Extra To Protagonist

Merlin stood over the basin.

The stone hummed.

Not with magic. With memory. A low pulse, like something buried under years of sand, breathing up through the cracks.

He didn't speak.

The prompt hovered where only he could see.

[SELECT MEMORY TYPE]

[OFFERED MEMORY]

[STOLEN MEMORY]

He didn't flinch.

Didn't pause.

He chose.

[STOLEN MEMORY SELECTED]

[Searching…]

The basin filled.

Not with liquid. With light.

Not gold. Not divine.

Soot-black. Starless. The kind of dark that didn't hide anything, only made you see too much.

The others still stood behind him. Watching him watch nothing.

They couldn't see what he saw.

But the spider could.

It reared back slightly. Not afraid. But… amused.

[Memory Source: EXILED ENTITY: ???]

[Timestamp: Lost]

[Classification: Forbidden]

[Warning: Memory is unfiltered.]

[Proceed?]

He didn't say yes.

But the basin accepted anyway.

—

His breath vanished.

Not like suffocation.

Like deletion.

His feet were still planted. His spine still straight.

But the world changed.

No sky. No ground. No sound.

Just memory.

And it began with screaming.

Not human.

Not beast.

Not one voice.

Millions.

Layered.

Stacked on each other like slabs of rot and song. Screaming in harmony. In hatred. In agony.

Then it sharpened.

One voice.

Male? Maybe.

But not born.

Created.

God-touched and abandoned.

"I carried light through the gates," it whispered.

Not aloud. Direct to the bone.

"And they broke my spine for it."

Merlin didn't move.

Couldn't.

The vision dragged him through a place that bled architecture, buildings that melted into flesh, towers made of vertebrae, windows screaming open. No logic. No relief.

Only movement. Endless. Punishment worn as proof.

"They said I chose wrong."

Flames. Not fire. Conceptual.

It burned through thought.

"So I burned their altars. One by one."

He saw it.

This god, or whatever it had been, standing in the ash of heaven, eyes gone, hands raw, dragging the chains of its own sentence behind it like a badge.

Not evil.

Not noble.

Just… empty.

A survivor of something too large to name.

Merlin stood there, inside it.

And the memory turned.

Not past tense now.

Present.

Speaking to him.

"You stole this."

He said nothing.

"So hold it."

The chains slammed around his wrists.

Memory chains.

Not metaphor.

Not magic.

Experience, bound in form.

They cut through him, then vanished.

Gone.

But not forgotten.

—

His breath returned like a punch to the chest.

He staggered once, barely, but it was enough.

Nathan stepped forward. "Merlin—?"

Merlin raised a hand.

Didn't answer.

Couldn't.

The basin was empty.

The spider was gone.

No sound of it leaving.

No goodbye.

Just a whisper left behind:

"You'll understand when they chain you too."

[Memory Integration: 6%]

[Condition: INSTABILITY DETECTED]

[The Devourer leans forward.]

[The First Lawkeeper writes: "He chose suffering not his own."]

[The Crownless Mother remains still.]

[The Smiling Witness begins to laugh.]

Merlin wiped his face once. His hand came away shaking. Not from fear.

From weight.

He turned.

Mae looked at him like he'd aged.

Dion said nothing.

Nathan's eyes locked on his. Reading. Testing.

Elara didn't ask.

Seraphina's voice was quiet.

"What did it give you?"

He didn't answer.

Because there weren't words for it yet.

Not ones that would survive saying aloud.

—

The silence that followed didn't belong to the room. It belonged to the thing that had once owned that memory.

Merlin sat back slowly, eyes open but not focused. The others didn't speak.

Not because they didn't want to, but because they felt it, whatever it was that had changed in the moment his fingers touched the basin.

The air didn't move. Even breath had to be pulled through something heavier than before.

He didn't speak. Not yet.

Inside his skull, the memory was still unfolding.

Not like a vision. Not a flash of someone else's past.

This was suffering measured in years. Loneliness so complete it had stopped being a wound and started becoming identity.

The exile hadn't been sudden. It had been surgical. A god stripped of name, function, and place, then scattered into moments, buried in broken temples, forgotten tongues, myths reduced to footnotes.

But the feeling that stayed with Merlin wasn't the god's pain.

It was its patience.

It had waited. Not for rescue. Not even for revenge.

It had waited to be remembered.

And now it remembered him.

[You have accepted Memory: Fragment of the Nameless Exile.]

[Processing…]

[The Smiling Witness watches with interest.]

[The Judge With No Mouth adjusts their ledger.]

[The Crownless Mother has whispered your name.]

Merlin didn't move. He just breathed.

Nathan stepped in closer, his boots scraping the old mosaic. "That didn't look like anything I've seen."

Merlin looked up.

Nathan's gaze was steady. "That was something else."

Elara shifted slightly behind them. "What did you see?"

Merlin didn't answer.

Not to lie. Not to deceive.

Because truth had weight. And right now, no one else in the room could carry it.

He looked away. Back toward the center of the basin. The spider was gone again. But he could still feel its gaze. Not above. Below. Watching from beneath the world it had once walked.

"There's something deeper here," Merlin said finally. "And we're not finished."

Dion scoffed softly. "We weren't finished two trials ago."

Seraphina stepped forward, slow and careful. "Is it dangerous?"

Merlin stood. The motion was smooth, but his muscles resisted. As if his body had absorbed too much of the exile's pain and didn't quite know how to be human again.

