The Core's voice saturated the room—a dissonant symphony of layered consciousness. It wasn’t speaking through sound but saturating her neural pathways, each syllable driving deeper, prying open cracks she had tightly sealed. "Rewrite me," it demanded. Its tone vibrated with frayed desperation, woven from countless voices—pleading, accusing, fractured.
Aria’s knees buckled. Her grip on the wrist-mounted console tightened, its fading light casting faint glyphs across the floor. She forced herself upright, trembling against the weight of the moment. Around her, the fragmented space shifted again, revealing faded wallpaper and limp toys strewn across the floor—a child’s bedroom on the verge of collapse. She tracked the pattern: this room merged every scar Everstill carried into a single, brutal echo.
Bolt crackled faintly in her ear, its once-reliable cadence breaking apart just as fast as she could focus on it. “Aria... attempting stabiliz—synapse incomplete... systemic collap—” Silence seized Bolt’s voice mid-sentence, an unsettling reminder of how unstable both her tools—and this place—had become.
She inhaled sharply, anchoring herself. This wasn’t the first time she’d felt the weight of borrowed pain. But the Core was relentless, more aggressive than any mapping challenge she’d ever encountered. The writhing tangle of cables surrounding her jerked violently, feeding off the room’s energy. They hovered with invasive precision, poised like predators, each thread alive, breathing with intent.
"You brought yourself here," it jabbed, the tone shifting with raw accusation. The Voice wasn’t singular—each word was layered, numerous lives overlapping like smoke folded into voices she might have known. "Rewrite me."
Her console blinked erratically now, reviving flashes of fragmented data. Tendrils darted closer, yet her body held still. The patterns it demanded from her, fractals seeking answers, had her caught.
This place eats what you bring into it—it always does, she'd said to Mira earlier—but now she knew better. There was no “it.” There was only the Core—the fused consciousness of personal and collective fractures, its network growing denser the longer she lingered. It hadn’t tried to destroy her—it had tried to pull her apart.
“Aria, are you isolated in time?” Her console fractured; her LED menus cycling ahead rotation-shaped))嬿