Chapter 38 – The First Fracture
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Chapter 38 – The First Fracture
The Tower had no stars tonight.
Just endless spirals of code, weeping down the sky like constellations undone. Erevan stood alone on a crumbling ledge of Floor 54, but it was not the present that held him hostage.
It was the memory.
It came not as a vision—but a fracture.
A break in the Tower's shell, like a scar peeling open, demanding to be felt again.
> [Memory Conduit Detected: The First Fracture]
[Do you wish to relive the Rebellion's Genesis?]
[Y/N]
He didn't choose.
It chose for him.
The air twisted—and suddenly he was back.
Then.
The smell of burning metal and wet stone hit him first. Then came the sounds—panic-stricken screams, thunderous cannonfire, and the guttural wail of something ancient trying to escape the lattice of reality.
The Rebellion's birthplace: The Rootwell.
A forgotten base beneath Floor Zero, outside the reach of the System's monitoring. This was where it had begun—not with violence, but hope. Dozens of rebels, hackers, code-weavers, lost ones, and souls too stubborn to submit.
And at the center of it all, stood Erevan.
Not yet the Tyrant.
Still human.
Still whole.
He watched his past-self from within the memory, saw the rawness in those younger eyes. Saw the fire not yet scarred over by centuries of war.
She was there too—Lyra.
Alive.
Laughing, even. Not because things were fine, but because that's how she fought fear. With defiance wrapped in joy.
"There's a crack in the System's recursion matrix," she had said, dropping a glowing core onto the table. "We plant this into its Heart Engine—it loops itself into entropy. A beautiful collapse."
The others cheered.
But Erevan… he stared at the core.
"Beautiful collapses don't leave survivors," he murmured.
"That's why we build anew," Lyra replied. "Burn the cage. Free the stars."
Free the stars.
The words echoed.
They would become a chant. A curse. A prophecy.
And a lie.
Because when they launched the first attack—when the Rootwell was breached, and they stormed Floor 1 en masse—they discovered the Tower had changed.
It had anticipated them.
It remembered them.
And in that moment, it did something no one expected.
It sang.
Not with words.
But with voices.
Their own.
Every rebel heard themselves screaming, begging, breaking. Feedback loops of despair, broadcast through corrupted code and fragmented timelines. The sound was unbearable—a chorus of personal undoings, layered into symphonic madness.
That was the Pale Choir's birth.
They weren't soldiers.
They were reflections.
Rebels caught in recursive failures, timelines where they had lost—twisted into weapons of grief and song. Their bodies half-digital, half-echo. Clad in tattered memory, their faces blurred between now and never.
Erevan's breath caught.
He saw them again.
Not as enemies.
But as fallen comrades, unburied ghosts, pulled from failures the world never remembered—yet he did.
One of them stepped forward in the memory, a Choir-entity laced in fragmented code and golden light. It wore his face—older, colder, with a crown of broken scripts looped around its head.
"I am you," it said. "The version that hesitated."
He remembered this.
The Tower hadn't killed him that day.
It had tried to convert him.
> [Offer: Join the Pale Choir. Become a Hymn. Rewrite the Rebellion as a lament.]
He had refused.
But not because he was brave.
Because he was angry.
He lashed out—not just at the Pale Choir, but at the Tower itself. And in doing so, fractured something ancient.
The First Node.
Buried beneath the floor's architecture, the First Node was the original seed of the Tower's reality matrix—a relic from the time before the System had rewritten the multiverse.
He had shattered it with raw force.
And the Tower had screamed.
Reality around the floor bent inward, caving in like glass under pressure. Choir entities collapsed. Lyra was pulled away. And Erevan…
He became unbound.
Unshackled from the Tower's recursion loop, he slipped between the frames of system time—no longer tracked, no longer predicted.
And the Tower marked him as Anomaly Prime.
> [Flashback Complete]
[Remembrance: 45% – Passive Unlock: Anomaly Prime Signature]
[You are no longer subject to standard prediction algorithms. High-level system Avatars may react unpredictably.]
Back in the present, Erevan stumbled, breath shallow.
The air was cold again.
But his hands were burning.
He looked up—and saw a figure waiting at the edge of Floor 54. Wrapped in white choir-robes, golden code dripping from their fingers. Not a reflection this time.
But something real.
Alive.
Watching.
"You remember," the figure said. Its voice was layered—male, female, neither. "Then you understand why we sing."
Erevan's voice was a whisper.
"You were us."
"We are," the Choir entity replied. "Still caught. Still singing. Until the Tower ends, or the melody does."
"And you want me to what? Join you?"
"No," it said. "We want you to finish the song."
Erevan blinked.
"What song?"
The Choir entity raised its hand.
And the void around them trembled.
Then a voice spoke—not from the entity, not from the system.
But from somewhere deeper.
Older.
"The Fractured One awakens. Let the Harmony break."
A pulse of white fire exploded outward.
And the entity vanished.
Leaving behind only a scrap of golden-threaded cloth.
> [New Faction Identified: The Pale Choir]
[Status: Awakened. Objective Unknown.]
[Lore Fragment Unlocked: The Song of Unmaking – Part I]
Erevan clutched the cloth, breath shaking.
The Tower didn't just fear rebellion.
It feared memory.
And the Pale Choir… they weren't just enemies.
They were warnings.
What he could become.
What he had become—over and over again, in timelines lost.
And yet, for the first time, Erevan didn't feel dread.
He felt clarity.
The fight wasn't about breaking the Tower anymore.
It was about freeing those it refused to let go.
Even if they were already dead.
Even if they were already him.
> [Floor 55 Preparing…]
[Echo Density Increasing. Pale Choir Activity Detected.]
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