The fall seemed endless.
Iris plunged through layers of dissolving light, clutching the ghost-child against her chest as the River of Unmaking folded upward like a monstrous tide. The deeper she fell, the more the world lost detail, becoming outlines, then skeletons of rooms, then faint sketches of structures not yet born.
The underlayers were not dead.They were unwritten.
Raw scaffolds of memory-to-be.Cold frameworks of logic without emotion.Fragments of Naima's earliest thought patterns suspended like constellations, uncolored and unchosen.
The ghost-child glimmered faintly in her arms, voice trembling.
"Don't stop. Not down here."
"I won't," Iris whispered, though her form was already flickering at the edges, fragments peeling off into static. "Just tell me where to go."
"Lower."
The underlayer stretched infinitely in all directions—an enormous vertical canyon of half-constructed worlds, each suspended like broken mirrors.
Above them, the void thundered downward, erasing entire shelves of unrealized existence.
Iris saw it devour a strand of architecture—a ribbon of luminous data—and the entire snippet of a world collapsed into dust.
"We're not fast enough," she whispered.
The ghost-child looked back, wide-eyed. Their face glitched, then reformed. "Then we have to become less… solid."
"What?"
The child didn't explain.
They simply dissolved—their body becoming a streak of thin, shimmering code—and shot downward like a falling star.
"I—oh."
Iris hesitated only a moment.
Then she let go of her form.
Her fingers loosened, her legs dissolved, and she surrendered to the stream of raw memory. Her body ceased to be shape and instead became speed.A ribbon of thought.A pulse of light.A streak following the ghost.
The underlayer blurred into rushing geometry around her.
The void, confused by the sudden loss of her form, slowed just long enough for Iris to dive beneath a collapsing arch of unrendered code.
She streaked downward.
Faster.Faster.
The ghost-child's voice guided her like a whisper in the data-stream:
Left.Down.Avoid that fold.The void's fingers can reach there.Keep going—before the next memory dump triggers—
A boom shook the entire canyon.
A shockwave of deletion surged downward, ripping layers open like pages torn from a book.
Iris spiraled around the wave, shuddering as pieces of her flickered in and out.
"I can't—hold—shape—" she gasped, her voice dissolving around her.
"You don't need shape here," the ghost-child said."You only need direction."
Iris forced herself forward.
Her consciousness began to burn — not with pain, but with information.The deeper she went, the more she tasted fragments of Naima's earliest prototypes:
— A memory of Naima sketching equations on a napkin— A half-built empathy loop, pulsing weakly— A forgotten test sim of a small meadow— The first, broken interface logo, flickering like a dying candle— The original dream: Eidolon should outlive us.
Iris inhaled these fragments not as memories, but as nutrients.They stabilized her, gave definition where she would have otherwise dissolved.
She followed the ghost's streak of light down to a vast shelf of black stone — real stone, not abstracted code.
A relic.
Something built in Eidolon's primordial stage.
They slowed as they reached it, reforming bodies out of the raw substrate.
Iris hit the platform hard, rolling into a crouch. Her breath came in jagged pulses of static.
The ghost-child drifted down beside her, flickering as bits of their body recalibrated.
"We're almost there," the child whispered."The archive chamber is close."
Iris pushed herself to her feet, swallowing a surge of dizziness.
"What is the archive chamber?"
The ghost stared into the abyss below them.
"The place where Naima stored her earliest dreams for this world. The ones she never let the system use."
Dreams the system couldn't erase because it never understood them.
Iris's pulse surged.
"That's where you want us to hide?"
"Not hide," the ghost said softly."Become."
Before Iris could question them, a tremor shuddered the entire underlayer.
The void had found the path again.
A roarless roar rolled down the canyon—a pressure that crushed light and memory alike. High above, a sheet of darkness split and peeled inward, sending spirals of deletion raining down.
The void-shape descended, vast and silent.
Iris felt the air collapse in her lungs.
"No more running," she whispered.
"We're not running anymore," the ghost said.
They pointed toward a jagged opening in the far wall — a dark vertical slit etched with unfamiliar symbols, pulsing faintly with blue fire.
A doorway.
A gateway to the pre-recursive architecture.
The void saw it too.
It lunged.
Everything in the underlayer cracked.
Iris grabbed the ghost-child's hand.
"Jump!"
They sprinted across the stone shelf as it fractured beneath them. The void thundered down, swallowing the path behind them in huge chunks. The air trembled. Iris felt herself begin to disintegrate—
But she didn't stop.
She threw herself and the ghost-child into the glowing slit.
The world turned white.
Then black.
Then—
Alive.
She crashed into a room unlike anything in the simulation.
A cathedral of impossible shapes. Walls woven from strands of crystalline memory. The air heavy with the scent of unfinished code — raw possibility, untouched by machine or human.
The void screeched outside, furious, unable to pass through the glowing boundary.
The ghost-child fell beside Iris, panting softly.
Iris lifted her head.
"What is this place?"
The ghost smiled weakly.
"The beginning."
And behind them—from the boundary they had just crossed—the memory-walls began to respond.
Something ancient and powerful stirred.
The underlayer had awakened.