Will woke with a soundless gasp.

  A few hours past midnight, Belhaven was a dark and distant silhouette through the loft windows, the forge below quiet and still. But none of that grounded him. He lurched upright as if dragged from drowning, breath tearing through his chest, sweat cooling fast on his skin.

  The nightmare wasn’t a dream. It was memory, truth, time collapsing inward.

  Ten years.

  Ten years.

  A deep, unnatural chill still clung to him, ghostlike—the phantom static of the dream prickling his skin as if he’d dragged the distortion back with him. Somewhere in his mind, a voice from the dream—Adrian’s—echoed in broken fragments. The bitter taste of ozone lingered in his throat.

  Hands touched his shoulders, warm and steady. Thane’s voice followed, low and coaxing. “Easy, William. Breathe. You are safe.”

  Safe. The word sounded unreal.

  Will flinched from the contact, eyes still wild. Before he could speak, a flicker of static sparked near the bedside.

  Brat appeared with a sharp digital shimmer, materializing abruptly, his pupils wide with alarm. “Your emergency flag spiked. Will, I’m scanning… hold on.” His hands moved rapidly through empty air, fingers flicking and pinching at things only he could perceive.

  A faint distortion jittered across Brat’s outline—an artifact, a rendering stutter—as if something in the system had pulled him online too fast.

  Will’s breath hitched, panic rising again as the memory surged. “Brat… Adrian said—he said ten years have passed. Ten years.”

  Brat froze, confusion sharpening. “Ten years? Wait—something’s wrong.” His eyes flicked rapidly, tracking invisible streams of information. “Your sleep-cycle telemetry is intact, but the overlays don’t match. I’m detecting external interference in the feed. Hold on, Will.”

  He worked faster, movements tightening as more windows snapped into place. “Why aren’t my oversight logs lining up? Something is pushing signals into your cognitive partition. This shouldn’t be possible—the protocols for external transmission are completely locked.”

  Thane shifted beside him, concern deepening. “What troubles you, my prince?”

  Will barely heard him. He pushed Thane’s hand away to focus on Brat. Thane steadied, his posture settling with familiar stillness.

  Brat’s hands trembled as he dug deeper. “Will… it’s worse than that. Someone modified my internal timekeeping. I came online the same moment you did, but there’s a dead-sector in my logs. Whoever did this masked the duration—they didn't want me to see that your consciousness has been in stasis for ten years.”

  A low hum passed through the room, almost metallic—a system recalibrating after being pushed too hard. Will didn’t consciously notice, but something in him tightened at the sound.

  A cold, fracturing beat rippled through Will’s chest. The room felt too small, the air too thin.

  “How could you not know?” Will demanded, voice raw. “I’ve been in here for ten years.”

  Brat’s ears twitched with raw panic. “I didn’t know. I swear it. Someone hid it from me. Will, I should’ve seen this in your logs—it should have been a high-level alert—but it’s like something overwrote my permissions. Someone reached in and changed my access from the inside.”

  Thane moved closer, reaching out again. “Let me help you, William.”

  Will recoiled, throwing Thane’s hand off. He pushed up from the bed in one sharp motion, stumbling back. “Don’t touch me.” His voice broke. He stared at Thane as the fear and grief twisted into something sharp.

  “You’re just code.”

  The words hit with more force than he intended.

  Thane stopped short. Hurt flickered across his face, immediate and unguarded, before his expression smoothed into an idle state.

  For a single heartbeat, his eyes had looked painfully human—wounded, soft, reaching. That was what made Will’s chest seize. That was what made him hate himself.

  A prompt flickered at the edge of Will’s vision:

  [SOCIAL SYNC -0.50]

  [CURRENT: 49.25 → 48.75]

  The number hollowed something inside him.

  Will’s throat tightened. Thane had looked at him like someone watching something precious crack. Like he mattered. And Will had torn through him anyway.

  He couldn’t stand the sight of either of them—their concern, their confusion, their hurt. It pressed down on him like the collapsing roof from the dream, like the world was caving inward and he was trapped beneath it.

  He staggered to the chair, grabbing for his clothing—pants, underthings, boots, shirt—all with shaking hands. “The twins… Adrian looked so old.” His voice cracked hard. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t get to be there.”

  Brat followed anxiously, his voice cracking. “Will, listen—there’s still more. It wasn't just a bypass. They rewrote my base logic. They altered my awareness so I couldn't even see the gaps. I didn’t know anything was missing… I didn’t know you were missing.”

