We spent two weeks exploring the plateau.
Each day brought new discoveries—ruins of civilizations I definitely hadn't imagined, creatures that followed biological rules I'd never studied, weather patterns that developed independently of my expectations. The world was vast and complex and terrifyingly autonomous.
Or maybe I was just very good at creating things unconsciously.
The question haunted me less now, but it never fully disappeared.
On the fifteenth day, we found the stairs.
They descended into the earth in the middle of nowhere—no building, no marker, just ancient stone steps leading down into darkness. They shouldn't have existed. I would never have thought to put them there.
"Should we?" Mash asked, peering into the depths.
"Absolutely not," Emiya said immediately.
"Absolutely yes," Cu countered with a grin.
We stood around the entrance, debating. It felt significant somehow. Like the mirror, but different. Less a threshold between worlds and more a passage into something hidden.
"I'll go first," I decided.
"No," Artoria said firmly. "We don't know what's down there. I'll scout ahead."
"It's my world," I argued. "My responsibility—"
"Our world," Mash corrected gently. "We're in this together, remember?"
So we descended together, weapons ready, lights conjured by Da Vinci floating ahead to illuminate the path.
The stairs went down for what felt like miles. The air grew colder, heavier, charged with something that made my skin prickle. Reality felt thin here, like walking through spider webs.
Finally, the stairs ended.
We stepped into a vast cavern, and everyone stopped breathing.
The space was enormous—larger than any natural formation should be. But it wasn't empty. Floating in the center, suspended by nothing, was a sphere of pure light. It pulsed rhythmically, like a heartbeat.
And around it, carved into every surface of the cavern, were names.
Thousands of them. Millions, maybe. Each one glowing faintly, written in languages I could and couldn't read, stretching into the darkness beyond our light's reach.
"What is this?" Medusa whispered.
I approached the sphere slowly, drawn by something I couldn't name. As I got closer, I could see that the light wasn't uniform—it swirled with colors, patterns, shapes that almost formed images before dissolving.
I reached out.
"Master, don't—" Mash started.
Too late. My hand touched the light.
And I saw.
Not visions exactly. More like... memories that weren't mine. Knowledge that flooded in all at once, overwhelming and terrible and beautiful.
This was a Record.
Not my record. Not even a record of my world. But a record of all worlds, all realities, all creations of all dreamers across all of existence. Every person who'd ever existed in any created reality had their name here, their essence preserved, their reality acknowledged.
Mash's name was here. Cu's. Artoria's. All of them.
But there was something wrong with their names.
They flickered. Pulsed with unstable light. Like they were... incomplete. Uncertain. Existing in a state between fully real and potentially false.
"Master?" Mash's voice seemed to come from very far away. "What do you see?"
I pulled my hand back, stumbling.
"You're real," I gasped. "All of you. This proves it. You're recorded here, in the fundamental archive of existence. You're not just in my head—you're part of the actual structure of reality."
"Then why do you look terrified?" Emiya asked.
Because I'd seen something else. Something I didn't want to tell them.
Their names weren't the only ones flickering. Throughout the cavern, countless other names pulsed with that same uncertain light. Beings created by dreamers who'd abandoned them, or doubted them, or failed to fully commit to their reality.
And slowly, over time, those flickering names were fading.
Going dark.
Ceasing to exist.
"We need to leave," I said.
"But we just got here—" Cu started.
"Now. We need to leave now."
Something in my voice made them obey without question. We climbed back up those endless stairs, and I didn't breathe easily until we were back under open sky, with solid ground and fresh air and distance from that terrible, beautiful Record.
"What did you see?" Artoria demanded once we'd made camp. "What aren't you telling us?"
I couldn't hide it from them. They deserved the truth.
"Your names were there," I said. "In the Record. Proof that you're real, that you exist as part of fundamental reality. But..." I struggled for words. "But they were unstable. Flickering. Like you're not fully real yet. Like you're in danger of... of fading."
Silence.
"Fading," Mash repeated quietly. "As in ceasing to exist?"
"I don't know. Maybe. The Record showed countless names like yours—beings created by dreamers who'd left their worlds or stopped believing in them or..."
"Or what?" Medusa pressed.
"Or who died," I finished. "When a dreamer dies, their creations sometimes fade. Not immediately, but gradually. Unless they've become real enough, stable enough, to exist independently."
"And we're not," Cu said. Not a question.
"I don't know," I admitted. "The flickering could mean you're in process—becoming real but not fully there yet. Or it could mean you're dependent on me in ways we haven't discovered. I couldn't tell."
Da Vinci was pacing, thinking. "If we're tied to your existence, if we're dependent on your consciousness maintaining this world, then we need to understand that dependency. Find ways to stabilize ourselves. Become more real."
"How?" Emiya asked. "How do you make yourself more real?"
"By living," Artoria said firmly. "By making choices, having experiences, growing beyond what we were created to be. That's how children become independent of parents. That's how anything becomes real."
"But there's no guarantee that works," Medusa pointed out. "We could spend years, decades, centuries living and growing, and still fade the moment Master dies."
"Then we make those years count," Mash said. "We live so fully, so completely, that even if we do fade eventually, we'll have been real while we lasted."
I loved them for their courage. For facing this existential threat with determination instead of despair.
But I was terrified.
Because I'd seen something else in the Record. Something I definitely wasn't telling them.
My own name had been there too.
And it had been flickering faster than theirs.