That wasn't just a bug."
I checked the quest tracker.
[Objective Incomplete – Target: Missing]Hint: Trace the last memory glyph.
There was no glyph.
But the Lexicon hummed. Its ink crawled, searching.
Then a new SYSTEM overlay flickered across my vision—not the UI. Deeper. Like debug code etched into my retinas.
[USER PROFILE: RECORDING ERROR]Thread Signature: DivergentRole Marker: LISTENER (Unconfirmed)ECHO STATUS: Escalating
I stepped back, heart pounding.
Lyra saw my expression. "That wasn't a normal alert, was it?"
I hesitated. "No."
"You're not just ahead of the curve," she said. "You're from a different one."
I didn't answer.
That night, I tried logging out.
But I didn't leave the game.
The logout worked. The pod disengaged. I got up, drank water, checked the news.
But I could still hear it.
The orchard wind.The girl's echo.The Lexicon whispering.
Like something had followed me back through the thread.
And in the corner of my vision, just behind thought:
[ECHO THREAD INCOMPLETE – CHECKSUM FAIL: ARCHIVE SPLINTERED]