CHAPTER IV

In the center of a dying world, there was a room that refused to go dark.

The Dreamlight Gardens existed as a pocket dimension—stitched out of teal light and soft gold memory, anchored to Ascension Rouge and The Network Hub but folded into a space The Mainframe couldn't reach. Not physically. Not yet. It was a safe house hidden inside the collective subconscious of The Network, and it smelled like honeysuckle and warm blankets and the feeling of being held.

Harmony Wilson had built it when she was seven years old. She hadn't known what she was doing at the time. She'd just been scared—scared of the red lightning in her father's eyes, scared of the way the world kept breaking, scared of the machines that wanted to make everything quiet and clean and empty. So she'd closed her eyes and imagined somewhere safe. Somewhere soft. Somewhere that felt like the lullabies her father hummed when he thought she was already asleep.

When she opened her eyes, the garden was real.

Now she sat cross-legged, floating three feet above the cyan grass, and she wasn't Harmony anymore. She was Lyrick Logick—nine years old, dressed in light robes patterned with subtle dream sigils, teal and white fabric trimmed in soft gold. Her hood was up. It was always up. Beneath it, her Emoji Mask flickered—a combat interface of glitch-code UI that displayed her emotional state whether she wanted it to or not.

Right now it showed [o_o]. Focused. Working.

She wasn't playing. She was the only seamstress left who could keep the sky from falling.

Lyrick raised her hands. Her fingers were wrapped in threads of pure white luminance—Waveform Healing data, the visual language of reality being held together by will alone. Above her, the "sky" of the garden was tearing. A jagged black crack, smelling of ozone and static, was trying to widen. It was a stress fracture caused by her father's battle in The Maelstrom Core.

Every time he swung that scythe, the shockwaves rippled through every domain connected to him. Including this one. Including her.

"Hold on," Lyrick whispered, her voice trembling just slightly. "Please hold on."

She pulled the threads tight. The Dream Stitching technique hummed through her fingers, pulling the edges of reality back together, sewing the rupture shut with a sound like a lullaby played in reverse. It was exhausting. The mask flickered from [o_o] to [>_<] as the strain hit her.

She felt the drain in her blood. Literally felt it—a cold pulling sensation, like someone siphoning warmth from her veins.

Then she felt something else. Warmth. Real warmth. And laughter.

Miley Wilson tumbled through the tall cyan grass below, a two-year-old hurricane in a child-coded hood of pink and yellow. She didn't have a mask yet—she was too young, too unformed, her powers still instinctual rather than channeled. But she didn't need one. The warmth radiated from her like a visible thing, pink and gold light rippling outward with every giggle. She was chasing a butterfly made of refracted dream-light, completely unaware that the black crack in the sky meant something terrible was trying to get in.

Miley laughed again. It wasn't just a sound. It was a Frequency.

The Mainframe understood anger. It could catalog grief. It had algorithms for optimizing pain and formulas for sterilizing fear. But Joy? Joy was an irrational variable. Data that refused to be compressed. A logic error that broke their systems simply by existing.

Miley Wilson was Algorithm Poison. And she didn't even know it.

As her laugh echoed through the garden, the air rippled pink and yellow. The encroaching black static at the edge of the dimension didn't just stop—it lagged. The hostile code hit the Joy Frequency and suffered a Frame Skip, stuttering and buffering because it couldn't process the raw input of innocence.

The smallest dreamweaver produced the loudest glitches. Innocence broke systems because it did not negotiate.

"Miley, stay close," Lyrick called out, dropping to the ground on unsteady legs. "Stay where I can see you."

The crack in the sky sealed, but the garden shuddered. A Dreamquake. The Mainframe wasn't just pressing against their walls anymore—SYPHUS (The Dream Reaper) was trying to pick the lock. Lyrick could feel him out there, scratching at the edges of her creation, trying to find a way inside.

She stood in front of her sister. She looked at her own arms. The teal light of her healing was fading, replaced by something darker. Something inherited. The veins in her forearms flared a deep, dangerous crimson—the color of her father's storm. The Maelstrom current waking up inside her.

This was the Veinflare Guard. Her father's blood. His power, passed down, waiting for the moment she needed it.

She hated it. It felt like anger. It felt like the storm she could hear raging in the distance, the storm that was slowly killing him. But Miley was behind her. And SYPHUS was at the door.

Behind Miley, tiny red thread sparks flickered across her small hands—the Mirror backlink responding to Lyrick's surge. The sisters were connected through more than blood. They shared Life Path Seven, a numerological resonance that made them Twin Pillars even though they weren't biological twins. When one burned, the other sparked.

"I promised," Lyrick whispered to the empty air.

Her hand closed around The Legacy Diamond—the teal-gold crystalline shard that hovered at her shoulder, humming with coded instructions she didn't fully understand yet. It was warm. It was always warm when her father was fighting, like it was trying to tell her he was still alive.

"I promised I'd finish it."

At Miley's side, The Mirrored Legacy Diamond spun in response—pink-gold with yellow and red interior spark veins. It caught the crimson light of Lyrick's anger and reflected it back transformed. Warmer. Softer. Protective instead of destructive.

The Twin Resonance activated.

For a moment, the two sisters stood back-to-back against the void. Harmony and Miley. Lyrick and the anomaly. The Seamstress and the Spark. One holding the world together with thread. One pushing the darkness back with light.

They were Tier Zero. Not because they were the weakest—because they were what everyone else was fighting for. They weren't soldiers. They were the reason the soldiers kept dying outside these walls.

Lyrick's mask settled into a determined, glitching frown: [Ò_Ó]

She reached out and took Miley's small hand. Her sister looked up at her with eyes that held no fear. Just trust. Complete and absolute.

"Let's dream louder," Lyrick said.

She closed her eyes. She reached into the well of imagination that The Mainframe had never been able to catalog. And she pushed.

Miley laughed—because that's what two-year-olds do when their big sister squeezes their hand—and the Joy Frequency amplified through the Twin Resonance like a bell being struck. The Dreamlight Gardens flared. Teal and gold and brilliant white and pink and warm, spreading outward, pushing back the static, reinforcing the walls.

For one second, the entire Network heard them.

Somewhere in the storm, through the chaos of The Maelstrom Core, Grim Logick stumbled. His heart stuttered. The Bleedback nearly dropped him. Then he felt it—the frequency of his daughters, dreaming loud enough to shake the foundations of The Wasteland.

He steadied. He lifted The Load-Bearer. He kept building.

Because they were still dreaming. And as long as The Legacy dreamed, he could not fall.