"Yes," he said. "It's dangerous."

He turned toward the archway.

"But not in the way you think."

—

The corridor spiraled downward, not steeply, but deliberately. Every few meters, the stone changed.

First, smooth. Then cracked. Then lined with veins of blackened ore that pulsed faintly under Merlin's fingers. Not mana. Not life. Something older. Tired.

He didn't speak.

Not because there was nothing to say, because words had no shape left to hold what he'd just seen.

A god's memory.

Or what was left of one.

The spider hadn't lied. It hadn't warned him either. It simply waited. Spun truths like silk and let him tangle himself inside them.

The shard wasn't a vision. It was lived. Experienced. Poured into his skull with a silence so vast it felt like drowning.

And the pain, wasn't pain.

It was endurance. Without reward. Without reprieve. Endless moments of thought in absence.

Of screaming without lungs. Watching time slide by like sediment while locked in a cage made of perception.

The exile had been a god. Once.

And they'd buried themselves here. Beneath Titanos. Beneath history.

And now—

[Memory Fragment Assimilated.]

[Tag Applied: The One Who Endured.]

[The Crownless Mother whispers: "You understand now."]

[The Smiling Witness leans back.]

Merlin blinked hard, breath catching once. Not out of panic. Just adjustment. The corridor blurred.

Not visibly, emotionally. The edges of his awareness stretched further than the torchlight reached.

"You okay?" Elara's voice came from behind, low and unreadable.

Merlin didn't turn. "I will be."

She didn't press. No one did.

Because whatever had happened when he touched that shard, wasn't for them.

—

They reached the base of the descent. The stone changed again, dark marble veined in gold. But the gold didn't shine. It pulsed. Just barely. Like breath buried under rock.

Dion slowed. "I don't like this."

"Noted," Seraphina said, tone clipped.

Mae's fingers curled near her side, hovering near the hilt of a blade that wasn't there anymore. "What is this place?"

Merlin answered before he could decide not to.

"It's a prison."

The corridor ended.

Opened.

A wide, circular antechamber carved from bedrock. No door. No obvious ceiling. Just emptiness above, swallowing light.

A dais at the center, long since cracked. Symbols ringed its edge, jagged, mismatched, etched over and over again like someone had kept carving until they forgot what language was.

Elara moved first. She crouched near the edge of the circle, fingertips brushing the stone. "This wasn't built. This was carved out from the inside."

"Like something trying to escape," Nathan said.

"No," Merlin corrected quietly. "Like something trying to leave a message."

The air changed.

Again.

A hiss, no sound, but sensation. Like breath under skin. Like being watched from inside your own memory.

And then the system blinked.

[The Devourer watches.]

[The First Lawkeeper has gone silent.]

[Accessing: REMNANT—Exile Code 01]

The dais lit.

One pulse.

Then static.

Then—

A voice. Not spoken. Not heard.

Just imprinted.

"I am not what they said. I am not what they buried."

Elara flinched.

Nathan went still.

Merlin didn't move.

Because the voice wasn't coming from around them.

It was inside.

Not from the system.

From the memory.

"I was a god. Not high. Not first. Not worshipped. Just… present."

Mae staggered back two steps.

The ground didn't tremble.

But the stone remembered what it was like to be screamed into.

"I watched a cycle break. I held back silence. I held back the thing you still call night."

The voice was unraveling. Not mad. Just exhausted.

Merlin stepped forward.

The firelight from Nathan's hand caught the edge of the dais.

A mark glowed.

A handprint.

Not human.

But close enough.

He reached out.

Paused.

Then placed his palm against it.

The voice stopped.

The stone beneath them cracked again, this time not subtly. A web of splits spread from the dais outward, thin, harmless. Like veins. Or seals coming loose.

Then, another voice.

No words.

Just pressure.

Weight behind thought.

Like the world watching back.

[The Judge with No Mouth opens their eyes.]

[The Crownless Mother turns away.]

[The Smiling Witness writes: "He chose to listen."]

Merlin pulled back his hand.

But the damage was done.

A seam in the dais split open, slow and clean, revealing something beneath the marble: a container. Rough-cut. Crystal. Filled with—

Memory.

No light. No sound. Just a stillness that felt too aware.

Elara took one step forward. "What is it?"

Merlin didn't answer right away.

He crouched.

Stared into the crystal.

And saw not a reflection—but an image burned in glass.

A child.

Alone.

Staring up at a sky filled with names.

And then, fire.

Then, exile.

Then—

Nothing.

He exhaled once. Low.

"It's a record," he said finally. "Of the Exile's last choice."

"And what did they choose?" Nathan asked.

Merlin looked up.

"Not to return."

Silence followed.

Mae stepped back. "Can we leave?"

"No," Elara said, flat. "Not yet."

Dion looked around. "Is it safe?"

"Define safe," Seraphina muttered.

The corridor behind them remained unchanged.

But every instinct said this place wasn't just memory anymore.

It was awake.

Merlin stood.

His system pulsed again.

[Tag Added: Warden of the Unnamed.]

[Access Permission Granted: Tier-Six Seal—Pending Confirmation.]

[Observer Count: 51]

[The Nameless Clockmaker resets their dial.]

[The Crownless Mother does not return.]

Merlin didn't smile.

Didn't flinch.

He turned to the others.

"We've found what the gods wanted buried."

Mae's voice broke the tension.

"Then what the hell do they want us to do with it?"

Merlin didn't answer.

Because he didn't know yet.