CHAPTER IV

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

Lyrick Logick sat cross-legged floating in the air of The Dreamlight Gardens. This wasn’t a physical place; it was a pocket dimension stitched out of teal light and soft gold memory, a safe house hidden inside the collective subconscious of The Network.

She wasn't playing. She was working.

Lyrick raised her hands. Her fingers were wrapped in threads of pure, white luminance—Waveform Healing data. 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 Grim’s battle in The Maelstrom Core.

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

She pulled the threads tight. The Dream Stitching pulled the edges of reality back together, sewing the rupture shut with a hum that sounded like a lullaby played in reverse. It was exhausting. She was nine years old, and she was the only seamstress left who could keep the sky from falling.

Beneath her hood, her Emoji Mask flickered. The digital display on the glass surface shifted from a focused [o_o] to a strained [>_<]. She felt the drain in her blood.

Then, she felt the warmth.

Miley, the anomaly, tumbled through the tall, cyan grass below. She was barely two years old, a toddler navigating a war zone she didn’t understand. But where Lyrick worked with precision, Miley worked with instinct.

Miley laughed.

It wasn't just a sound. It was a Frequency.

The Mainframe understood anger. It understood grief. It could catalog and sterilize pain. But Joy? Joy was an irrational variable. It was data that refused to be compressed.

As Miley’s laugh echoed through the garden, the air around her rippled pink and yellow. The encroaching black static at the edge of the garden 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.

"Miley, stay close," Lyrick called out, dropping to the ground.

The crack in the sky sealed, but the garden shuddered. A Dreamquake. The Mainframe wasn't just knocking; SYPHUS, the Dream Reaper, was trying to pick the lock.

Lyrick 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.

This was the Veinflare Guard. It was her father’s blood—The Maelstrom current—waking up inside her. She hated it. It felt like anger. It felt like the storm. But she needed it.

"I promised," Lyrick whispered to the empty air, clutching The Legacy Diamond that hovered at her shoulder. "I promised I'd finish it."

The Mirrored Legacy Diamond at Miley’s side spun in response, catching the red light of Lyrick’s anger and reflecting it back as protective warmth. The Twin Resonance activated.

For a moment, the two sisters stood back-to-back against the void—the Seamstress and the Spark. One holding the world together with thread, the other pushing the darkness back with light.
They were Tier 0. They weren't soldiers. They were the reason the soldiers were dying outside.

Lyrick’s mask settled into a determined, glitching frown [Ò_Ó]. She reached out and took Miley’s small hand.

"Let's dream louder," Lyrick said.
And for a second, The Network heard them.