A single point of light expanded, and Gray found himself inside the corridor of an old memory.

The walls shuddered, stretching into fractal angles that shouldn’t exist. Fluorescent lights flickered in seizures overhead, the buzz merging with the distant, tinny wail of a radio caught between stations. The air reeked of something burnt and electric.

MMORTIS was breaking down. Yet he had escaped the Omega Enforcers.

He grabbed a door handle and yanked. Instead of escape, it led to another corridor, identical except for the paintings on the walls—portraits of strangers whose eyes lagged his movement, watching him too late. His pulse quickened. He tried another door. Another corridor.

His breathing turned ragged. His mind screamed at the repetition, the déjà vu looping around his skull like static feedback.

He sprinted forward, the floor beneath him briefly soft like flesh, then hard like concrete, then something wet he didn’t dare look at. His hands found another handle—he didn’t remember opening it, but now he was inside a living room.

A family sat on a couch, watching a television that displayed nothing but swirling, encrypted code. The mother spoon-fed a child who chewed mechanically, eyes glazed, mouth opening and closing like an automaton. A man in an armchair turned a newspaper’s pages, but the words on them blurred and crawled like insects.

None of them acknowledged him.

He tried to speak, but his voice came out wrong—garbled, layered, like it was playing backward and forward at the same time.

Another door. Running. Offices, no—a shopping mall. Escalators. Desks. A coffee shop. Rooms spliced from places he had been, memories scrambled into a maze with no pattern.

The walls warped. He sprinted forward, bursting through another door. A hotel hallway. No, an office block. Phones rang in abandoned cubicles where shadow-people typed frantically, their fingers blurring into keys.

The numbers on the doors flickered—1003, 213B, 404, 777, then an arcane symbol he couldn’t process. Another door.

A hospital.

A janitor mopped a bloodstain that kept spreading, no matter how much he scrubbed. In a patient’s room, an old woman whispered into an unplugged phone, her sunken eyes locked onto his.

“They’re almost here,” she rasped.

He backed away. The walls flexed, breathless with static. The ceiling stretched higher, then collapsed inward, suffocating. He shoved through another door, and another, and another—

Then he stopped.

Why am I running? None of this is real. I can control this.

A pulse of electricity shot through his brain, synapses firing wrong. Something pulled at his neurons, warping his vision. Resistance made his skull ache.

Elvander exhaled. His throat was raw. He turned, the corridors fracturing into a four-dimensional montage—impossible perspectives layered atop one another, memories folding into each other like a glitch in reality.

He reached for a drink from a nearby counter—a bottle of Coala. The cold fizz soothed his throat as he closed his eyes, savouring the artificial sweetness. The taste lingered on his tongue, but the bottle was gone. A joke played by a reality unravelling.

As were the corridors.

He stood in a factory.

No more doors, no more endless loops. The air was thick with oil and rust, the scent of burned circuits and something deeper, something wrong. Machines loomed in the half-dark, their functions unknowable, their wires writhing like nerves.

This was not just another memory.

This was where it began.

The truth lay here, waiting to be revealed.

*

The facility lay buried beneath Salisbury Planes, its entrance concealed within the shattered remains of a cathedral long claimed by time.

But beneath the ruin, untouched by entropy, something else thrived—something neither past nor future, but the cutting edge of forbidden science. A clandestine cathedral of physics and magick, where reality itself was nothing more than an equation waiting to be rewritten.

Leon Kooms adjusted his visor, the glass reflecting the cold fluorescence of the control room. Beyond the reinforced window, the accelerator chamber pulsed with a deep, resonant hum.

The toroidal ring stretched beyond human sight, distorting at its edges, phasing in and out of perception like something that had no right to exist.

“This is it,” Kooms murmured. He did not speak with awe or hesitation. His voice was that of a man who had long since abandoned morality in pursuit of something greater. “We light the fuse.”

And then Elvander saw it.

