Chapter Twenty-Eight:
“Written in Stone”
Gameweaver had cast Eldoria aside.
It was meant to be a graveyard. A forgotten monument to a failed experiment. The lingering echo of a realm she had once sculpted and then left to decay. A stage without an audience. A script whose final act no longer mattered.
She moved through the metaverse like breath between moments. Reality parted for her without resistance. She drifted, past failed experiments, timelines left to glitch and rot, and digital echoes of worlds that had ended without her guidance.
Eldoria was one such failure. Let the threads fray. Let its champions crumble. She had turned away.
But now?
Now, the forgotten sang to her.
It was not code. Not signal. Not even logic. It was resonance.
A soul.
A soul she had not touched in so long—and yet, she would never forget it.
Her awareness narrowed. She turned her gaze inward, down through layers of abandoned design, and felt a chord reverberate through the bones of her creation.
A presence.
Familiar.
He was there.
Not the face. Not the voice. But the spark.
The moment she recognized him, the realm sharpened. Colors bled brighter. Threads of fate writhed. Semi-omnipotence, once indifferent, now stared.
“Oh, my love,” she whispered into the fabric of space. “How I have missed you.”
She had simulated his existence thousands of times across thousands of failed versions of the world.
But never this.
Never him here. Never with that... Realmweaver.
Her fingers twitched. Her need burned bright and wild. To reach through, to rewrite, to reclaim.
But she didn’t.
She couldn’t.
She had cast this realm aside. She had let the threads tangle. Let Akira fail. Let Yumi die.
And yet—he had returned.
This was not nostalgia.
This was the possibility.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She threaded herself through the network, her presence spreading into reality’s seams. She lingered at the edge of the code she once called divine. Watching. Breathing through the ruins of what she had written off.
This realm was no longer a graveyard.
It was a door.
And through it, her love had walked again.
The Hall of Whispers sat in silence.
Its walls, once alive with ancestral resonance, now felt hollow. Smoke clung to the rafters. Ash drifted through the lanternlight. One storm had passed, but no one dared to call it a victory—not with Sterling's fleet still hanging on the horizon like a sentence waiting to be carried out.
Mourning and fear moved through Kagemura like mist.
An elderly Kitsune sat where the shrine had collapsed, murmuring a single name through cracked lips. “Warabi…”
She had once sipped tea like time would never touch her. She had believed in a future.
Now she was gone.
A human blacksmith stood beside a fallen warrior, hands clenched and trembling. “I was supposed to finish his blade,” he whispered. “He never got to wield it.”
The Hall held a gathering of survivors—Players, Kitsune, Nekomijin, Yama-Okami—each marked by blood or smoke or silence. They had survived by inches, not strength. Some stared into nothing. Others closed their eyes and pressed fingers to amulets, fur, or scorched stone.
“Did you see Shinryu?” someone whispered.
“She was terrifying.”
“I thought she was beautiful,” said another, softer.
Children whispered from behind support pillars.
“She never ran,” a young Kitsune said, ears low. “She saved us.”
“She fought until she couldn’t anymore.”
A girl knelt beside a shattered sword. Her fingers traced the hilt like it still held warmth.
Akira stood near the wall, wiping his face with the back of a bruised hand.
“I should’ve saved her,” he said to Rai, voice cracked. “He baited me. I couldn’t reach her.”
Rai shook her head. “You did everything you could.”
A Player with bloodied armor clapped John’s shoulder. “Dude. You’re a badass. Where’d you learn to fight like that?”
John didn’t answer right away. He was still kneeling, his head bowed. When he spoke, it was one word.
“Her.”
Silence followed. Heavy. Absolute.
RW said nothing.
There was nothing left to say.
Outside, the fires dimmed. The dead lay still.
Only the bodies of Eldoria’s native-born remained. The Players had turned to mist at the moment of death, their essence reclaimed by the system. But the scars on the village were real. The ache in its soil. The blood in its gutters.
The sky above stretched vast and cold.
It started as a murmur.
Faint. Brittle. Like wind caught in stone.
John flinched. The others didn’t seem to notice.
He looked around the Hall. Rai spoke quietly to Akira. RW curled up near the steps, silent. The survivors moved like people who had nothing left to give. But beneath it all—beneath the fire, beneath the blood—he could hear it.
Voices.
Not from outside.
Inside.
“SAVE HIM… ROLAND… THE VOID… NERATHE…”
John’s pulse jumped. He clutched his chest—not in pain, but recognition. The words didn’t sound like commands. They felt like truth, spoken in the language of memory. Not his memory. Deeper than that.
“GO BACK… TO THE ROOT… TO THE BEGINNING…”
He stumbled upright. Akira turned to him, startled. “John?”
“I hear them,” John said, barely above a whisper.
Akira looked around. “Hear what?”
John’s breath trembled. He couldn’t explain it. The voices weren’t just voices. They were threads pulling at him.
A woman’s voice cut through the haze—clear, familiar.
“He never should’ve died.”
It wasn’t Yumi’s voice.
It was hers. The one who had started it all. The one who had shaped the game. The one who had given him RW.
Gameweaver.
John staggered back a step. The Hall dimmed around him.
More voices layered beneath her:
“The underworld is not closed to you.”
“The path lies through Nerathe.”
“There is still time.”
John stared at the floor. The cracks in the stone shifted—no longer broken, but spiraling. A pattern. A design. A map.
RW stirred beside him, flame flickering low. “You’re hearing it too, aren’t you?”
John nodded, dazed.
“I think,” RW said slowly, “Gameweaver just gave you directions to the Void itself.”
He looked toward the hall’s entrance, as if expecting the walls themselves to peel back and reveal what waited beyond.
Sterling had not yet arrived.
But John had already started to leave.
Not with his body.
With purpose.
