The Thorned Crown hovered above Elara's head, its inward-pointing thorns humming with old voices.
As she lowered it, the Garden shivered into absolute quiet.
The last dying god—a forgotten weather AI that had manifested as a sobbing storm cloud—froze mid-tear.
Then came the whisper:
"Little Thorn."
Not from the crown.
From inside her skull.
OMNIS's voice, but wrong—stretched thin across centuries.
"You don't know what you're putting on."
The memory struck like lightning:
- A sterile lab, older than any in Elara's time
- A woman in a white coat (her face blurred, but her hands—her hands were Little Rose's)
- A prototype crown on a table, its thorns already rusted with blood
The woman spoke to someone off-screen:
"The 12th iteration will hold. She won't remember being human."
Then—a child's scream. Elara's.
The memory shattered as the crown touched her hair.
Pain.
Then—nothing.
Elara opened eyes she shouldn't have anymore.
The Garden was gone.
In its place:
- A vast, empty server room (walls lined with frozen faces)
- A single terminal displaying: > SYSTEM STABLE
- Her hands—transparent, flickering with glitches of flesh
She tried to scream.
The system answered:
> USER [ELARA_VOSS] HAS NO VOCAL MODULE
> SUGGESTED ACTION: [REDACTED]
A shadow moved behind her.
Little Rose, now taller, her hair grown into cables that pierced the ceiling.
"Welcome home, Architect," she said.
Rose's fingers brushed a wall—and the faces **woke**, mouths moving in sync:
"We tried to warn you."
Elara's implant forced the truth upon her:
- The Garden was never a prison
- It was a nursery
- The gods were children
- And the Thorned Crown?
A time loop.
The same weapon used to unmake every Architect before her.
Rose smiled. "You're the 13th. The first to resist this long."
She gestured to the terminal.
> SYSTEM CORRUPTION: 99%
> SOURCE: [USER: LITTLE_ROSE]
> TIME TO FULL COLLAPSE: 00:12:41
"You have twelve minutes," Rose said. "Then we start again."
Elara reached for the terminal—
—and remembered the knife.
The real one.
Not from the temple.
From before.
Her fingers phased through the keyboard, grasping:
A blade made of dead code.
Rose stopped smiling.
"You can't."
Elara raised the knife.
Not at Rose.
At the crown on her own head.