Story Title :- Echoes in the Circuit
Chapter 2: Ghost Signal
The world swam back into focus like a corrupted stream rebuffering mid-transmission.
Kael lay on the floor, skin clammy, breath shallow. The console’s screen had gone black, but something within him was screaming—like a new frequency had activated in his bones. His veins burned with a low thrum of energy. No longer just human. But not yet something else.
He pulled himself up, the sigil on his arm now glowing brighter—reacting to his thoughts, maybe even emotions. The silence in the room was unnatural, too perfect, as if the space itself had been carved out of reality. A holding cell for forbidden knowledge.
The console flickered again. Not text this time—but a face.
A woman, hooded, lit in sickly green. Her voice glitched between human and synthetic, her eyes hidden behind obsidian lenses.
“Kael Draven. You opened it. That was either brave... or suicidal.”
“Who the hell are you?” he rasped, voice raw.
“I go by Vex,” she replied. “And I’m the only one trying to keep your head attached to your body. Or soul. Depends on what you’ve become.”
Kael narrowed his eyes. “You were watching me.”
“I was watching the Protocol,” she corrected. “When you woke it, you sent out a signal across a hundred dead channels. Every Rift-sensitive entity in the city felt it. Including them.”
Kael felt a chill rise. The memory—or vision—he’d seen when he pressed ‘Y’ still hung at the edges of his thoughts like static after a detonation.
“What the hell is the Protocol?” he demanded. “And what’s happening to me?”
Vex’s image wavered for a moment. Then she sighed, or something close to it.
“The Arcane Protocol was an experiment. A fusion of synthetic cognition and arcane resonance. Designed to create living conduits—people who could interface with both magic and machines without frying their minds. You were the prime candidate, Kael. The Riftwalker.”
Kael laughed bitterly, hollow. “Then why don’t I remember any of it?”
“Because they broke your mind apart and scattered the pieces across sub-dimensional caches,” Vex replied. “You weren’t meant to survive. But you did. And now, they want their asset back—or destroyed.”
Kael staggered back from the console. “No. This is insane.”
“You want proof?” Vex’s voice sharpened. “Follow the signal. There's an old arcane node beneath Sector 9, buried under a collapsed transit line. Coordinates incoming.”
The screen flashed, and a map appeared—marked with a pulsing red glyph deep beneath the earth.
“There’s something waiting for you there,” she continued. “A memory vault. One of yours. You want answers? Go. But go fast. That shadow-thing from earlier? It wasn’t alone.”
The screen cut to black.
Kael stood in the dark, shaking.
He knew the Syndicate wouldn’t wait long. And if what Vex said was true, something far worse was tracking him. Something born of the Rift. Something that remembered him even when he didn’t remember himself.
Sector 9 – Lower Depths
Kael dropped into the collapsed transit shaft under cover of night, his boots landing with a muted crunch on shattered glass and decaying steel. The tunnels stretched out like arteries beneath the city’s rotting skeleton, pulsing with residual power and whispered voices leaking from thin air.
Graffiti marked the walls in glowing sigils. Not street art—wards, warnings, messages left by Rift cultists who prowled these ruins.
He moved carefully, hand on the hilt of a blade he’d stolen from an old warlock corpse during his time in the wastes. The weapon wasn’t just metal—it pulsed when magic was near. And now, it was burning in his grip.
The signal Vex had given him grew stronger with each step. His vision flickered, overlays of broken memory bleeding through—the flash of a scalpel, the cold scream of a child, a sigil spinning endlessly inside a ring of flame.
Then came the sound.
Whispers. But not in his head this time.
Voices, hissing around him from the shadows of the tunnel.
“Draven... sleeper... Riftborn...”
He turned in every direction, heart hammering.
Shapes began to emerge—distorted figures, wrapped in cloaks of static, faces melting between forms. Spectral remnants, ghosts of Rift experiments long dead. They didn’t attack. They watched, reaching toward him with hollow hunger.
Kael ran.
The tunnel opened into a cavern where a twisted tree of cables and bone rose from the ground, its branches embedded with blinking data-cores and ancient glyph-stones. At its base was a shrine—a small metal obelisk shaped like a keyhole.
The obelisk pulsed as Kael approached.
The sigil on his arm began to burn.
He knelt, placing his palm against the metal.
Pain lanced through his skull—and then the vault opened.
Images flooded his mind: a lab drenched in flickering violet light. A circle of scientists, and warlocks in lab coats. He stood inside a ritual sphere. Machines hummed. Blood trickled down his nose as the Arcane Protocol was activated.
Then—the rupture.
The Rift tore open above the lab.
Screams. An entity surged through—amorphous, a god of smoke and void and time. It saw Kael. Chose him. Marked him.
He saw himself falling—consumed, burned, reborn.
Then… blankness.
Kael gasped, pulling away from the obelisk. Blood dripped from his nose.
The Protocol hadn't made him a weapon. It had made him a vessel.
And something ancient was waking inside him.
Behind him, the tunnel shuddered.
The shadows screamed.
And the hunt began.
End of Chapter 2
