Priscilla woke up to the smell of lemon-scented floor wax and stale bread.
She blinked against the harsh, fluorescent glare of the Obsidian Aegis Academy's basement. Her head throbbed with a rhythmic, dull ache—the kind that comes from a 14-hour shift in the Star-Cinder pits. She reached for the Star-Cinder daggers at her waist, but her hands grasped only air and the coarse fabric of a Third-Class scullery tunic.
The obsidian tattoos on her arm were gone. The starlight in her eyes had faded into a tired, human brown.
"Cilla! Get up, you NPC! If those floor-boards aren't sparkling before the Heirs wake up, the Rectress will have us in the containment cells!"
Priscilla bolted upright. Standing over her was Noah. But he wasn't the glass-armed hero of the North. He was the skinny, scruffy boy she had first met in the barracks. His arm was flesh and bone, free of the entropy-curse. He looked younger, his face devoid of the scars from the Void-Born war.
"Noah?" Priscilla's voice was a hoarse whisper. She lunged forward, grabbing his shoulders. "Noah, we have to go! The Echos—the Gala—the Void-Born Flagship! We were in the North!"
Noah stared at her, then let out a sharp, mocking laugh. "The North? Cilla, I told you to stop reading those 'Sovereign' trash-novels. You're getting delulu. You're a scholarship student, remember? Your 'Main Character Energy' is at a zero."
Priscilla pushed past him, sprinting toward the Great Hall. Every corner she turned was a memory of her weeks undercover. She saw Jennie and Kaelen arguing over a broken mop. She saw Liam lifting crates in the kitchen.
"Liam!" she screamed, skidding to a halt. "The Grid! The Obsidian Protocol! Do you remember?"
Liam looked at her with a blank, pitying expression. "I remember I'm hungry, Cilla. And I remember that if we're late for morning assembly, we lose our meal credits. Stop acting like an academic victim and get your bucket."
Priscilla felt a cold, oily dread sliding down her spine. This wasn't just a dream. The air was too real. The sting of the lemon-wax in her nose was too sharp.
She reached the Great Hall and skidded to a stop. The doors were open. The dancers were there, just like the Gala, but they weren't silver-collared ghosts. They were just... students. And on the throne sat Lilliana Thorne, alive and smiling, drinking tea as if the last year of war had never happened.
"Ah, 742," Lilliana said, her eyes twinkling with a predatory warmth. "Back so soon? You were staring at the wall again. You really must stop daydreaming about being a Queen. It's quite pathetic for a girl of your station."
Priscilla felt her mind begin to fray. The memories of the North—the cold wind of Zenith-Alpha, the feel of the Void in her hand—began to feel like the fading remnants of a fever dream. Maybe she was just a scullery maid. Maybe the "High Sovereign" was just a story she told herself to survive the dark.
She picked up a scrub brush and knelt on the cold marble. Scrub. Rinse. Repeat.
But as she dipped her hand into the bucket, she saw her reflection in the soapy water. For a split second, her eyes flashed with a violet fire. A single, black runic tattoo flickered on her wrist before vanishing.
"No," Priscilla whispered. "This is a Shared Neural Simulation."
She looked at the dancers. They were moving in the same 4/4 time signature as the "Silent Gala." It was the same math. The same logic. The Echos hadn't just defeated her; they had put her back in the "Box."
Priscilla stood up, her eyes narrowing. She didn't go for a weapon. She went for a Logic-Break.
She walked up to the center of the dance floor and screamed a string of "Human Noise"—the most chaotic, unrefined slang she could remember from the pits.
"NPC ENERGY! DELULU! ACADEMIC VICTIM!"
The music faltered. The students froze. Lilliana's tea cup stopped mid-air. The walls of the Great Hall began to ripple like a digital screen under high heat.
"Noah! Look at me!" Priscilla grabbed Noah again, her voice a lethal roar. "You aren't a servant! You're a wolf! You're my Vanguard! We fought the Void together!"
Noah's eyes flickered. A jagged line of black glass started to manifest on his arm, cracking his skin. He let out a pained, guttural growl. "Cilla... it... it hurts..."
"YES! IT HURTS BECAUSE IT'S REAL!"
Suddenly, the world turned white.
A high-frequency whine filled Priscilla's head. When her vision cleared, she was back in the basement.
"Cilla! Get up, you NPC! If those floor-boards aren't sparkling..."
Priscilla froze. It was the exact same second. The exact same smell.
"Noah?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"You're getting delulu, Cilla," Noah laughed.
Priscilla realized the horror of the Mirror Prison. Every time she tried to wake them up, the system "Reset" the loop. And every reset took a piece of her memory. She couldn't remember the name of the flagship. She couldn't remember Frederick's face.
She walked to the storage closet, her heart hammering. She needed a catalyst. Something the "System" couldn't account for.
Inside the closet, she found a small, discarded mirror. She looked at herself. The "maid" was winning. Her face looked softer, more compliant.
"You're tired, aren't you?"
Priscilla whirled around. Standing in the shadows of the mop-buckets was... Herself.
It was the version of Priscilla from Volume 1—the one who had just won the war and wanted to hide. She wasn't an Echo. She wasn't a clone. She was the Subconscious Architect.
"This place is safe, Elena," the Shadow-Priscilla said, her voice a comforting hum. "No one dies here. Noah's arm is healed. Tristan isn't a monster. You don't have to be a Queen anymore. You can just be Cilla. Isn't that what you always wanted?"
Priscilla looked at the Shadow. She looked at the door where Noah was waiting, happy and whole. The temptation was a physical weight, heavier than any Void-gravity.
"I wanted to be free," Priscilla said, her voice cracking. "But a cage made of sugar is still a cage."
She gripped the small mirror in her hand until the glass shattered, slicing her palm. The pain was sharp. It was jagged. It was Real.
"The Noise isn't just the music, you shadow," Priscilla hissed, the black runes on her arm erupting through the "maid" skin with a violent, bloody force. "It's the pain of choosing to be yourself, even when it hurts."
She didn't try to wake Noah up this time. She turned her obsidian-hand toward the Floor itself.
"If I can't wake the dreamers," she growled, her eyes turning a terrifying, starlight-violet. "I'll just burn the dream."
The chapter ends with Priscilla slamming her hand into the Academy foundations, channeling the Obsidian Protocol not to fight, but to "glitch" the entire simulation into a catastrophic system-error.