Eli didn't sleep that night. Not really.
He sat cross-legged in his desk chair, staring at the flyer like it might move if he looked away. Around him, the lights from his monitors blinked like tired eyes. The flyer's paper felt oddly thick, the ink a little too saturated. Like it had been printed on purpose. By someone who meant it.
He ran a hand through his hair, then opened his group chat with the dev team.
Eli: you guys ever heard of "The Path of the True Flame"?
Noah: is that a metal band or a cult?
Mina: sounds like both tbh
He didn't reply.
Instead, he turned to his game. Maybe it would distract him. The scene he'd been working on, a cathedral in the middle of a foggy forest, still hovered on screen. Except... something was off.
He hadn't added those candles before. Or the red-robed figure standing at the altar.
He blinked.
Checked the code. Checked the assets. No one else had touched this scene.
His cursor hovered over the character sprite. No name tag. No dialogue file.
He opened the debug view. The figure was tagged: flamebearer.001
The same word used in the flyer.
His stomach dropped.
Then, just for a second, his monitors flickered. The game screen glitched. Static. Then, a single frame. A still image of Nari's coloring book.
He backed away from the desk like it had burned him.
The next morning, he searched the name.
Path of the True Flame cult California yielded almost nothing. One buried article. A forum post from five years ago. Missing kids. Mysterious burn marks. The group moved around. Off-grid. Sometimes masquerading as a retreat. Always preaching purity and silence.
And then one image, grainy, black-and-white, showed a chapel in the woods.
It looked exactly like the one he'd put in the game.
Except he hadn't known it existed until now.
The glitch. The flyer. The game. Nari.
Something was bleeding through.
That evening, he booted up the game again.
Everything looked normal at first.
Then, slowly, the flickers returned. A static overlay. A whisper of code scrolling in the corner of the screen. Letters that looked like they'd been scrawled by hand: REMEMBER THE PATH. SHE IS WAITING.
He opened the build folder, searching for rogue files, assets, anything. A new file had appeared: flame_intro_v3.avi. It wasn't there yesterday. It wasn't part of the game.
He clicked.
The video opened on a black screen. Then, gradually, candlelight. A hooded figure. A voice was low and distorted.
"Purity is born in fire."
And then, a close-up of Nari's drawing.
Not a photo of it. The actual drawing, frame by frame, as if someone had scanned each line she'd made.
He slammed his laptop shut.
Heart pounding. Skin clammy.
He wasn't imagining this. He wasn't overreacting.
Someone, or something, was in his code.
And it somehow knew Nari.