Chapter 3: System Anomalies

The path down from the cliff was not really a path at all. It felt more like an idea someone had once—a mix of crumbling stone tiles and grass, tree roots breaking through the old ground, and a broken signpost written in a language Kael didn’t recognize.
Maybe he had known it once, back when Elarion’s world-building document was still structured and not rotting in a forgotten Google Drive folder.
Lucien floated ahead, silent.
Kael followed with his hood pulled low. His robes moved as if they were alive—too smooth, too theatrical. If he concentrated, he could feel the thread count of the fabric. If he focused harder, he could change it. The power was unsettling in its subtlety.
“Question,” Kael said as they walked through a glitchy thicket. The trees shook and endlessly repeated their leaf-fall animation.
“Speak,” Lucien responded.
“Why me? Sure, I helped create parts of this place, but there were other developers, writers, coders. Why am I the one who got pulled in?”
Lucien dimmed slightly. “Because you were the last one to believe in it.”
Kael stopped walking.
“I don’t—”
“Belief matters here,” Lucien explained. “This world remembers those who shaped it. You weren’t just writing code. You were bringing life to the system. When the rollback happened, the code found you.”
“That’s not how programming works,” Kael muttered.
“No,” Lucien replied. “It’s how creation works.”
They reached the valley just as the sun started glitching again, flickering between high noon and twilight every ten seconds. Kael shielded his eyes from the intense light.
“Light cycles are out of sync,” Lucien noted. “System clock drift.”
“Cool,” Kael said, squinting. “So the world can’t sleep.”
Down below, nestled in a grove of half-rendered ruins, was the camp Lucien had mentioned. Tents made of canvas and code shimmered with a soft blue static, and strange symbols floated just above the fabric—either warding spells or broken textures, Kael couldn’t tell.
Then he saw her.
At the center of the camp, a figure stood alone, sparring with empty air. Her blade didn’t shine, it glitched. Every movement warped the pixels around it, distorting the space like a corrupted .png file. The weapon flickered between a longsword, a dagger, and a scythe—always shifting.
Lucien paused. “That’s her.”
“The mercenary?”
“She calls herself Sairis. Former bounty-class NPC. But something changed. She’s no longer bound to scripted behavior. She’s self-directed.”
Kael raised an eyebrow. “You mean she broke her AI loop?”
“She deleted it.”
Kael took a cautious step forward, boots crunching on the stone. Sairis turned.
Her eyes were blank for a moment—loading—then sharpened. They were crimson, edged with static.
“Another ghost?” she called, her voice low and layered with digital echoes. “Or are you something new?”
Kael lowered his hood. “Not a ghost. Honestly, I’m not sure what I am.”
Sairis studied him. “You carry authority. I can sense it.”
“That’s new.”
She tried to sheathe her sword, but the blade flickered and collapsed into particles, then reformed behind her shoulder as if the system hadn’t decided where it belonged.
“You’re the one causing the reboots,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Ever since you showed up, the rules keep changing. Magic spikes. Movement logic shifts. I saw a man walk off a cliff because gravity forgot it was still supposed to exist.”
Kael frowned. “I’m not doing that on purpose.”
She stepped closer. “You smell like a patch note.”
Lucien moved between them. “He is. Kael is the Architect. The system recognizes him as root admin.”
Sairis stared at Kael for a long moment.
Then she chuckled, a dry sound. “So the myth is true.”
“What myth?”
“That the Architect would return. That the one who built this world would walk it one day. Most of us thought it was old code, a belief for NPCs who glitched too hard.”
Kael rubbed the back of his neck. “Well… here I am. Ta-da?”
Sairis didn’t smile. “Then you need to understand something, Architect. This world isn’t waiting for you to save it. It’s learning to survive without you. You show up now, and everything—every NPC, every monster, every faction—is going to assume you're here to rewrite them.”
“I’m not.”
“They won’t care.”
Silence followed.
Lucien finally spoke. “There’s a rift zone nearby. Data corruption and leftover instability. Something inside is triggering unauthorized respawn events.”
Sairis’s gaze snapped to him. “You mean them.”
Lucien didn’t answer.
“What’s in there?” Kael asked.
Sairis responded instead. “Ghost data. Abandoned player profiles. Dead files trying to live again. I fought one. It looked like my sister.”
“Your sister?”
“She was a scripted companion. Deleted during alpha testing.” Her voice cracked slightly. “But the thing I saw remembered everything. The devs purged her, but she clawed her way back in.”
Kael felt the weight of that—a world of forgotten builds and buried prototypes, all waking up.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s see what my mistakes have created.”
Sairis tilted her head. “You’re not what I expected.”
“I never am.”
They turned toward the shimmer on the horizon—a jagged rift in space, pulsing with code and memory.
Behind them, the sun blinked again.