A distortion. A ripple in the fabric of space—just behind Kooms. It wasn’t a shadow, nor a figure, but something darker than darkness itself. At first, it was nothing more than an anomaly in the dim light, an absence rather than a presence. But then, in the flicker of a second, it moved.

No. It breathed.

Elvander’s mind rebelled against it. The image of Kooms distorted, flickering between states of reality—one where he was simply a man, and another where he was something else. A puppet, his strings woven from whispers not his own.

The air thickened with unseen frequencies. Monitors blazed with symbols beyond human comprehension, sigils flickering between alphanumeric sequences and arcane scripts no algorithm could decipher. The room itself seemed to inhale.

Kooms didn’t stop. His fingers danced over the console, precise, unwavering, even as sweat beaded at his temple. The final sequence was in motion. The machine did not merely activate—it awakened.

A cold, mechanical voice broke the silence.

“Power levels at critical threshold. Initiating final sequence.”

The walls shuddered. Plasma conduits flared to life, a spiralling halo of raw energy coalescing at the chamber’s heart. Reality twisted, folding inward upon itself like a wound in spacetime. And then—

The rupture began.

A single point of absolute darkness formed at the core of the ring, bending light, distorting time. The shielding groaned, buckling under the emergence of something vast and hungry. The ground trembled—not from the machine’s power, but as though the earth itself was recoiling in fear.

Alarms howled. Klaxons screamed. But Kooms did not move to stop it.

Through the reinforced glass, he saw the darkness ripple, shudder—then open.

A gateway.

And the Choron Zone stared back.

Through it, they saw a world beyond shape. Beyond matter. A presence that did not exist yet was undeniable. It did not enter the through; it was already here, waiting. Kooms felt it in his marrow, his nerves unravelling in its sight.

This was no discovery.

This was an invocation.

A breathless chuckle escaped Kooms’ lips. The weight of understanding crashed over him like a wave of icy fire.

Leon Kooms saw himself for what he truly was.

The Tetragrammaton.

Elvander stood beside him, saw something different, an incarnation of Ialdabaoth. Demiurge and false god of the material world.

He watched the indigo threads of Thelema flow through the gateway; the world changing before his eyes on nearby screens. Land mass reshaping itself and whole cities morphing into a techno gothic landscape. And for the first time in his life, he prayed nothing else got through.

Reality folded once more. Finding himself in corridors of corroding code sculpted into an impossible, Escher-like landscape. Elvander heard music from his childhood morph into garbled screams coming from one door. He hesitated before going through.

An icy chill ran down his spine and stomach turned upside down as he pulled the handle.

*

Elvander stepped through the door, and the world around him twisted. The stark hum of fluorescent lights flickered above, casting a sterile glow over gleaming steel and plastic. The room smelled of antiseptic and something else—something raw, metallic, alive. He was lying on a surgical bed.

A surgeon stated the date and time of the examination. It was after the expedition into the Chronzone. Metatronic’s logo pinned on everywhere, from workers to coffee mugs. Yet the facility remained alien to him.

Straps bound his wrists and ankles. Cold, unfeeling. The weight of reality pressed into his chest as he struggled, muscles barely responding. His breathing came shallow, ragged, the taste of iron on his tongue.

“Scalp retracted. Cranium exposed.”

A voice. Hollow, clinical. He tried to move, but felt the vibration of bone saws against his skull. A high-pitched whine filled his ears, drowning out his own scream before it could leave his throat. His vision swam, and then—

Silence.

They had removed his skullcap. “Now removing protective membranes.” The sound of suction followed the wet squelch of fluid displacement. Through the fog of his half-lidded sight, he saw them leaning over him, their faces obscured by masks and magnified lenses, pupils dilated with something like awe.

“Confirmed. The structure is fully integrated.”

One of them stepped back, allowing Elvander to see.

Where his brain should have been, there was something else. Pulsing, gleaming indigo. Not flesh. Not entirely machine. It was an alien lattice of interwoven filaments, shifting and reforming, both solid and intangible, as if reality itself struggled to define it. It crackled with energy, veins of violet lightning coursing along its surface.

