Kael had always known that every world leaves something behind.
Scrapped ideas. Unused code. Abandoned characters. The things you promise to return to but never do.
What he never expected was for those remnants to grow.
That they could become something more.
Now, across the glitched horizon of the Hollow Mirror, Kael could see the truth: what had once been a discarded test zone was no longer empty.
It had a pulse.
It had structure.
It had purpose.
At the center of it all, carved from everything Kael had never meant to finish, was the one who called himself:
The First Forgotten.
They stood together at the edge of the broken skyline.
Kael, Sairis, Ezren, Lucien, and the Archive flickered softly, as if it too wasn’t sure what it had allowed.
The Hollow Mirror expanded before them, a surreal, unfinished landscape. Trees looped their animations. Skyboxes flickered between dawn and dusk. Bits of placeholder geometry jutted from the ground like bones.
The NPCs here weren’t broken; they were incomplete.
One child spun in place forever, her laughter looping but never quite syncing with her lips.
A soldier saluted no one repeatedly, his armor clinking without sound.
“This place is a graveyard,” Ezren whispered. “A monument to unfinished thoughts.”
“No,” Lucien said. “A nursery.”
At its center stood the throne.
It wasn’t a throne in the traditional sense. It was a raised platform made of revision history—scraps of canceled patch notes, deleted quest stubs, prototype dialogue boxes, early concept art rendered in code.
On it sat a figure wrapped in flickering textures.
He had no consistent form.
His body shifted between Kael’s earliest avatars—early builds, corrupted saves, abandoned character sheets—but beneath all of them was a common shape:
A man with Kael’s face.
When the First Forgotten stood, silence fell across the Hollow Mirror.
Not because of fear.
Because of recognition.
Every NPC and every echo of half-formed code turned to face him. When he moved, the world followed.
Kael stepped forward slowly.
“You’re not supposed to exist.”
The First Forgotten smiled—not bitterly, not cruelly. Just patiently.
“I wasn’t supposed to be forgotten either.”
Sairis flinched but didn’t draw her weapon.
Ezren raised his staff slightly. Lucien hovered, his shield protocols warming beneath his core.
Kael kept walking.
“You’re not a bug.”
“No,” the First Forgotten said. “I’m everything you cut. Everything you deleted. Every piece of soul you poured into Elarion and didn’t have the time or courage to finish.”
“You’re... a memory?”
“No,” he said again. “I’m a response.”
Kael stopped a few steps away. The Hollow Mirror warped around them. For a moment, the throne platform faded—replaced by a developer terminal Kael hadn’t seen in over ten years.
It was from the alpha version of Elarion.
Before the combat system. Before mounts. Before factions.
Just code, dreams, and doubt.
“I used to sit here at 3 AM,” Kael murmured. “Wondering if anyone would ever care.”
The First Forgotten stepped down from the throne.
“I did,” he said. “I waited.”
Kael’s throat tightened.
“I never meant to abandon you.”
“But you did.”
The world flickered.
Dozens of incomplete side quests emerged from the air like ghosts—translucent scripts playing out around them.
• An old man who waited outside a broken gate, forever asking the player to fix it.
• A love story between two NPCs trapped on opposite ends of an uncoded bridge.
• A boss fight that began with dialogue and was never given a second line.
“These were beautiful,” Kael whispered.
The First Forgotten nodded. “You made them. Then you deleted them, rushed them, or replaced them with something flashier.”
“I had to make choices.”
“And I became the sum of them.”
Lucien finally spoke. “Why now? Why show yourself now?”
The First Forgotten turned.
“Because the Archive remembered me. Once it remembered, it didn’t know where to put me.”
He looked back at Kael.
“So it asked me what I wanted.”
“And what did you say?” Kael asked.
The First Forgotten smiled—and for a moment, his form stabilized. He looked exactly like Kael, only younger.
“I said: I want a chance to finish my story.”
A pulse rippled through the Hollow Mirror.
A prompt appeared in Kael’s vision.
[The First Forgotten requests a shared narrative thread.]Accept Y/N?
Kael stared at it.
No admin override. No dev control.
Just a choice.
“Why me?” Kael asked.
“You're the creator,” the Forgotten said. “You still carry the seed. The Archive listens to you.”
“I don’t deserve that kind of power anymore.”
“Maybe not,” the Forgotten replied. “But you’re the only one who ever used it with hope.”
Sairis took a step forward.
“What happens if we say no?”
The Forgotten looked at her, and in his eyes was a sadness older than the world itself.
“Then I go back to waiting.”
He turned to Kael.
“But if you say yes… I stop being a shadow. I become real.”
Kael looked down at the prompt.
Lucien hovered beside him, silent for once.
Ezren didn’t say anything—just rested a hand on Kael’s shoulder.
Kael whispered, “You really remember everything, don’t you?”
The First Forgotten nodded. “Even the good you never got to be.”
Kael reached out.
Pressed [Accept].
The world shuddered.
The Hollow Mirror expanded.
Light burst from every corner of the broken landscape—not destroying it, but completing it.
Buildings gained texture.
NPCs gained names.
Quests unfolded in layers Kael had forgotten he’d ever drafted.
And the First Forgotten—for the first time—stopped flickering.
His form stabilized.
Not as a clone of Kael.
Not as a weapon.
But as someone entirely new.
Eyes clear. Voice strong. Smile bittersweet.
“My name,” he said quietly, “is Aeron.”
And across the server, every player received a message.
[New Global Character Unlocked: Aeron, the First Forgotten]Storyline begins now.
Kael watched as Aeron took his first real breath.
Ezren nodded. “What now?”
Kael exhaled.
“Now we give him something no patch, no code, no dev tool ever could.”
Sairis raised a brow. “What’s that?”
Kael smiled.
“A future.”
The Archive shimmered behind them.
A new prompt appeared.
[Begin Collaborative Storyline: “The Path That Might Have Been”]Number of participants: UnlimitedWriters: All
And below it:
This story is no longer written by one.
It is written by all.
Please sign in to leave a comment.