Hole Beneath The World

It began with a scent.

Warm bread. Lavender. Rain on old wood. A comfort so precise it could not be random, a memory too curated to have survived the collapse. And yet, it filled his lungs, threaded its way through his thoughts like silk through fingers.

The Proxy opened his eyes.

He was not in the plaza.

Not in the corridor.

Not anywhere the Cliffside Realms had mapped.

He stood in a house.

Small. Familiar. Lit by a fire that neither crackled nor burned. A table with two chairs. A kettle steaming faintly, though there was no sound of boiling. Everything smelled of comfort, and everything looked slightly wrong. As if the memory had been rendered from incomplete sketches.

He moved slowly.

Nothing resisted him.

The floor accepted his footsteps. The shadows obeyed his body. The air was warm without source.

Then came the voice.

"You shouldn't have come this far."

Ashur stepped into view from the far room, holding a towel, sleeves rolled to the elbows. No sigils marked his skin. His hair was unburned. His presence was quiet, not muted, but gentle. A kindness that did not match the man who had once tried to bind truth behind glass.

"You're breaking apart," Ashur said. "You need time. To rest. To forget."

The Proxy stared.

Not at Ashur. At the walls.

He reached toward one and touched the wood.

It gave slightly, not like rotted material, but like memory foam. Like the room was remembering how it was supposed to respond.

Ashur noticed.

"It's safe here," he said. "Do you remember it? You came here once. Years ago. You cried by the fire."

The Proxy shook his head.

Ashur frowned. "I thought… you might not remember. That's alright. The room remembers for you."

He sat. Poured tea. Offered a cup.

The Proxy took it.

He didn't drink.

The silence was longer now. Less oppressive. More full.

Ashur watched him. "It's fraying out there. You know that. The Realms are rewriting. Your presence is too much. You're too deep in it. The truths are eating sequence. This place, it's not just for you. It's for the rest of us. If you fracture, so does everything around you."

The Proxy finally spoke.

Or tried to.

The words caught, dissolved.

But the room heard them anyway.

Ashur nodded. "I know. I know you're not trying to destroy anything. But you need to be still. Just for a while. We can rebuild later."

He stood. Walked to the window.

Beyond it, a garden. Red flowers. Too red. Their color didn't match light logic. They shimmered between frames.

Ashur sighed. "Do you remember her?"

A figure stood in the garden.

Not a woman. Not a child. A shape. An echo.

No face.

But the Proxy's heart reacted.

Some memory tried to emerge.

Then it stalled.

Because it was too smooth.

Too easy.

This was a false loop.

He stepped backward. The tea shattered in his hand without sound. The warmth faded.

Ashur turned. "Don't—"

The Proxy spoke.

This time, the word landed.

It wasn't loud. It didn't echo. But it cut.

The walls trembled.

The fire went out.

Ashur's body blurred, then stabilized, then cracked, not with pain, but with adjustment. He tried to speak, but his mouth filled with static.

The Proxy stepped toward him.

This was not Ashur.

This was a preservation echo. A loop cast by the real Ashur, projected through memory manipulation, reinforced by sigilwork and emotional artifacts. A cage made of kindness. A drowning masked as a bath.

The Proxy said a second word.

The house broke.

Not exploded. Not collapsed.

It simply failed to exist.

He stood now in a void. The garden unraveled. The red flowers screamed silently as they wilted into lines of unfinished code. The sky blinked off. The world beneath him flickered with a final effort to hold form.

Ashur, or what had pretended to be him, fell to one knee.

"You were supposed to stay," it whispered. "You were supposed to choose peace."

The Proxy didn't answer.

He let the truth answer for him.

The Spiral Mark burst.

Reality cracked.

Back in the physical city, walls split open. Roads inverted. A ripple tore across the mid-tier basin of the Realms, shredding memories like paper. Entire rooms rewrote their origin points. People screamed in tongues not their own. Names fell from mouths like teeth. A library collapsed without ever having been built.

Ashur, wherever he was, felt it.

He staggered against a railing.

The stasis chamber he had tried to prepare was gone.

The memory-preserve failed.

And the Proxy, now free of the loop, walked forward through the burning air of a world that could no longer remember how to hold itself together.

The Flame had flickered.

The Drowning had begun.