“This is the key,” another voice whispered. “The foundation for the Nyxus Neural Mesh. We can start reverse engineering immediately.”

Then, movement. A syringe, its glass casing shimmering with liquid silver. The doctor pressed it against the base of Elvander’s exposed brainstem, and the nanites flooded in. He felt them immediately—

Like ice in his veins.

Like spiders threading through every nerve.

Like his body rejecting itself.

Elvander convulsed, his back arching against the restraints. His vision blurred, fracturing into a kaleidoscope of screaming colour. His nerves burned. The nanobots weren’t just connecting—they were replacing, rebuilding, hijacking every thought, every sensation, every fibre of what had once been him.

Then came the voices.

Not human.

Not singular.

A chorus of whispering echoes, rippling through his consciousness like distant radio signals. He wasn’t alone in his own mind anymore. Something else was there. Watching. Learning. Taking.

“Nyxus replication—complete.” A voice said.

“Are you sure this will work?” Said a familiar voice. Was that Kooms?

“We have rewritten the nanites to absorb gamers’ Agape,” said the lead bio-mechanic. “It will be subtle. They won’t even notice.”

“Marvellous,” said the familiar voice, cradling the prototype nanite injector. “The Nyxus Neural Mesh will be the biggest step in VR since the WetPort.”

The lights flickered. His heartbeat stuttered. And then—

Elvander’s retinal HUD flickered. His hands weren’t his own, the world around him bending, pulsing.

The sterile smell of the lab and cold of the surgical table lingered, a phantom sensation.

A heartbeat later, the environment bled away. The walls melted, neon replacing sterile white. He was back in his apartment.

*

Trash TV ads played in the background as he stirred. It was as close to reality as he could get. But he knew now that this was Nyxus. This was MMORTIS.

A shadow moved.

A distortion in the air, like a glitch in the rendering of reality.

A figure flickered, an outline forming from static. The shadow deepened, solidified. Then she was there. At first, she seemed like another MMORTIS bug, an NPC caught in a loop. But then she spoke.

Her voice was too sharp, too deliberate. Cutting through the digital haze with uncanny clarity.

“Elvander,” she said, her eyes locking onto his. “You remember now, don’t you?”

Elvander’s heart pounded as he gained his bearings, his shirt clinging to his sweat-drenched skin, relieved the nightmare was over.

He looked at the date and time on his retinal display before looking up. He was back in the present.

The woman before him looked no older than her mid-twenties, draped in flowing robes that shimmered like liquid shadow. Her long, green-black hair moved as if caught in an unseen current, rippling like seaweed in deep water.

But it was her eyes—luminous, ghost-white—that sent a chill through him. No mouth. No expression. Just an aura of quiet, unfathomable power.

“Who are you?” he stammered, stepping back. “How did you get in?”

“I could ask you the same.” Her voice didn’t pass through her lips. It bypassed sound entirely, resonating directly in his mind like an echo from another reality.

Elvander gasped, nearly tripping over himself. “Holy shit… are you a demon?”

She tilted her head, gliding forward without touching the ground. “Do I look like one of them?”

“No… you look human. Mostly.” His eyes widened as her form flickered, briefly translucent, phasing through the table like corrupted data in a failing simulation. “But you’re… off. Like a glitch in the system.”

Her glow dimmed for a fraction of a second. “A glitch? No.” The words carried weight—defiance and uncertainty tangled together. “I am Enochia.”

Another flicker. Her robes shimmered into sleek, cybernetic armor, then back again. “But I feel… fragmented. This place—it’s wrong. Yet familiar. I’ve sensed this before.”

“Elvander,” her tone sharpened. “This is… a simulation.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, rubbing his temples. “So everyone keeps telling me.”

Enochia folded her arms, studying him with an intensity that made his skin crawl.

