Refraction Point

There was no sensation of falling.

Only unraveling.

Zayn's mind stretched, contorted, then compacted into a shape that had never existed before. Sound became smell. Sight became memory. The breach hadn't transported them through space—it had rewritten their rules entirely.

When sensation returned, it wasn't comforting.

The Root was not a place. It was a realization.

They stood on an inverted landscape: an endless ocean suspended upside-down above them, held in place by gravitational recursion. Beneath their feet, the ground was alive—breathing, pulsing softly beneath translucent layers of recursive tissue.

The sky—or what passed for it—flickered with shifting glyphs. Some resembled code, others resembled thoughts. They were ideas left half-finished by reality.

Patch took one look around and groaned. "Okay, this place breaks every physical law and at least two laws of common sense."

Zayn looked down at his hands. The Karnyx pulse was weak but consistent.

"We're deeper than we've ever been," Fry said. Her voice echoed oddly, trailing into the air like smoke.

Vela was focused on something in the distance.

A tower—twisting and fragmented—rising from the liquid earth, seemingly rooted to nothing. Shapes moved around it, humanoid but blurred, as if the Root couldn't decide what they were meant to be.

"That's it," Vela said. "The collapse point."

Zayn nodded. "That's where Riven would have gone."

"Or what's left of him," Fry added.

Patch adjusted the strap of his field bag. "So, uh... we walk into the weird soul blender and hope it doesn't turn us into spaghetti?"

Zayn cracked a grin. "That's the spirit."

They moved slowly.

Every step triggered flickers of unreality—moments from lives they never lived.

Zayn saw himself as a painter in one. A farmer in another. In one, he was just a child who never left home, playing catch with his father.

Each false self whispered, stay.

But the Karnyx pulled him onward.

Vela stumbled briefly, eyes glassy. Fry grabbed her, grounding her with a whispered memory: their first field mission, lost in a recursion maze, laughing as they painted markers on the walls.

The vision passed.

They pressed on.

At the base of the tower, time warped.

The structure wasn't a building. It was a column of descending recursive folds, spiraling downward into the earth. It sang—a low, endless hum vibrating through marrow.

Patch took a cautious step inside and instantly doubled over. "Okay, that's not good. That's brain nausea. My thoughts just threw up."

Vela frowned. "It's trying to convert us. Make us part of the Root's structure."

Zayn's Karnyx flared again, pushing back the influence.

"Stay close to me," he said. "We go together."

They descended.

Each level was a metaphor made real.

The first was a library filled with books containing only one sentence: You failed.

The second: a field of clocks, all stopped at the same moment Zayn's pod fractured years ago.

The third: a memory garden, where thoughts bloomed as flowers, and wilting petals whispered doubts in familiar voices.

They passed them all.

At the final level, there was no door. Just a mirror.

It did not reflect them.

It showed Althea.

Suspended.

Alive.

Encased in recursion crystal, at the very center of the Root.

Zayn pressed his hand to the mirror. It dissolved.

He stepped through.

The chamber was impossibly large, yet it felt intimate—like a place designed to house only one emotion: longing.

Althea floated above a pedestal, unconscious but intact. Threaded lines of recursion flowed into her from every direction, like she had become a node of memory itself.

And beside her stood Riven.

But he had changed.

His Spiral Crown was gone. His form flickered between child, adult, and unformed echo.

"I knew you'd come," he said. "We're all drawn here, eventually."

Zayn's voice was low. "What have you done to her?"

"Saved her," Riven replied. "She was caught in the collapse. I anchored her here. But she's not yours to retrieve."

Patch rolled his eyes. "Great. Another cryptic boss battle."

Vela stepped forward. "You're unstable. You can't hold this place together."

"I'm not trying to," Riven said. "I'm becoming it."

Fry shook her head. "You'll destroy everything."

"No," Riven whispered, stepping aside. "You will. When you decide who lives."

He vanished.

And the chamber began to shake.

Zayn ran to the pedestal. Althea's eyes fluttered open.

"Zayn?"

He caught her.

"I'm here," he said.

But the tower groaned. The Root was collapsing.

They had to choose.