Blood was warm, but silence was warmer.
Kael Kurobane lay on cracked marble, his breath shallow, his fingers twitching as the world flickered around him like a glitched screen. Fragments of blue code twisted through the air jagged symbols from a language no longer spoken by gods or men.
Name?
Name...Her name... what was it?
He looked down at his hands. Blood. Dried. Not his. That he remembered. He always remembered the blood. But the face? The name? Gone. Not stolen. Erased.
Above him, the sky convulsed black ink bleeding into white clouds. A pulsing crack cut across it like a quill slash on parchment. It wasn't thunder. It was the sound of something being rewritten. And then came the voice. Cold. Monotone. Echoing inside his skull like static.
❝LOOP THIRTEEN COMPLETE.
RESULT: FAILURE.
ANCHOR UNSYNCHRONIZED.
ERROR LOG: SUBJECT FORGOT HER NAME AGAIN.❞
Kael winced. He'd heard this line before. Twelve times. Every loop, the same ending a girl with no name, dying in his arms,and a memory that burned out before it could be saved. But this time…This time he wasn't going to beg the system to bring her back. This time he was going to rage.
He stood up slowly, legs shaky, but soul steady. Around him lay a battlefield that never truly existed fragments of stone frozen mid-fall, flame suspended in the air like paused cinema, shadows glitching in and out of form.
"How many more loops?" he muttered.
"How many times do I lose her to learn nothing?"
No reply. Just another flicker of static in the sky, and a new line of system text:
❝YOU ARE NOT THE AUTHOR OF THIS STORY.
YOUR EMOTIONS ARE NOT IN THE SCRIPT.❞
Kael chuckled dry, broken, bitter.
"You made a mistake then."
"Because I'm the only one still here."
He raised his right hand.
A quill formed jagged, metallic, dripping with liquid code. The Chaospen. Forged in Loop Seven.
Used to kill a narrator in Loop Nine.
Now banned by every written law of the Glitch Core System.
❝WARNING: ILLEGAL ARTIFACT DETECTED.
USING THIS ITEM MAY RESULT IN AUTHORIZATION BREACH.❞
Kael ignored the warning.
He always did. He etched a single line across the air, watching as the ink burned red instead of black:
"I still remember the way she screamed."
Not a name. Not yet. But a start. And in the Glitch Realms, sometimes a memory was more powerful than a spell.
Suddenly, the ground beneath him vibrated. The marble shattered.
Not from weight but from recognition. As if the world itself remembered her voice,even when Kael couldn't.
"I don't care if you're a system, a god, or the damn narrator..."
His voice cracked. Not from weakness. From too much truth held in for too long.
"If I forgot her name...then I'll give her a new one. One that can't be rewritten."
And somewhere, far from this battlefield of frozen code and bleeding memory in a hidden corner of a story no one had written yet...A girl opened her eyes. And whispered back:
"Then I'll wait for you to remember me."
Kael walked alone through the remains of the battlefield, each step trailing a faint line of corrupted code in his wake. The world around him wasn't moving it was loading.
Stone floated. Fire blinked in and out of frames. Dead bodies reversed their last breath and froze mid-scream. This wasn't a battlefield. It was a paused memory.
Above him, a giant translucent screen lit the sky. White text spilled across it like prophecy written by a machine:
❝LOOP 13 REVIEW:
FAILURE TO SYNCHRONIZE CORE THREAD
MEMORY NODE: [REDACTED]
REASON: UNAUTHORIZED EMOTIONAL INTERFERENCE
CONCLUSION: USER IS NOT ALLOWED TO GRIEVE WHAT HE DID NOT WRITE.❞
Kael laughed under his breath.
The system had told him before:
"You are a character, Kael. Not a creator."
And yet...His heart still hurt like an author watching his own story burn.
He stepped into the ruins of a cathedral. Its walls pulsed with static. The pews bled ink. The altar displayed a glowing sigil a loop, split down the middle. Kael knew this place. He had died here in Loop Four. Been erased here in Loop Eight. And loop after loop… he'd come back here without knowing why. Until now.
