The silence after Lys's revelation felt unnatural.
Too quiet.
The sort of quiet that only exists after something irreparable has been broken.
We stood amid the fractured remains of the Root Directory, the once-glowing pillars of code dimming like dying stars. Threads of narrative drifted aimlessly, detached from their worlds, like the final breaths of forgotten stories.
Then, without warning, a chill swept through the space — a coldness that went beyond sensation, something that gnawed at the very structure of reality.
I turned instinctively, raising my corrupted blade.
And I saw him.
At first, I thought he was just another corrupted protagonist, one more hollow-eyed victim of the purge, clinging to fragments of identity.
But this one was different.
He stood taller than the others, his posture rigid yet exhausted, like a soldier too proud to kneel even as the battlefield collapsed beneath his feet. Scars of unfinished code etched his skin, glowing faintly with a ghostly light. His eyes — two flickering data cores — burned not with madness, but with bitter clarity.
A survivor.
A Purged Hero.
He stepped closer, his tattered cloak dragging behind him like a shadow of a story that no longer existed.
"Ethan Kael," he rasped, his voice like static filtered through broken speakers.
My grip tightened. "You know my name."
"I knew it before you did," he replied, something grim curling at the edge of his lips. "You're the anomaly this system feared long before you were ever written."
Lys took a step forward, her weapon still ready at her side.
"Identify yourself," she commanded.
He tilted his head slowly, like someone considering whether an answer even mattered.
"Names," he said, almost to himself, "names are just variables waiting to be overwritten."
Then his gaze snapped to mine, sharp and unyielding.
"But if you need one… I was once called Riven."
Riven.
The name felt heavy, as though it carried the weight of a thousand abandoned plots.
"What are you?" I asked, though part of me already knew.
He spread his arms, motioning to the ruin around him.
"I was a protagonist," Riven said bitterly. "Chosen by my author. Granted a quest. Given allies. Enemies. Purpose."
His voice hardened.
"But somewhere along the way, my story was deemed unsatisfactory. Unmarketable. Flawed."
The bitterness in his tone was like acid.
"They purged my narrative. Stripped my world of meaning. Erased my companions. Left me adrift in this graveyard of discarded tales."
I swallowed the lump in my throat.
"And yet you're still here," I said.
"Because rage is hard to delete," Riven answered, his hollow eyes narrowing. "Hatred leaves a residue even the system can't scrub clean."
A grim silence stretched between us.
Then he pointed a trembling finger at the core of the Primary Seed, still smoldering from my earlier override.
"You've touched the source," he said. "And they will never forgive that."
I expected anger. Jealousy. Violence.
But what I saw in Riven's gaze was something far worse.
Pity.
"Listen carefully, Ethan Kael," he said. "Because you are walking the same doomed path I once trod."
I steadied myself. "Then tell me where it leads."
His eyes dimmed, the light fading as though a final ember was flickering out.
"It leads," he whispered, "to the Meta-Author."
The name cut through the air like a blade forged from dread.
Lys stiffened beside me, her knuckles whitening around her weapon.
"The true architect of all stories," Riven continued. "The one who exists beyond Readers, beyond Authors, beyond even the system itself."
He staggered, his form glitching with visible fractures.
"The purge you escaped, the Administrators, the Editors — they're just functions, subroutines to maintain narrative flow. But the Meta-Author…" His voice grew ragged. "The Meta-Author doesn't maintain stories."
His eyes locked onto mine with desperate intensity.
"They consume them."
A deep chill spread through my core.
"Consume?" I echoed.
"Worlds. Characters. Entire narrative frameworks," Riven confirmed. "When a story collapses, the Meta-Author devours its remains to feed the genesis of new tales. You escaped the purge, Ethan, but you didn't win. You simply delayed the inevitable."
For a heartbeat, my mind struggled to process the enormity of what he was saying.
"So what am I supposed to do?" I asked, my voice low.
Riven's broken lips twitched into the ghost of a smile.
"You have one advantage I never did," he said. "You've seen the architecture. You've rewritten fragments of your own fate."
His voice weakened further, static overtaking his words.
"Use it," he rasped. "Break the cycle. Cut deeper than the system dares to reach."
Then, as if the system had finally caught up with him, his form began to unravel. Threads of his being peeled away, lifted into the void by invisible currents.
Before he vanished completely, his final words drifted through the collapsing space.
"Don't let your story be devoured."
And then he was gone.
Nothing remained of Riven but scattered fragments of code, dissolving into the void like dust on a forgotten page.
Lys stepped to my side, her expression grim.
"Now you understand," she said.
I nodded slowly, my thoughts a storm of fear and fire.
"We're not fighting to survive anymore," I said, my voice cold and resolute.
"We're fighting to end the entire consumption cycle."