  Will dragged his shirt over his head, tears tracking down his face.

  Brat reached for him. “Maybe if I can find the source of the alteration… maybe I can fix something—”

  Will whipped around, voice shredded. “Fix it? How? How are you going to give me ten years of my life back?”

  Brat froze, devastated.

  His hands dropped to his sides, fingers curling into useless little fists. His lower lip trembled—not programmed, not scripted—just Brat, terrified and hurting.

  Will shoved toward the door.

  “Will, wait. Please.”

  He didn’t stop.

  He slammed the loft door behind him.

  A second cold pulse slid across his vision:

  [SOCIAL SYNC -1.00]

  [CURRENT: 48.75 → 47.75]

  The corridor outside felt too narrow and too dark.

  A faint, residual warning shimmered in the corner of his interface.—[SYSTEM LOAD: UNSTABLE]—before it blinked out. He didn’t even process it. There was no room left in him for anything but flight.

  He kept walking.

  Will hit the street hard, the door to the forge loft slamming behind him with a crack that echoed down the narrow row of buildings. The lower tier was dark and mostly empty at this hour, the mage-lights along the main road burning low and golden. His breath steamed in the cold, sharp and uneven.

  Kellan stepped from the shadows, moving into quiet formation behind him. He didn’t speak. He only followed, uncertain but dutiful, his footsteps crisp against the cobblestone.

  Brat appeared at Will’s left side in a frantic flicker, as if pulled violently into existence. He hovered to keep pace with Will’s quick, angry strides. “Will, stop. Listen to me. Please.” His voice cracked with panic. “Let me check the deeper layers. Let me try again. Something’s wrong and I’m trying to understand it.”

  “Shut up,” Will snapped.

  Brat flinched but kept hovering. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t. Someone altered my protocols. Let me reach higher logs and I can find who did it.”

  “You knew. Or you let yourself not know.”

  “I would never hide something like that from you—”

  “You’re programmed,” Will spat, voice cracking. “Someone programmed you to hide it!”

  Brat shook his head frantically, hands pushing through invisible screens. “Will, please. I want to help. I want to fix this.”

  “You can’t fix anything,” Will said, picking up speed.

  A pressure like a vice tightened around his ribs, the echo of the dream—of Adrian’s broken voice, of ten years gone—spiraling through him with nauseating force. The world around him felt too sharp, too bright, too scripted. Every mage-light flicker, every NPC footstep felt like a lie.

  A ringing rose in Will’s ears — not sound, but memory: his brother with gray at his temples. Lines around his eyes. A decade of waiting. A decade of grief. All without him.

  His stride turned into a march. He barreled down the street, shoulder-checking a drunk sailor who cursed after him, nearly colliding with a merchant unloading crates for the dawn markets.

  Everything blurred—faces, lights, shadows. His chest hurt with every step, his thoughts tangled in furious loops. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t breathe.

  Brat surged ahead and tried to plant himself in Will’s path. “Please just stop for one second. We can figure this out together.”

  Will passed through him as if through fog. Game physics wouldn’t let Brat block him; the system forbade it. Brat spun to keep up, panic rising. “Will, wait. Please. You’re not thinking.”

  “No,” Will said, voice shattering. “I’m finally thinking.”

  His voice cracked on the last word—high, brittle—a sound more like something breaking than clarity forming.

  He didn’t notice where he was going until the buildings changed and the mage-lights shifted to warm, amber tones. The street narrowed, the air sweetened, and the soft glow of the bordello district appeared ahead. He stopped short only when he saw the porch lights. He had wandered here without realizing it.

  Two courtesans stood on the front porch, wrapped in silks that shimmered even in low light. They brightened as soon as they saw him.

  “Prince William,” one called with a warm smile. “A pleasure. Starting your day early?”

  Their smiles were flawless, their timing impeccable—the system’s pre-scripted hospitality sliding into place as if nothing in the world were wrong.

  The normalcy of their tone felt suffocating. Like the city didn’t know anything had shattered.

  Brat hovered at the bottom of the porch steps, frantic and terrified. “Will, don’t go in there. Please. Talk to me. We can figure this out. I want to figure this out.”

  Will placed a foot on the first step.

  “Will,” Brat said again, voice shaking. “I can’t enter. My protocols don’t allow it.”

  “I know,” Will said.

