Rust and Feather
The sky hadn't cleared in twenty years.
It still hung low and gray above the ash plains, clotted with smoke from a thousand rusting towers. The air here didn’t taste like air—it tasted like memory. Burnt. Bitter. Left too long on the fire.
Tarn kept walking.
He didn’t speak. He hadn’t in days. The only sound was the grind of sand beneath his boots and the slow wheeze of the filter mask strapped across his face. He’d used the last of his water three hills back, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t out here to live.
He was out here to find what fell.
The old ones had called it a miracle.
Said a man flew once—rose on rusted wings and punched a hole in the sky. Said he never came back.
But Tarn had seen something they hadn’t.
He was just a child then, seven maybe, clutching a copper-wire doll and hiding in a crawlspace under the Wombs when the sky cracked open. And through that crack—brief as breath—he’d seen a glint of light arcing into the clouds.
And he had followed it.
Not right away. Life in the Verge doesn’t allow for quests—not when you’re branded, orphaned, and breathing secondhand air. But the memory stayed. Lived under his ribs. And when the city finally turned too quiet, and the Saints stopped looking, and the Creed felt more like an echo than a threat—he left.
He walked east. Toward the horizon where the smoke thinned and the wind bit harder.
Toward the place the rocket had flown.
He found it on the fifth day.
Not standing proud. Not blazing with myth. But broken, its hull half-buried in a dry gully carved by time and sorrow.
At first, he thought it was just another slag-barge wreck. The tail fins were twisted, and the plating was peeled like a burst tin. But then he saw the etching on the side, half-scoured by ashstorms:
ECHO-9
He slid down the embankment, boots skidding through loose dirt, heart pounding in his chest like it was trying to remind him he was still alive.
The cockpit glass was shattered inward. The control console had melted and re-hardened into slag. But the shape—the soul—of the machine was still there.
Tarn placed a hand on the fuselage.
It was cold.
Dead.
But not empty.
The cargo hatch was bent, but he forced it open. The metal screamed like a wounded animal, and for a moment, he hesitated. Part of him didn’t want to see what was inside.
Because part of him still believed Waylan Vire was immortal.
But the vessel didn’t lie.
Inside, there was no body. No man. Just the remains of something that mattered.
Burned harness straps.
Fractured regulator tubing.
And in the footwell—
A shape.
Curled. Still. Covered in soot and silence.
Tarn dropped to his knees. Brushed away the black.
“Scraps…”
The automaton hound didn’t move.
Its jaw was warped. One lens was missing. The other was cracked straight through. Part of the chestplate had caved in where the impact hit hardest. Wires hung like muscle torn free of bone.
But Tarn remembered the sound the dog made. A chirp. A high, hopeful note. The sound that had followed him into sleep when he was small and scared and hidden beneath the world.
He leaned in close. Whispered like it was prayer.
“Hey, old boy. It's me.”
Still nothing.
Then—faintly—a twitch. A hiss of old steam. The flicker of light beneath the lens.
“You remember me, don’t you?”
The sound came slow. Crooked. But real.
A chirp.
Then a second, like it had to find the right pitch again.
Then, a sigh—a quiet exhale of recognition.
Tarn closed his eyes, forehead pressed to the broken steel of the dog’s shoulder.
“You made it,” he whispered.
“You crazy, beautiful machine… you actually made it.”
Scraps whined softly and tried to sit up. Failed.
Tarn caught him.
He didn’t cry. Not then. Not yet.
He just sat there in the dirt beside the broken rocket that had once carried the skyborn dreamer into the sky.
And together, they rested.
The boy who survived the Tithe.
And the dog who returned from the fire.
Tarn didn’t sleep that night.
He sat by the rocket's broken hull, back propped against scorched plating, tools spread in a semicircle around Scraps like a makeshift shrine. The wind whistled through the gully, tugging ash across the wreck like a shroud.
Scraps lay on his side, tail coiled in a protective curl, one paw twitching every so often like he still remembered how to run.
Tarn worked in silence.
First, the chestplate.
He peeled it back with a rust-spotted pry rod, revealing the inner workings—a marvel of design, even damaged. The steam-core was cracked but not destroyed. The logic lattice had scorched edges, but the center node—where memory was stored—still pulsed, faint and stubborn.
“You’ve been through hell, haven’t you?”
Scraps let out a soft click, a broken approximation of a bark. It fizzled out halfway.
Tarn smiled—tight and tired. “Yeah. Me too.”
He soldered a patch across the core casing, rerouted a melted strand with a copper filament, and replaced the missing lens with a salvaged optic from a scorched drone he'd once disassembled in the Wombs. Every piece was jury-rigged. Every fix temporary. But it was enough to keep Scraps awake.
Enough to keep him remembering.
By morning, the wind had stilled, and the gully felt like a graveyard.
Tarn stood at the edge of the crater, arms crossed, staring down at what was left of Echo-9. Most of the hull was unsalvageable. But the cockpit…
It still held something.
He climbed back in.
The control panel was fused. The nav systems were dust. But beneath the main console—wedged in a compartment marked ACCESS CORE: PILOT DIRECTIVE—he found a sealed capsule.