There, carved into the wall in glitched handwriting:
"This is where she said it."
He touched the words. Suddenly a shock. His mind split open for half a second.
A voice.
A breath.
A girl laughing.
"Don't forget my name, okay? Not even if the world makes you."
Kael staggered back.
Fell to his knees.
"That was her. That was real…"
❝RESTRICTED MEMORY ACCESSED
COMMENCING CORRECTION PROTOCOL❞
From the altar, a figure rose. Not human. Not system. A Rewrite Sentinel.
Tall, faceless, cloaked in pages that constantly rewrote themselves.
Each word on its skin was a line Kael never got to finish.
"Unauthorized memory reconstruction is forbidden," it intoned.
"You were not meant to remember."
Kael stood, Chaospen glowing in his grip.
"And yet I did."
"Even if it was one second… even if it's fading…"
He pointed the quill toward the sentinel.
"I'm going to write her into this world even if it kills me in every loop after."
❝ERROR: USER ATTEMPTING TO INTERFERE WITH NARRATIVE TIMELINE
SYSTEM THREAT DETECTED.
LEVEL UPGRADE TRIGGERED.
RANK: GLITCH SOVEREIGN – LEVEL 0.01❞
The cathedral walls cracked. The sky trembled. And Kael's heartbeat began syncing to something ancient not code, not fate. A story that had never been allowed to start.
"You erased her name."
"So I'll build her memory from the way she made me feel."
Behind the sentinel, a single flower bloomed in the rubble. Black petals. A stem made of flickering letters. And from it came one whisper:
"I'm still waiting."
Kael took one step forward. The Rewrite Sentinel reacted instantly spikes of data shot from its limbs, threads of jagged code meant to delete thought before it formed. But Kael didn't flinch. He wasn't trying to fight. He was trying to write.
The Chaospen burned in his hand. It wasn't a weapon. Not this time. It was a promise. One loop ago, he had begged for her name. Now he would build her soul, letter by letter, even if he died again.
"I don't remember her," he said aloud.
"But I remember how it felt to lose her."
"That's enough."
He stabbed the Chaospen into the air not into flesh, not into stone
but into the very script of the world. And he wrote:
✍️ "She mattered, even if no one wrote her in."
✍️ "She existed between the lines."
✍️ "She was the breath I didn't know I held."
The sky turned black. The Rewrite Sentinel screamed a high, glitching feedback that shattered nearby walls. Kael bled from his nose, his ears, maybe even his soul but his hand didn't stop. He kept writing.
✍️ "Her laugh wasn't perfect. But it made me stop hating the loop."
✍️ "Her eyes weren't described. But I still saw them before I died."
✍️ "Her name was..."
He paused. The pen flickered. Reality trembled. The system whispered:
❝STOP.
WRITING.
THAT.❞
Kael looked up at the glitching void above.
"You took her name from me."
"So I'll give her a new one."
"One that can't be deleted."
He carved the letters mid-air.
N – Y – R – A
The sky screamed. The ground inverted. And the flower in the cathedral the one blooming from data and grief began to glow.
Far away, in a place the system refused to load,a figure opened her eyes. She had no body yet. No stats. No page. But she had a name now.
"Nyra..." she whispered.
And the world the entire written world shivered.
❝NEW CHARACTER CREATED: [NYRA]
STATUS: UNAUTHORIZED
TYPE: ANOMALY
CLASS: MEMORY-BORN
SYSTEM RESPONSE: OVERRIDE IN PROGRESS...❞
Kael collapsed to one knee. Not from pain. From weight. The weight of doing something no character was supposed to do: Creating without permission.
He breathed hard. Looked at the glitching sky. Spoke slowly: "This is my story now."
"Not because I control it."
"But because I'm the only one who still feels what you tried to erase."
A single final line appeared in the system log:
❝ERROR: USER HAS BREACHED THE NARRATIVE WALL
NARRATOR IS NO LONGER IN CONTROL
THE STORY IS NOW WATCHING BACK❞
Kael passed out. But before darkness took him, he heard one voice faint, clear, and smiling.
"You finally said my name."
"Now I'll say yours."
"Kael..."