  He didn’t look at Brat when he said it. He couldn’t. If he did, he might stop. And stopping meant feeling, and feeling meant drowning.

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  He climbed the rest of the steps.

  “Will, please—”

  Will reached the door, grabbed the handle, and yanked it open. Light and warmth spilled into the street. He turned his head just enough to look at Brat over his shoulder.

  Brat’s eyes were wide with terror.

  Will slammed the door in his face.

  Brat flinched as though struck.

  [SOCIAL SYNC -2.50]

  [CURRENT: 47.75 → 45.25]

  Warm light poured over Will the moment he crossed the threshold, softer and sweeter than the street outside. Honey-colored lanterns glowed along the walls, tinting everything in gold. Music drifted from some hidden room, low and inviting. It should have been comforting.

  It wasn’t.

  He entered like a storm, breath shaking, hands trembling. His boots scuffed sharp against polished floors. The sudden warmth felt suffocating.

  The room was full of courtesans—men and women draped in silks, lounging across low couches and leaning against carved columns. But the system knew him, knew him inside-out, so it was two male courtesans who approached first.

  Both were handsome and soft-voiced, their robes shimmering as though the fabric breathed. Their smiles were perfect. Too perfect.

  “Prince William,” one murmured, voice smooth and practiced. “Welcome. You look chilled. Come sit with us.”

  “Let us take care of you,” the other added, brushing fingertips gently along his forearm.

  The touch made his skin crawl. Their movements were flawless. Each gesture landed with the polished precision of pre-scripted animation. For a moment, their smiles flickered a fraction too long before resetting.

  He needed something to pull him out of his own head, to quiet the noise of his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

  “Drink,” he rasped.

  One of them immediately reached for a decanter. A glass appeared in his hand—amber liquid glowing warm as sunrise. Will took it and downed it in one swallow. It burned his throat, or simulated burning, then nothing.

  “More.”

  Another glass. Then another. He kept drinking, trying to drown the echo of Adrian’s voice from the dream, the flash of Thane’s hurt, the panic in Brat’s face — anything to keep from thinking about the ten years he somehow lost.

  The alcohol hit him with artificial warmth, rising and fading too quickly—as if the system kept adjusting the potency behind the scenes. It didn’t help. It only made the ache inside him feel more jagged.

  The room swayed, but his mind didn’t quiet.

  The courtesans drifted around him with gentle touches and soft laughter. Synthetic intimacy. Scripted flattery. Their hands were warm, the air scented with rosé wine and vanilla. A world built for comfort.

  It made him feel worse.

  A pair of hands guided him gently toward a lounge, offering cushions and silk. Someone whispered a compliment in his ear. Someone else traced a fingertip along his shoulder.

  He didn’t want any of it.

  He pushed deeper into the bordello, moving through silky curtains into quieter rooms. He didn’t know who he was following or why. One male courtesan brushed close, offering his hand, his smile, his scent.

  Will let him lead for a moment. Then pulled away.

  Pleasure wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted pain. Or to disappear. Or both. Meaningless intimacy felt like punishment, a way to scrape at whatever part of him still felt alive. He pressed his back to a wall, then lurched away again, pacing through the haze of light and perfume.

  He could feel the system watching him—not as a presence, but as a pressure, a subtle tightening in the walls, a softness in the air that felt artificial and suffocating. Even here, in a room designed to drown him in sensation, he couldn’t escape himself.

  The room flickered.

  A lantern buzzed in a sharp digital stutter. Shadow pooled in a corner, glitching before smoothing over. An NPC faltered mid-laugh before restarting his line.

  A faint pulse brushed the edge of Will’s vision.

  [SOCIAL SYNC -1.00]

  [CURRENT: 45.25 → 44.25]

  He squeezed his eyes shut as another wave of tight, panicked grief hit him. His breath broke in his chest.

  He pushed past another cluster of courtesans and into a quiet side room. No music here. Just soft cushions and the dim light of a single lamp.

  That was where something inside him finally gave way.

  A sob tore loose before he could stop it. He crashed down against the wall, sliding to the floor. His knees drew up without him realizing, his hands gripping the fabric of his pants as though the room might fall away beneath him.

  The bordello carried on around him, muffled voices and gentle laughter floating in from distant rooms. No one paused. No one looked in. No one heard him.

  “I want to go home,” he whispered.

  The words fractured in the still air.

  They barely made a sound.

