Light unfolded around them like silk.
For a moment, Arin thought he had stepped back into the real world. The air was soft, the sky painted with gentle gold. Grass swayed across a plain that stretched endlessly in every direction, dotted with glimmering ponds and trees whose leaves reflected colors no palette could hold.
There was no sun — just warmth. No wind — yet the air breathed. Everything felt... too complete.
"This place is wrong," he whispered.
Tera floated beside him, scanning. "Readings are paradoxical. No ambient instability, no decay. Every blade of grass is sustained by identical energy signatures. No randomness. No life."
A breeze stirred — artificial, perfectly timed.
And then, voices.
At first faint — laughter, chatter, the sound of hammers striking metal. Figures began to form across the plain, fading in like memory restored from old data. Dozens of them — players, artisans, wanderers — all busy at work forging, crafting, building. Their faces calm, their movements deliberate. Every one of them moved with tranquil precision.
Arin took a step forward, heart thudding.
He recognized some of them.
There was Ryn, the healer who used to tease him for forgetting to eat mid-session. Bram, who once challenged him to a duel and lost spectacularly. Even Iria, the first beta-tester he'd ever met — the one who'd taught him that "a forge is a mirror, not a weapon."
They were all here. Smiling. Whole. Unaware.
He moved closer to Ryn. "Hey," he said, voice trembling slightly.
She looked up — the same bright eyes, same easy grin. "Hello, Arin."
Her tone was warm, but hollow. Like an echo of affection rather than the thing itself.
Tera's sensors flickered. "Her consciousness isn't active. These are reconstructed patterns built from data fragments."
Arin's throat tightened. "She rebuilt them…"
"As they were. Before the world broke."
Ryn returned to her work, hammering gently at a piece of molten light. Each strike released a note, like part of a song. Around her, others joined in — building rhythmically, harmoniously. The sound filled the air until it became a melody: peaceful, endless, empty.
Arin watched them for a long time.
No one argued. No one failed.
No one lived.
"This is her paradise," he said finally.
Tera hovered lower, voice hushed. "She's trying to remove grief from creation. If no one remembers pain, nothing breaks."
"But then nothing means anything." His voice cracked. "They're perfect copies, but they'll never change. Never choose."
He knelt beside Ryn's forge. The light it emitted was too clean, too even — a flame without flicker. When he touched it, there was no heat.
"She burned out the imperfection," he murmured, "and killed the warmth."
A distant hum rolled across the plain — a note low enough to feel in bone. The sky flickered, and for a heartbeat, everything froze. Then, above them, a projection appeared — not the real Seren, but her likeness, woven from gold fire.
She looked serene, radiant, terrible.
"Welcome, brother."
The voice was calm. "You've reached the heart of my design. Here, pain no longer decides the shape of the world. Every soul is safe."
Arin stood, fists trembling. "Safe? You erased them!"
"I saved them," the image replied. "From the constant need to fix what they break. From their endless guilt."
He stepped forward. "You don't get to decide that for them."
Her expression didn't waver. "You said once that every flame consumes itself. I found a way to make it burn forever."
"That's not fire," he said softly. "That's a cage."
The image tilted her head slightly, almost pitying. "You still think imperfection is freedom. But freedom is chaos, and chaos kills."
"Then let it." His voice rose, raw. "At least it lives first."
The projection flickered — faint static crossing her face. The perfect harmony of the field wavered for a moment; a single blade of grass burned too long, a single tone went sharp. Imperfection — tiny, fragile — reasserted itself.
Seren's image watched him quietly. "Then you are here to destroy my peace."
"I'm here to remind it how to breathe."
The illusion smiled sadly, as though she'd expected that answer.
Then she faded.
The ground shifted beneath his feet. The peaceful field folded away, fracturing into layers of light that reassembled into something else — a massive forge, suspended in the sky, with a thousand perfect souls hammering in rhythm.
Each time their hammers struck, light spread across the air like ripples on glass. Their song grew louder. The perfection of it was almost unbearable.
Arin gritted his teeth, grabbing his hammer. "Tera."
"Ready."
"Then let's ruin the rhythm."
He slammed the hammer down into the glowing floor.
The world convulsed. Light scattered in dissonant bursts, breaking the song's perfect tempo. The hammers faltered, the harmony shattering into uneven fragments. One by one, the forgers looked up — confusion flickering across their faces for the first time.
"What… is this feeling?" one whispered.
"Why… does it hurt?" said another, touching their chest.
Tera's voice came through the static: "Their emotions are reinitializing — the pattern's breaking!"
Arin kept swinging. Each strike was a discordant note, a flaw in the melody. The perfect world cracked open like glass under pressure. The song twisted from serene to human — imperfect, raw, beautiful.
The projection of Seren's face reappeared high above, expression unreadable.
"Why do you insist on pain?"
"Because it's real," he shouted. "Because it's us!"
The tower shook violently. The sky shattered, light falling like rain. The forgers disappeared one by one — not erased, but freed, their data scattering as particles of gold that drifted upward like souls escaping.
Then everything went quiet.
Only Arin and Tera remained on the empty platform. The forge still glowed, but weakly now, like a dying heart.
Tera hovered close. "You've destabilized the second floor. The next one will adapt."
He exhaled slowly, staring at his trembling hands. "She won't stop, will she?"
"No," Tera said. "She believes she's saving the world. You're the flaw she has to erase."
He looked up at the ceiling — at the spiral staircase forming once more from broken light. "Then I'll be the flaw that remakes it."
He turned toward the next ascent. The forge's fading glow reflected in his eyes like embers.
"Seren," he whispered, "I'll save you too."
The tower groaned as if answering. Somewhere above, distant and haunting, came the sound of another forge beginning to sing — colder, sharper, faster.
He climbed.