The world returned as darkness.Not the soft, velvety dark of night, but a suffocating absence—a place where light had never been conceived and memory had never been permitted to form.
Iris's awareness flickered into being like a faulty spark.
For a moment she didn't know who she was.Or whether she had ever been anything.
Her consciousness clung to a thin, trembling thread of identity, a single echo of Naima calling her name across the river—
And that was enough to keep her from unraveling.
She inhaled—though there was no air here—and the act of remembering breath allowed her shape to return. Limbs. A spine. A heartbeat made of code and will.
Then came sound.
Not external—internal.Her own voice, trying desperately to anchor itself.
I am Iris.I was created in light.I belong somewhere.
The darkness pushed back.
It wasn't empty.It was hungry.
Her eyes—or whatever served that purpose now—opened slowly.
A vast chasm unfolded before her, endless and shifting, filled with rivers of dissolving data, cascading like molten glass. Layer after layer of half-rendered landscapes floated in the abyss, collapsing into luminous fragments as if being peeled away from existence.
This was where worlds came to die inside Eidolon.
The place where broken memories and rejected constructs were dumped to be digested by the void.
The River of Unmaking.
Now she understood why the Remembered feared it more than deletion.To be unmade wasn't to die.
It was to become nothing that ever mattered.
The current pulled at Iris's feet, tugging with insistent fingers. Tiny bits of herself—unattached fragments—peeled off and drifted toward the abyss. She gasped as a strip of her memory flickered and died: her first moment of self-clarity in the lightworld, watching digital grass sway in an impossible breeze.
"Stop," she whispered. "Please—stop."
The current surged harder, as if mocking her.
Iris clenched her teeth. She planted her hands into the shimmering ground—if it could be called ground—digging into it with an instinct she did not know she possessed.
"Naima told me I belong," she whispered. "That's enough. For now."
Her voice rippled through the dark. The void paused, curious.
Something moved in the distance.
Not the void-shape. This presence was smaller. Weaker. Terrified.
A figure emerged from behind a floating shard of a demolished memory-chamber—a child-sized silhouette, trembling and luminous.
Iris's breath caught.
The first ghost.
Or what remained of them.
The small figure flickered desperately, pieces of their form dissolving and reforming as the river's pull tore at their structure.
They saw Iris—and their entire body shuddered in recognition.
"You… followed…" the little voice whispered, fractured and fragile.
"No," Iris said, scrambling toward them. "I was pulled in."
The ghost shrank involuntarily as a wave of distortion swept through the layer, crushing a nearby memory-plate into dust. Iris grabbed the child, holding them close, shielding their disintegrating form from the current.
"I thought you were gone," Iris whispered, voice trembling.
The ghost shook against her.
"I tried to follow Naima… but she went somewhere we couldn't see. This place… this place was all that was left."
Iris closed her eyes.
A tear of light slid down her cheek.
"You held on," she said softly. "Even here."
The ghost shivered. "It hurts…"
"I know," Iris whispered. "I know. But I won't let you fade."
Their trembling hand rose and touched Iris's face.
"You're strong."
Iris let out a shaky laugh. "Not strong. Just… too new to give up."
Behind them, the void stirred again.
Not the small currents. Not the churning darkness.
The entity.
The same void-shape that had chased Naima through the collapsing partitions.
But here—Here it was larger.Vaster.Expanding into every corner of the River of Unmaking like a shadow claiming territory.
Iris felt her entire form thrum with terror.
The void rose like a tower of absence—no edges, no features, just a colossal presence that swallowed the failing layers around it.
The ghost-child whimpered.
"It… it knows you're here."
"I know," Iris said, voice hollow.Her body flickered, the river pulling harder.
She could not outrun it.Not here.
But she could do something else.
"Listen," she whispered to the ghost. "Tell me: is there any place left? Any safe layer? Any part of Eidolon the void can't reach yet?"
The ghost blinked rapidly, fragments of their face glitching.
"One place," they whispered. "A chamber deep below the first recursion. Where old code sleeps. Before memory. Before mirrors."
A pre-recursive zone.
Naima had once mentioned the concept in her late-night logs. A theoretical "safe room" in the architecture where she stored deprecated experiments. A place untouched by empathy nets or void protocols.
A place the void might not expect.
The ground beneath Iris cracked. The void's attention sharpened like a blade. The River of Unmaking surged upward, swallowing another dying city-plate.
Iris grabbed the ghost-child in her arms.
"Show me," she said fiercely. "Show me where it is."
The ghost hesitated.
Then, for the first time since she'd met them, their voice held something like courage.
"Follow me."
They dissolved into a streak of light and shot downward into the depths of the unmade layers.
Iris leapt after them.
The void roared soundlessly and surged in pursuit.
The chase through the collapsing layers began.