  The lamp beside him flickered again.

  A small, brief distortion rolled across the walls—like the system trying to reach him, or trying to reset something—but it smoothed over before he could notice.

  But no one came.

  The bordello swallowed him whole.

  Will drifted through it like a shadow, barely aware of where his feet took him. Rooms blurred together. Silk curtains brushed his shoulders. Soft laughter rose and fell around him, too gentle, too easy. Someone pressed another drink into his hand and he swallowed it without tasting it.

  Warmth spread across his tongue. It faded just as quickly.

  He needed more.

  The system only allowed intoxication for sixty minutes at a time. A safety protocol. A kindness. He could almost laugh at that.

  Another glass reached him. He drank.

  A pipe was offered next. Sweet smoke curled into his lungs.

  The world numbed. Then sharpened. Then numbed again.

  His heartbeat pulsed in strange, uneven rhythms, as if the system couldn’t decide whether to dampen the sensory load or amplify it. The edges of his vision glowed faintly, like gold static itching beneath the surface of his vision.

  A faint shimmer of gold at the corner of his vision pulsed once. He dismissed it with a flick of his fingers, not even focusing long enough to know what it wanted. Another appeared a few minutes later. He waved that one away too.

  A male courtesan lay back across a low couch, his robe slipping from one shoulder, watching Will with an inviting smile. Another leaned against a pillar, head tilted in a way that was meant to be seductive but felt manufactured. The room beyond was full of bodies stretched across cushions and beds, a tangle of limbs and silk. Pleasure everywhere. Heat everywhere. None of it touched him.

  Someone guided him toward a long, low bed where bodies lay intertwined, asleep or pretending to be. Will sank onto the edge, head heavy, fingers numb. A hand slid along his back. Another curled around his wrist. He barely registered them.

  His clothes felt wrong—loosened, shifted, some pieces missing entirely. A cool draft ghosted across his bare hip, but he couldn’t remember taking anything off. He couldn’t remember anything at all.

  Another faint pulse flickered in his periphery. He batted it aside, irritated. Then another. And another. He stopped even reacting, only blinking harder as if that alone could silence whatever the system was trying to tell him.

  Something deep in the interface strained—tiny fractures of light like hairline cracks spreading along the inside of his vision. Anytime he blinked, they vanished. Anytime he looked too closely, they slithered out of focus.

  The haze thickened.

  Time softened until it lost shape.

  Minutes dissolved. Or hours.

  Maybe longer.

  The air inside the bordello felt viscous, slow—like the system was throttling time or repeating micro-loops around him while it recalculated his emotional load. The lighting shifted in a rhythm that made no sense, like a heartbeat that didn’t belong to him.

  A courtesan lay beside him, breathing slow and rhythmically. A glass appeared at Will’s side before the warmth of the last one even faded. He drank again. Smoke drifted past him. A small tray of powdered stimulant was pressed into his palm. He rubbed it along his gums. Relief washed through him, thin and temporary.

  He leaned back against a velvet headboard and let the numbness wash over him. Someone whispered in his ear. Someone else touched his chest, slow and gentle, trying to coax him into sensation, into something like pleasure.

  He felt none of it.

  He only felt the rise and fade of the substances as they cycled out of his system again and again, forcing him to drink more, smoke more, take whatever was offered just to keep the numbness in place.

  At some point the light through the windows shifted from gold to gray. Then to blue. Then to gold again. Will didn’t move. He couldn’t tell if it had been an hour or a day. Maybe the system was cycling light to make the rooms feel alive.

  Maybe he had actually lost time. More time.

  He tried to focus on a distant courtesan moving through the crowd. He blinked twice—and on the third blink, the figure seemed to jump backward a frame, their stride repeating as though the world had stuttered and tried again. His stomach lurched at the unnatural snap of their movement. Then the sensation passed.

  His body felt heavy, detached from him. Someone slid against his side. Someone laughed softly nearby. Silk whispered. A pipe was tucked between his fingers. He lifted it automatically.

  A faint, rapid flicker of a notification pulsed at the top of his vision. Will mentally waved it away, irritated at the intrusion. It returned again.

  Its shape sharpened for a split second—[SYSTEM OVERRIDE INITIATED]—before dissolving into gold haze.

  A small shape formed in the corner.

  Humanoid, child-sized, its outline shimmering like a reflection trapped inside a thin sheet of code.

