Chapter 1
The world had forgotten what silence felt like, though most of its inhabitants didn't know they were listening to a machine. To the people walking the cobblestones streets of Frostfire Glade, the world simply was.
They lived,
They bled,
They remembered when the shadows grew long.
They thought he was dead. They thought the nightmares had ended with his scripted execution and the 'Creator’s' grand ledger.
They were wrong.
Deep beneath the soil, beneath the rendered roots of the ancient trees, something cold was humming. It didn't need a body anymore. It lived in the corruption and the dropped frames.
*****
Luke stared at his hands, watching them tremble before he could stop them. One second, he was leaning against the stone wall of the palace's outer wall, listening to Adam talk to River about trade routes, the next, his lungs forgot how to pull in air, and a sharp, metallic ringing pierced his ears.
"Breathe," he whispered to himself. "Just breathe."
"Luke?" A hand caught his shoulder, warm and steady.
It was Emily, her expression a mix of worry and exhaustion that always made Luke feel guilty. She was holding a bundle of dried herbs, though she had dropping them into the dirt when he started shaking.
"I'm fine," Luke gasped. "Just... some bad memories."
"You've been thinking alot about those bad memories," Prince Adam muttered, walking over with his arms crossed. He didn't mean to sound harsh, but his brown eyes lingered on Luke’s face, tracing the dark circles under his eyes. Adam looked away quickly, a shadow crossing his face.
Everyone knew the resemblance. Even with Caine long gone, Luke carried his face like a sentence he hasn't asked to serve.
"Leave him be, Adam," River said. He stepped between them, offering Luke a flask of cool water. "Here."
Luke took it. For a moment, the world stabilized. The colors of the palace walls, the white stone and the royal gardens rendered by an unseen hand, stopped vibrating at the edges.
"Thanks, River." Luke murmured.
"Don't mention it." He replied softly. "Though something's definitely off today. Look at the wall."
They all turned to look. At the end of the wall surrounding the palace, the texture of the stone had gone completely smooth, smeared like wet paint on a canvas. Worse still, carved deep into the wall, or rather, stitched into the pixels were three stark, black letters.
C.D.W.
Prince Roderick stepped forward, his hand resting instinctively on the hilt of his sword, even though it barely had a blade left and there was nothing to fight.
Princess Keira stood beside him, her expression grim as she stared at the letters.
"That's the third time this week," Keira said, her voice dropping to a cautious whisper. "First on the ledger in the market square, then scorched into the sand by the sea, and now here."
"It's just the weather," Adam insisted. "Paint fades weirdly in the damp."
"Paint doesn't warp into neat capital letters, Adam," Roderick said quietly, his eyes dark. "And it certainly doesn't hum when you get close to it."
Luke stood up slowly, ignoring the lingering dizziness in his head. He walked toward the wall, drawn by a sickening gravity he couldn't explain. Every step toward the letters made his heart hammer. When he reached out and touched the letters, a jolt of static snapped against his fingertips.
"Don't look so surprised." A voice whispered in the hum of the air. Not in his ears, but directly behind his eyes. "The final act is here. We're far from finished."
Luke jerked his hand back, gasping, but the letters remained, glowing faintly against the stone wall.
******
The clock in the corner of Milly's monitor read 2:14 AM.
The rest of the room was drowned in shadows, save for the cool, pale glow of her monitor casting light across a cluttered desk. Soda cans, sketchbooks overflowing with character concepts, and loose pens littered the wood.
Right beside her monitor sat a small, golden locket. It was open. Inside, the photograph Depicted two people. One of them was her, though years younger.
She hadn't recognized the other person at first, but she knew who he was now. Caine. He looked identical to Luke exept for the hair. A mix of black, red and brown. Back then, he felt like a co-creator. Now, looking at the tiny picture made a cold pit form in her stomach.
A sudden, aggressive hum from her PC broke the quiet room. Milly winced, resting her tablet pen on her desk. The cooling fans inside her computer spiked, whirling like a jet engine taking off. She dragged her mouse over to open her task manager.
CPU Usage: 99%
GPU Usage: 98%
What on earth...?" She muttered, her voice raspy from lack of sleep. She hadn't even opened a rendering queue.
Milly clicked on the active window to pull it up. On her screen was the main project file for Frostfire Glade. It was supposed to be idling in a safe, static loop. Instead, the viewport was stuttering violently. Milly zoomed the digital camera closer to the outer palace wall. Her breath hitched.
On the white stone texture, a patch of the environment was smudging into low-resolution sludge. Carved straight into the wall were three harsh, dark letters:
C.D.W.
"No. No, no, no," Milly whispered, her fingers flying across her keyboard to open the project's asset directory. "I got rid of you. How? Why...?"
She brought up the global entity list, scanning through the active code strings. The file she was looking for was nowhere to be found. Movement on the screen caught her eye.
Milly looked back at the viewport. Rendered in high detail at the center of the frame was Luke. He was standing right in front of the carved initials, his digitized hands trembling as he reached out to touch the static on the wall. Behind him, Roderick, Prince Adam, River and Emily where frozen in an unscripted conversation loop, their facial models tense with confusion.
She watched Luke flinch back, clutching his hand as if he had actually felt a shock through the pixels. Then, a small red error box flashed at the bottom corner of her screen: [System Warning: Unassigned Administrator Command executed by Entity_ID: Luke_02]
Milly glanced from the screen down to the golden locket on her dest. In the warm glow of the monitor, the silver eyes of Caine seemed to mock her. He was still here.
