The old mill creaked with every gust of wind, as if it was resisting the idea of still standing in a world that no longer belonged to it. Dust hung in the air, faintly glowing under the sickly light of the moons, and the silence had weight. The kind that pressed on your chest like a shapeless warning.
Sera stood by the broken window, watching the sky as if waiting for an answer to fall with the ash.
"The Terminal?" she asked, not turning around.
I nodded, still reading the message over and over. Each letter seemed hastily written, but there was clarity in its intent. It wasn't a trap… or if it was, it came from someone who knew the rules better than we did.
"What if that 'S' isn't a name?" I finally said. "What if it's… a function?"
"Like a variable?"
"Or a signature. As if someone else… is correcting the story from the outside."
She didn't speak, but her back stiffened. She'd thought of it too.
—
When we left the mill at dawn, the forest trees were frozen, though the air wasn't cold. It was like time had gotten stuck in a single frame. Some birds hovered in midair, wings motionless, eyes wide open.
The world was collapsing at the edges.
And we were at the center of that distortion.
—
The path to the supposed Terminal wasn't marked on any map. But the journal… vibrated.
Yes. It pulsed like an anxious heart, beating in a new rhythm. As if it were guiding us, as if it knew something we didn't.
"This is madness," I said. "We're not off script anymore. We're the glitch."
Sera didn't smile. Not this time.
"And glitches," she said, "can either be deleted or become legend."
—
We crossed a clearing that shouldn't exist. A hill spiraled upwards, made of stones that emitted a low hum. There, at the summit, we found a structure: a broken tower, but somehow alive.
It wasn't made by human hands.
It was like reality had tried to build something… and changed its mind halfway through.
The Terminal.
Or what was left of it.
—
Inside, the air was filled with code.
Not words. Not symbols. Pure code, floating, blinking across the walls like condemned fireflies. Every line contained fragments of stories. Scenes never written. Future possibilities, aborted by the dominant narrative.
I saw my own face there.
Distorted. Old. Happy. Dead.
I saw Sera crying over an altar.
I saw a version of us running… and another ruling over a world of shadows.
And at the center, a core: a black crystal suspended in a cage of chains that unraveled and reassembled to the rhythm of a song we couldn't hear.
—
Sera reached out her hand toward it.
"It's… like it can hear me."
I felt it too. Not with my ears. With my soul. The same pulse I'd felt the first time I used the Eclipse of Three Moons.
"Don't touch it yet," I said, almost afraid.
But it was too late.
The crystal flickered.
And a voice —neither human, nor divine, nor machine— filled the tower:
> "Anomalies detected. Confirming alternate route.
Loading: 'Path of the Renegade.'
Warning: all choices from this point are irreversible."
We looked at each other.
And in that moment, I realized it didn't matter how prepared I thought I was.
I was about to choose a path where the story wouldn't protect us. Wouldn't even recognize us.
And yet…
"Do we do it?" Sera asked, her eyes glowing with more than just magic.
I nodded.
Because there was no turning back.
And because, for the first time since I arrived in this world...
> I wanted to be part of a story no one else could write.