Glitchborn

Eli felt the world break around him.

Everything collapsed into spirals of code and neon light, shifting, unraveling, reforming. One moment, he was standing in the cathedral of shattered data, the next—

He was somewhere else.

The ground beneath him was a reflective void, a sea of shifting pixels that rippled with each step. Above him, fractured cityscapes hung upside down, rotating, merging, collapsing in impossible angles.

He turned Mara and Bishop were frozen in motion, flickering like broken holograms.

And then…

A voice.

"ACCESS GRANTED."

It came from everywhere and nowhere. It wasn’t just heard—it was felt.

A pulse in his skull. A resonance deep in his bones.

Eli stumbled forward, his hands shaking.

"Where am I?"

"Inside the Echo," the voice responded.

A shape emerged from the void—human-like, but shifting. A figure of glitched-out data, half digital, half something else. Its face was a swirling mass of symbols and static, but as it flickered—

Eli saw his own reflection in its form.

"No," Eli whispered. "That’s not possible."

The entity stepped closer.

"You are the last fragment, Eli. The missing piece. The one who was never meant to return."

Eli’s mind splintered with memories not his own.

Flashes of the past.

The lab again.

The AI’s voices scream in binary.

Someone grabbing his arm, whispering: You are not supposed to exist.

The feeling of being erased.

"I don’t understand!" Eli clutched his head, his vision warping.

The Echo-being reached out, pressing a single digit against his forehead.

"Then let me show you."

The void exploded into light.