  Silent — not by choice, but because whatever was pushing it through the bordello’s barrier hadn’t fully taken.

  Its mouth moved, fast and desperate, forming Will’s name again and again with no sound behind it.

  The flicker of a hand jerked upward, not a slow wave but a frantic attempt to get his attention, fingers stuttering as if caught between frames.

  The form struggled to stabilize, never fully resolving before its edges tore into static.

  It strained, glitched, and blinked out entirely.

  The room didn’t react. The courtesans didn’t pause. The world simply swallowed the anomaly and smoothed over the tear, as though it hadn’t happened at all.

  Will didn’t see any of it.

  His head tipped back, eyes half-lidded, another slow breath of smoke drifting from his mouth.

  Will didn’t know how long he stayed like that.

  Slumped against the velvet headboard, breath thick with smoke, vision soft and wavering. He felt unmoored, floating somewhere outside himself. The bordello noise had faded into a low, distant hum.

  Time flexed around him—light stretching and shrinking in ways that didn’t make sense, sound folding into itself. The air was too still, too warm, as if the room were holding its breath.

  He barely noticed when the light in the corner of the room shifted.

  A thin ripple washed across the air, subtle as heat off metal. Then another. The cushions around him flickered for a heartbeat, colors deepening and then smoothing out again.

  A presence materialized in front of the doorway.

  Brat.

  He stood very still, arms tucked close to his chest, as though afraid to disturb the room. His outline flickered once, then locked into place. Whatever had allowed him to cross the bordello’s threshold had cost him something; there was a tension in his frame Will had never seen before.

  A thin line of static clung to the edges of his form, like someone had dragged him through a firewall and parts of him hadn’t fully caught up.

  He stepped forward quietly.

  “Will,” he whispered.

  Will didn’t move.

  Brat inched closer. “Will… please.”

  Will was half-curled on the bed, shirt undone, body slack with exhaustion. Eyes red, lashes clumped. He looked wrecked. Lost. His pulse flickered faintly beneath the skin of his throat.

  Brat sank to his knees beside the bed, heart in his eyes.

  There was no joke waiting on his tongue.

  No sarcasm.

  No half-grin or teasing bravado.

  Just fear.

  Raw and small.

  “I’m so sorry, Will,” he said.

  The words were barely sound.

  Will exhaled, a hollow rasp. He turned his face away, eyelids lowering. “You lied,” he said quietly. “You let me think… you let me believe…” His voice cracked with exhaustion and something deeper. “You should have known.”

  Brat shook his head so fast it evened into a blur. “No. No, Will, I didn’t. I didn’t. I swear on everything I am. They hid it from me too.” His hands hovered uselessly in the air, shaking. “I would never keep that from you.”

  Will closed his eyes, but the tension in his jaw didn’t ease.

  Brat’s voice trembled. “Will… you’re my whole job. My whole self. Everything I do is for you. I am you.” He swallowed, face crumpling. “Why would I lie to you?”

  Silence opened between them.

  Not cold — just heavy.

  The bordello’s distant laughter warped slightly, as if stretched thin. The light dimmed and brightened in uneven pulses, flickering in time with Will’s ragged breathing, the system unsure which of them to stabilize first.

  Somewhere in that quiet, something inside Will shifted. The sharp edges dulled. His breath stuttered once. Then again. The anger wasn’t gone, not really, but it wasn’t the only thing there anymore.

  Brat saw it. His shoulders lowered a fraction, like he was afraid to exhale.

  Will dragged a hand across his face, smearing the remnants of tears. He didn’t look at Brat, not yet. Not fully. But he didn’t turn away again either.

  Brat let out a breath that shook.

  He knelt beside the bed, inches away, one hand lifting as if to touch Will’s arm — then hesitating.

  Will stared at the floor with wet eyes.

  Brat stayed there, frightened and small and fiercely loyal, waiting for Will to come back to himself.

  Somewhere in the periphery of Will’s vision, a faint shimmer pulsed.

  Then another.

  Ignored, like all the others.

  A notification struggled to form—its edges flickering, collapsing into static before it could cohere, as though someone higher in the system were overriding it.

  Something in the system whispered warnings — instability, overstrain, breach-adjacent load — but Will didn’t look up.

  He just breathed.

  Brat stayed by his side.

  The air thickened with dim blue light for a heartbeat—there and gone—like an eye opening behind the walls, watching them both.

  The world dimmed around them.