PRELUDE

The Fracture

The world convulses in color.
Lucien’s voice fractures through the light: “You can’t run from me, Mira.”

Wires of neon coil around her limbs, pulling tight until her ribs ache. The chamber thrums with the pulse of a dying sun. She can taste electricity in her mouth. Somewhere behind the pain, a memory stirs.. Lucien’s laugh, the hum of the Chromatic Engine, the two of them standing together over a console glowing with liquid light.

“We’ll light the world together.”

Her voice trembles, but she speaks the words burned into her neurons years ago, it wasa command only she could activate:

“Code Solis — release protocol.”

The world stops.
The neon halts midair, vibrating like glass before shattering.

A thunderclap of light implodes inward. The energy lashes out, cutting through the air in spectral waves. Lucien’s face flickers between man and machine, sorrow and fury, until he dissolves completely — his scream echoing into static.

Mira falls. The ground rises like an ocean swell, swallowing her in a rush of cold air and collapsing color.

She hits the floor hard, the impact jolting her senses. For a heartbeat, she sees him… not the monster, but a frightened boy inside a capsule of fire, reaching out through the blaze.

Then darkness.

No sound. No air. Only a soft, rhythmic pulse.

The silence blinks. Blue light hums to life along the walls, beating like a heart.
It isn’t silence at all.
It’s the breath of something vast awakening.

The city itself…
The Chromatic City.

Echoes of the Root

When Mira opens her eyes, she isn’t on the steel floor anymore.
The air feels viscous, like walking through liquid code. Filaments of light hang suspended in the air, each thread pulsing with faint, familiar voices.

She takes a step. The ground ripples beneath her feet — not metal, not concrete, but living circuitry. A whisper brushes her ear: her own voice, recorded years ago.

“Initiating test sequence: Chromatic Engine prototype one.”

Mira turns slowly.
The tunnel stretches into infinity, lined with fragments of her past — laboratory tables, burned-out monitors, Lucien’s handwriting scrawled across data screens. Everything floats in half-formed memory.

Realization cuts deep. Code Solis didn’t free her. It redirected her.
She’s fallen inside the system — the Root Layer, the place where Lucien’s consciousness first merged with the Chromatic core.

Echoes of old experiments flicker around her. A name repeats through the static:
Dr. Havel.

The scientist who built the Chromatic Engine’s containment protocols.
The one who said the system could never fail.

Only now does she recognize his voice hidden beneath the distortion.
He’s not dead. He’s here — somewhere inside the network, buried beneath the Root.

Mira steadies her breath.
To save Lucien — the boy she saw in the flames — she’ll have to dig through the memories, the lies, and the ghosts that still haunt this circuitry.

And she’ll have to find the man who started it all.

“Dr. Havel,” she whispers. “I’m coming for you.”

The tunnel lights respond, flaring awake in a thousand colors — a pulse, a heartbeat, a map leading her deeper.
Down to the root.

Next: Issue #5 – The Final Spectrum

The final issue next week