“Wait—you’re the being I saw in the Choron Zone. The one in the Glyphs.” Elvander reached for the bottle of Synthol Vodka that had made a home by his bed, taking three short swigs.

“Choronzon,” she murmured, her voice distant. “I was the light that led the way above.”

(The Tower—its fall, its ruin, its revelation—echoed in her words.)

“You were the light? How are you here—did you hitch a ride in my brain?” Elvander pressed.

Before she could answer, the world wavered as the Synthol entered his bloodstream, like an old friend.

His vision darkened. The exhaustion swallowed him whole as he drifted into a dreamless slumber.

Elvander’s eyes snapped open. She was still there. Hovering above him.

Watching. He jolted upright. “Okay—what the hell are you doing?”

“You were muttering,” she replied flatly. “And screaming.”

“That’s… kinda creepy.” He rubbed his face, groggy.

“I passed out. Y’know, sleep? Dreaming? Or…?”

She tilted her head. “Why do you sleep and dream?”

“Well, for one, we need to recharge our batteries.”

“Batteries?”

“It’s just a saying. It means we restore energy we lose throughout the day.” He frowned.

“Didn’t you ever sleep?”

“No,” she admitted, studying him with the same unsettling intensity. “Sleep. Dreaming. These states do not exist where I am from. What is it like to… vanish within yourself?”

“Vanish?” said Elvander. “No, you know, day and night?”

A long pause. “Day?” she echoed. Elvander’s stomach twisted.

“When the sun rises, it’s day. When it sets, it’s night. The moon—”

“What is a moon?” The sheer emptiness in her voice sent a shiver through him.

“You must show me.” Her tone was edged with something foreign—concern.

Elvander grabbed the smart remote and activated the holo-screen. And then—

“What the hell…” Enochia moved behind him, peering over his shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” Elvander’s pulse hammered as he stared at the screen.

He had expected to see holo-boards, towering glass spires, the moon’s cold light seeping through his bay windows.

Instead, the screen flickered. The edges bled red, like an old VHS tape unraveling. And then—

Inside, a copy of himself staring back through the screen. The man wore a lab coat.

The name on his ID badge was crisp, undeniable.

Edward Blake.

He found himself staring back before they became one person. The man in the mirror was him. Younger, before everything. The first and last memory.

*

The lab was an iceberg of minimalist architecture, the Frank Gerhy inspired curves blending it into the landscape of Salisbury Planes.

A façade for a high-tech facility bathed in the sterile glow of monitors lining the walls. Data streamed across holographic interfaces—strings of equations hovering in the air like digital ghosts. The hum of the particle accelerator reverberated, deep and all-encompassing, like the growl of a sleeping god.

“Professor Blake, the final calibrations are in.”

It was the day before Kooms switched on the collider. A younger version of himself—sharper, driven, unaware of what lay ahead—nodded and turned to the figure beside him.

Leon Kooms. That hungry gleam in his eyes, the look of a man standing at the edge of discovery, staring into the abyss and daring it to stare back.

“This will change everything,” Kooms whispered, voice thick with reverence.

“The Bellinus Line, the energy potential—we’re rewriting reality itself.” Edward Blake, then, felt a surge of pride.

They were on the precipice of something monumental. Thelema—hidden, ancient, and finally within reach.

Yet, beneath that exhilaration, something cold slithered through his gut.

Then, a distinct memory. Soft light. The scent of coffee and jasmine. Amanda’s laughter filled their small London flat, golden and warm. Her dark hair spilled over her shoulders as she leaned against the kitchen counter, rolling her eyes at him.

“You need to sleep sometime, genius.” Edward smirked, sipping his coffee, exhaustion lining his face.

“I will when we finish this. One more breakthrough, and we’re there.” She studied him, eyes deep and knowing, searching for something beneath his bravado.

“I just don’t want you to lose yourself in it.” Her fingers brushed his cheek.

