The alert sounded at the canal bench on a Tuesday.

It wasn’t a threat assessment. It wasn’t flag moves. It wasn’t quest logs being updated, stats changing, or formations getting a heads up. No. All it was was a message flashing innocuously in the top left hand corner of my UI overlay, something that didn’t need any immediate action taken but just waited there until I got around to it.

WIKI ALERT

New entry generated — non-canonical origin

Category: Post-canon documentation

Status: Auto-generating from observed events

Entries: 4

Review available

For a few moments, I gazed out across the canal.

And then, I accessed it.

The wiki that had been brought along by me had been a complete account of Shattered Vows Online, as of the point of its publication. This meant all canonical characters, flag moves, dungeon floors that held data, every plot point from Daren arriving in Ashveil to the exact ending that I had seen three times and two videos of before I had begun this journey. It had gotten increasingly darker as well since the wiki had gone silent following Vorn’s flags suspending themselves.

Not broken — the data on the wiki was still there and still correct, but the story told no longer matched the events that had been unfolding around me after I’d wiped Lyra’s corruption meter using a single-use system cheat and Vorn had walked out of the marketplace, all flags suspended, leaving the story the game designers had planned behind to make notes on what had just happened.

Four new entries. I clicked on the first one.

WIKI — POST-CANON ENTRY 001

Subject: Mira

Classification: Non-game-origin variable / confirmed ally

Role: Female Rival — REFUSED (within 6 hours of insertion)

Current function: Intelligence asset / combat companion / relational

Weapon: Crossbow, Tier 2, INT scaling

Rank: D — assessed via Floor 6 clear record override

Notable: Foreknowledge exceeds canonical MC by 14% / forum data supplement / Flag 4 pre-disclosure through datamine / secondary objective complete

Floor 6 clear record: confirmed, on record

Floor 7 entry: on file

Relationship / Kai: 97

Status: ACTIVE — new objective forming

I read it twice. The wiki had an entry for Mira. It wasn’t a canonical one — there was no such thing as a canonical Mira, she was post-canon like me, added to a position the game created and promptly rejected. The wiki had constructed it using recorded event data. Actual events, recorded in the same dry-reference style as the rest of the canonical characters, stored in the same database.

The game had filed Mira.

I opened the next entry.

WIKI — POST-CANON ENTRY 002

Subject: Rin

Classification: Game-native / post-canon spawn

Spawn condition: Floor 6 clear — consequence generation

Role: Solo runner — party formation subsequent

Weapon: Two short blades, melee, STR dominant

Rank: B

Notable: Eleven days on solo Floor 6 before joining a party / self-taught deflection technique on day 3 / triple cluster encounters documented / corruption meter: 4 — static during all encounters

Floor 6 clear: confirmed, on record

Relationship / Kai: 67

Relationship / Mira: 29

Status: ACTIVE

Rin was now entered as well. A character spawned as a consequence of clearing Floor 6 of the dungeon, which we weren’t even meant to have cleared at our rank, recorded in the exact same style as all the other canonical characters I knew of when I arrived.

It wasn’t confusing, what had transpired. Just — writing it down.

I clicked on the third one.

WIKI — POST-CANON ENTRY 003

Subject: Sable

Classification: Game-native / city population

Role: Market artisan — document illustration

Notable: Non-combatant / not affiliated with any guild / no dungeon access / no approach mechanics activated / corruption meter: 23 — progressing via organic interaction / establishment phase ongoing

Relationship / Kai: 74

Status: ACTIVE — arc in progress

And I sat with that for a while.

There was an entry in the wiki for Sable. There was a corruption meter number for Sable. It knew about the arc, knew it was in progress. Just like the file on Vorn and his flag sequences — the mechanics being executed, observed without value judgment and logged as data.

The difference between the process I was going through and Vorn’s process, the difference I could only get back to and not figure out somehow — the wiki wasn’t interested in that difference. It just recorded the corruption meter and the relationship level and the status of the arc.

I closed out that page and moved on to the fourth.

WIKI — POST-CANON ENTRY 004

Subject: Kai

Classification: Non-game-origin variable / NPC Unit 4471

Canonical role: Supporting NPC — background, non-interactive

Current function: PRIMARY

Notable: Complete wiki knowledge / cheat system activated / one-time bonus used for Lyra corruption reset / Flag 4 triggered / canonical NTR narrative suspended / post-canon state established / Floor 6 first clear on record / Floor 7 entry logged

Rank: B

Current objective: GENERATING

Status: ACTIVE — post-canon primary

I stared at the last part for a while.

Post-canon primary.

When I had first come in, I had been NPC Unit 4471. Background. Non-interactive. A character there to add flavor to a game world by making the city seem full, who had a name in the source but no dialogue and nothing going on.

This wiki had just designated me the primary character.

I closed my alert window and looked out into the canal.

The water flowed at its regular rate. Two hundred feet away, a merchant cart passed over the bridge. An apprentice of some kind was squabbling with a vendor selling vegetables in the precise tone of someone sure of their rightness.

Shattered Vows Online had its canon ending wherein Daren went into Ashveil, met Lyra, formed a relationship with her till it was 1000, only to have it destroyed by Vorn’s strategy when Daren was simply naïve enough to not realize what was really going on until it was too late. This is what happened. I knew. I saw it. I loved it because it wasn’t my life.

And yet I was now in it and it took me thirty-four days to ensure it would never come to pass.

Lyra and Daren had reached 865 and counting, with Vorn currently suspended with all his flags and in Ashveil self-defining somewhere in town. The corruption meter for Lyra was zero and trust threshold was 94% with me and she was completely done with her processing arc. All this meant that the canon ending wherein Lyra broke, Daren was emotionally crippled, and Vorn went away unscathed wouldn’t happen.

This is why the game opened a fresh file for all this information and then reclassified the role.

PATTERN RECOGNITION II

Environmental note: Wiki auto-generation based on observed event data — four entries total / category is post-canon / created from scratch following canonical formatting rules. Kai entry classified as post-canon primary. Canonical NPC role formally reclassified.

Conclusion: Game system is now operating on post-canon status as new default condition. Documentation process has been reassigned from canonical record to live event logging. The story the game is currently writing is the story actually happening.

I thought on this some more.

I then thought of Floor 7, with incorrect geometry where the third hallway splits off and ambient temperature higher than any of the previous floors as well as no wiki data aside from my own entry records.

The game is auto-documenting based on the events that are being witnessed. That means that Floor 7, when mapped accurately, will auto-document itself by producing its own entries based on our field data.

This was us creating the canon.

Either it was the most important thing that had taken place since I showed up here, or it was merely a document management function that redirected me to pertinent data because the original data set was invalid.

Perhaps both. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

I let Rin know via the runner network that our run on Floor 7 was scheduled for tomorrow. Mira probably already knew — she received the wiki alert like the rest of us but managed it more quickly and had compiled her observations well before I was halfway through the first entry.

Once I returned to the Broken Crown, Sena had the cups prepared, and people started filtering in for their evening drinks, and the city did what all cities do, which is to keep on doing what cities do despite what the wiki may say.

I sipped on my cup and considered those four fresh entries in the upper-left quadrant of my UI while remembering NPC Unit 4471 being labeled post-canon primary in a game world that had begun writing its sequel.

Then I went to sleep, because Floor 7 started at seventh bell, and misaligned geometry at the third junction wouldn’t plot itself.