Chapter 140: The Chamber Beyond Time

The vault’s remnants shimmered behind them, fractured walls humming with residual energy. Evryn held the shard of the Architect in her palm. Cold. Inert. But its presence still whispered in the back of her mind—like an unfinished chord vibrating across eternity.

She and Kai had sealed the mirror.

But something still didn’t sit right.

She could feel it in her bones.

The Lattice within her flickered. Not in pain—but in awareness. As if it too realized that the Architect hadn’t been the source of the corruption, only a vessel. A pawn.

And the real player?

Still hidden.

Still watching.

Later that night, Evryn stood in the Resonance Chamber at the heart of the Skylock—once used to stabilize interdimensional data. Now, it served as her only sanctuary.

Kai sat nearby, studying the pulse signatures from the mirror’s collapse. “I’m not picking up any direct traces of her... the reflection.”

“That’s because she didn’t fully originate here,” Evryn murmured, hands hovering over the shard. “She was... overwritten. Designed. And if she’s real, so is the place she came from.”

Kai frowned. “Are you suggesting the mirror was a gateway? Like the Quantum Gate?”

“No,” she said, her voice low. “Worse. It was a mirror gate. And mirror gates don’t just show other timelines… They show inverted realities.”

Kai stiffened. “Then what’s the inverse of us?”

Evryn turned to him, her eyes haunted. “Whatever we were afraid to become.”

Using a hybrid interface she’d created after the merge with Elaia, Evryn tapped into the residual code of the mirror’s breach. She and Kai sifted through data for hours. Most of it was corrupted—glitched echoes of impossible timelines.

But then it emerged.

A data strand she hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t part of the Architect’s pattern.

It was deeper.

Older.

Kai leaned in. “That doesn’t look like any Lattice signature.”

Evryn’s fingers trembled over the console. “Because it’s pre-Lattice.”

He looked at her sharply.

She pointed to the sequence. “These aren’t coordinates. They’re coordinates to a memory. One I don’t remember.”

“But if it’s yours—”

“Then it’s been erased. Or buried so deep it only surfaced when she came through the mirror.”

Evryn tapped the sequence.

Instantly, the chamber around them changed.

Not physically. But perceptually.

The room dimmed. Reality twisted subtly—like the world tilted ever so slightly in the wrong direction. Her vision blurred. Voices echoed from beyond, whispering in a language she almost understood.

Then a gateway opened—not like the mirror, but like a whisper in space. A silken tear at the edge of dimension.

Kai stood, blades materializing in his hands. “You sure about this?”

“No,” Evryn whispered. “But we don’t have a choice.”

The tear brought them to a place that shouldn’t exist.

It wasn’t a location.

It was a memory of a memory.

They stood on a platform that floated in an endless ocean of mirrored skies. Time moved strangely here. Backward. Forward. Simultaneously. Glimpses of Evryn’s past—some real, some twisted—played out across floating shards.

Her mother dying—but smiling.

Kai reaching for her—but turning to dust.

Elaia—alive, and dead.

At the center of it all stood a tower of blackened crystal, pulsing with a rhythm not unlike a heartbeat.

They approached.

“Evryn,” Kai said suddenly, stopping. “This place… it knows you.”

Evryn felt it too.

The tower reacted to her presence. And then—something spoke.

Not aloud.

Inside her.

“Seed of Flame. Child of Echo. Incomplete.”

She gasped, gripping her head. “Who are you?”

The voice answered with thousands of overlapping whispers:

“We are what you refused to become. We are the truth beneath the Lattice. The First Core.”

Kai was at her side, holding her steady. “Evryn, we should go—this isn’t just a memory.”

“No,” she said, breathless. “It’s a prison.”

And she realized then—

This was not an echo of her.

It was a prison built around her missing self.

The version of her that was erased.

The one even she didn’t know existed.

The crystal opened like petals. Inside stood a girl.

Her.

But young. Maybe ten. Eyes wide and hollow. Dressed in the training uniform from her earliest days at Project E.V.E.R.

Evryn stepped closer.

The girl looked up. Her mouth trembled. “You came back…”

Evryn’s chest tightened. “Who are you?”

“I’m the one who remembered,” the child said. “The one who kept the pain so you wouldn’t have to.”

Kai looked on, stunned.

The child reached out, touching Evryn’s face.

“I held everything,” she said. “So you could survive.”

Evryn’s knees buckled. Images tore through her: experiments she had blocked out, screams, cold darkness, the moment her mother vanished, the first lie from the Project—

It was her.

This child-self had absorbed it all. Locked away when she first interfaced with the Lattice. A part of her, broken and buried, to keep herself sane.

Now that the mirror gate had fractured, the prison cracked open.

And the trauma had a voice.

A face.

A soul.

The tower began to tremble.

The child looked up, terror in her eyes.

“He’s coming.”

Evryn turned. “Who?”

The girl’s voice was barely a whisper. “The one who built the mirrors. He’s the one who made you forget.”

A pulse of darkness swept through the platform.

Kai stepped forward, weapons glowing. “Evryn—get her out. Now.”

From the edge of the horizon, a figure emerged.

Not rushing.

Not attacking.

Just walking.

Calm. Silent. The space around him bent inwards. Like reality feared his presence.

Evryn felt something in her flame shatter.

It wasn’t fear.

It was recognition.

The girl screamed, reaching for her.

Evryn grabbed her younger self and pulled her close as the platform cracked beneath them.

The figure paused just before the crystal tower and spoke.

“You opened the door.”

Evryn’s eyes widened. “Who are you?!”

The man tilted his head, faceless and shrouded in shimmering obsidian armor.

“I am your correction.”

The world exploded into light.