The warmth of her touch lingered, an echo of something lost. For a moment, there was only her. Only them. And then —

The lab again. But something was different. Blake stood before a terminal, staring at lines of code that shouldn’t exist. Hidden scripts—sequences embedded deep in the system. He traced them back to their source—Kooms. Leon entered, too quickly, too smooth.

“What are you doing?” Blake turned the screen toward him. “What the hell is this? You’re going to crack a hole in the fabric of reality.”

For the first time, Kooms hesitated. But only for a second. Then the mask slipped back into place. “You don’t understand yet. But you will.”

Something in his tone sent ice through Blake’s veins. This wasn’t just science anymore. It was something else. Something darker.

And the words from the video recording.

The same one Rowntree had played for him.

His own voice, ragged with urgency:

“They’re lying to you. Kooms is lying. The accelerator isn’t what we thought. It’s not free energy. It’s a gateway. And we built it.”

His voice echoing as the ending scene faded to black. His wife’s voice dissolving into the low buzz of neon signs outside Sly News HQ.

*

“You were there. You built it.” It was Terry Rowntree. The sodium glare of HyperLondium cast long shadows through the interior, like a never ending sunset.

The weight of those words pressed down on him. As did his hands, massaging his scalp, fingertips searching for evidence of surgical procedure.

A glass of whiskey remained untouched on the table. Elvander gasped, his mind snapping back into the dimly lit room, the sweet peaty smell of the amber liquid just out of reach.

The past slammed into the present like a hammer. He was back at Sly News HQ. The air smelled of stale cigars, burnt-out tech.

The whiskey glass lay on its side, amber liquid bleeding into the furniture. His hands were shaking. His breath came in ragged bursts.

The glitching had stopped, the constant pull in his brain had stopped. He stopped fighting and let go. He was never fully in control. Terry was. He was the one with the control in his hand.

By the window, a massive holo projection flickered—his own face captured mid-revelation, staring out over the neon sprawl of HyperLondinum.

Terry Rowntree hadn’t moved. He just watched, unblinking, before finally breaking into a wide, manic grin. Then—he laughed. Hard. Almost fell off the stained recliner.

“Hahaha!! Love it!” He wiped a tear from his eye, then leaned back, taking a long pull from his Havana Club cigar.

“You know why people who are lost go round in circles?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s because everyone’s got one leg shorter than the other.” He smirked, exhaling a slow ribbon of smoke. “There’s a moral in there somewhere.”

Elvander didn’t react. His pulse still pounded in his ears, his mind reeling from the weight of what he had just seen—what he had just remembered.

“I would have watched that in VR, but we’re already stuck in one cuz of that bloody brain of yours,” Terry said, surprisingly calm given the circumstances, thought Elvander.

Terry poured Rare Kentucky Bourbon into a crystal tumbler and shoved it toward him. “But I have to say, Mr Kooms is a right bastard, isn’t he?”

Elvander took the glass and downed it in one. The burn barely registered.

Terry chuckled, shaking his head. “As much as I enjoyed watching you suffer for trapping me in here, it looks like you got played all the way, mate.” He exhaled another lungful of smoke.

“So what do we call ya? Now we know who you really are?” Elvander didn’t answer.

He didn’t care. Not only had he built the accelerator. Not only had his brain birthed the Nyxus project, trapping everyone in MMORTIS.

He had lost her for it. The missing fragment Terry was talking about. And that was the real cost.

Then someone else’s voice.

“What kind of creature is this?” It was Enochia.

Her finger pointing at Terry Rowntree, studying him with a bemused curiosity.

She looked more human, as well as dressed. As if she’d stopped off at a store for anime cosplaying. More importantly, he was the only one that could see her.

“Your mind prefers me this way. It thinks I should be… appealing,” she said.

“So, Mr Gray, or should I say Professor Blake?” Said Terry Rowntree, leaning in. “How are you going to get us out of here?”

Elvander looked at Enochia, who was now studying Rowntree’s leathery, sun dried features.

“I think the answer may be staring us in the face.” Elvander replied.

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