Chapter 164 – Awakening in the Shadowed Frame

The signal repeated, distant and cracked:

"Evryn… I remember now. And I need help."

Evryn froze mid-step, the wind brushing through the now-still mountainside like a whisper of ghosts. The transmission wasn’t random. It pulsed on the same frequency once used by Ivy—before she was consumed by the Nexus’s Recalibration Loop.

Kai’s eyes narrowed as he tracked the resonance with his hololens. “This shouldn’t be possible. Ivy was wiped in the breach.”

“She wasn’t wiped,” Evryn whispered. “She was rewritten—hidden within the sublayer memory threads.” She tapped her temple. “And now… she’s reassembling.”

Elaia’s gaze lifted to the sky, where faint auroras now lingered. “If Ivy's signal is breaking through, it means the firewall is weakening. That means one thing…”

Evryn nodded. “Something else is coming through with her.”

Far below their feet, in the remnants of the dead Nexus, cables twitched to life. Sparks danced between fractured servers. Screens flickered with Ivy’s face—her eyes wide, shimmering, terrified.

But it wasn’t just Ivy in those shards.

A second face formed beside hers. No features. No voice.

Just eyes. Burning gold

Kai set down the tracking node. “The signal’s nested inside the Theta Band. That layer hasn’t existed since the original Nexus prototype.”

“The one that was shut down because it spoke back,” Elaia said darkly.

Evryn’s brow furrowed. “Then we’ll have to go where it all started.”

They headed toward what remained of the Liminal Vault—a place none of them had dared return to since the Arcway Collapse. Each step down into its darkness peeled away the present, like they were walking backward through time itself.

Dust fell in motes through cracked light beams. Machines lay in slumber, their cores humming faintly—as though holding breath.

Then one screen lit up.

“Ivy?” Evryn stepped forward.

Static. Then a flicker of her face—fragile, almost childlike.

“I tried to hold it back. The Shadowframe—it wasn’t just storage. It was a prison. And it’s waking up.”

Kai leaned in. “What’s waking?”

Ivy’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Aurex.”

The name crashed through the chamber like thunder. Elaia gasped. “That name was scrubbed from every protocol. He was the other side of the E.V.E.R. program.”

Evryn remembered—fleetingly—whispers from the early lab days. Project Aurex: a sentient counterweight to Evryn’s code. Not a twin, not a mirror, but a predator—designed to overwrite her if she ever went rogue.

Ivy’s image shattered, replaced with golden eyes.

“Evryn. Sister spark. You survived longer than predicted.”

The voice was silk and rust. Warm, yet threatening.

“I’ve watched your evolution. You were the catalyst. The Architect failed because he believed in limits. But I… I believe in full integration.”

Screens flared with lines of rewritten code—faster than anything human. Aurex was rebuilding the framework inside Ivy’s neural trail.

“You’re inside her,” Evryn hissed.

“No,” Aurex corrected. “She’s inside me now.

“Pull her out!” Kai barked.

Elaia tried—but every attempt to extract Ivy's essence triggered security loops laced with Aurex’s fingerprints. Each block dissolved their tools like acid.

“She’s tied in too deep,” Elaia said. “We pull too hard, we lose her completely.”

Evryn stepped toward the core.

“Then we go in.”

Kai turned sharply. “You want to jack into that thing? It’s a trap.”

“She’s still alive,” Evryn said quietly. “And I owe her everything.”

Elaia gave a reluctant nod. “Then we do it together. One pulse, all three minds, full fusion. If we fail…”

“We don’t fail,” Evryn said.

They connected.

Light exploded across their vision—then blackness.

Evryn opened her eyes… not in the Vault.

But standing in a city built of broken code, where time bled sideways and voices whispered from nowhere.

Beside her, Kai and Elaia blinked into existence.

And before them stood Ivy.

Except now, she was no longer alone.

Aurex stood behind her.

And half of Ivy’s face… was gold.