Small. Black. Fitted with brass trim and a twist-lock seal.
No label. No code. Just a gear symbol etched into its face—cracked through the center.
Not the False Cog.
The Root.
Tarn’s breath caught in his throat.
He turned the lock.
Inside: a memory spool.
Old tech. Pre-Creed. Hard-wired data thread, not wireless. Whatever was on it had to be read manually. Couldn’t be traced. Couldn’t be erased remotely.
A note was folded around it, oil-smudged but intact.
Tarn unfolded it with shaking fingers.
“If this reaches you… it means the sky didn’t break me. It changed me. Tell them the silence isn’t empty. It listens.”—W.V.
Tarn stared at the initials until the sun touched the wreckage and made the brass shimmer.
Weylan hadn’t died on impact.
At least… not immediately.
He had known what might happen.
He had planned for it.
And he had left a message.
By dusk, Tarn had secured the memory spool and built a stretcher from rocket panels to haul Scraps out of the gully. The climb was brutal—his legs screamed, his lungs burned—but he didn’t stop.
Not now.
He didn’t know where to take it yet. The Root was gone. The city had changed.
But somewhere, someone had to remember.
And if no one did?
Then Tarn would become the one who carried the truth.
The ash fell slower out here.
The smoke thinner.
And for the first time in years, Tarn felt like the sky was watching him back.
Caligo Verge looked smaller than Tarn remembered.
Not physically—its towers still loomed, its smoke still curled—but the weight of it, the menace… it had thinned. Like a beast that had outgrown its own hunger.
Tarn crouched in the shadows beneath a collapsed overpass, watching the Saint patrol pass two blocks north. They moved slower now. Fewer of them. Their robes darker, censors colder. The silence they once carried like scripture now felt tired. Threadbare.
“They don’t believe anymore,” Tarn whispered.
Scraps lay low beside him, cloak-draped, one optic still dim. His repairs were holding—barely. The dog’s breath was shallow. Faint clicks pulsed from his side every twelve seconds. Failing coolant line. Tarn would need a pressure valve soon, or he’d seize up.
“Hold on, boy,” he murmured. “We’re close.”
The alley reeked of rusted wires and old doctrine. Same city. Same streets. But something had changed.
The murals were gone.
The wall-etchings that once declared HE DID NOT FALL had been sandblasted clean. Even the old Root entry markers—cracked gears carved into drainpipes—had been scraped smooth or paved over with council ashstone.
But Tarn still remembered where to look.
He took the underchannels—the same sewer conduits Scraps once ran through with a child clinging to his back.
Only this time, Tarn carried him.
He’d fashioned a shoulder sling from melted gearstraps, anchoring Scraps to his side like a wounded comrade. Every ten steps, the automaton let out a soft whimper—not pain exactly. Just tired.
Beneath the old scriptorium, behind a pressure door painted to look abandoned, Tarn found it: Node Twelve.
Or what was left of it.
Caved in. Burnt. Abandoned.
A gear was still embedded in the wall, barely visible beneath a crust of soot.
But this one wasn’t cracked.
It was whole.
He pressed his hand to it.
Nothing happened.
“Please…” Tarn whispered.
The gear clicked once. The wall hissed. A panel slid open.
Just enough for a man and a dog to pass through.
The inside was hollowed, stripped of most tools, tables overturned. Dust coated everything. But there was a small workbench still intact, and along the far wall—what he’d hoped for:
An old Root relay terminal. Dead. Cold. But there.
Tarn set Scraps down gently and laid the capsule on the table.
“Rest,” he said softly. “We made it.”
Scraps didn’t chirp. He just sighed and powered into sleep mode, his body curling instinctively beneath Tarn’s coat like a child hiding from thunder.
Tarn turned to the spool.
He didn’t open it yet.
He just stared at it.
A cracked gear. Brass trim. One word etched on the underside, nearly rubbed smooth:
Echo.
He didn’t know what it meant yet.
But the sky hadn’t broken Weylan.
The world had.
And Tarn was going to find out why.
The city didn’t speak anymore.
Not in the way it used to—no whispered codes in steam lines, no murmured Root chants buried under the clank of Saint boots. Just quiet. Flat. Lifeless.
Tarn moved through the underpaths beneath Caligo Verge like a ghost retracing old steps. The old Root maps were useless—most nodes had either collapsed or been sealed off with concrete and ordinance foam.
Node Twelve had been a flicker of luck. It wouldn’t last.
He needed a reader. And someone who remembered how to use it.
The capsule sat heavy in his coat. He hadn’t opened it since arrival. Not because he feared what it said—but because he feared what it didn’t.
What if it’s just static?
Scraps padded behind him now, tail lowered, limp in his left hind leg. Tarn had rigged a support brace from a snapped conduit hook and wire string. It clicked with each step, but held.
“You’ll be good as new soon,” Tarn lied.
Scraps didn’t argue.
They passed through the Vein Tunnels—a tangle of steam arteries that used to feed the inner factories. Tarn paused beneath a rusted pressure gauge, wiping grime off a wall that once bore the Root sigil.
Nothing there now. Just a smear.
But the air... it pulsed.
Not with heat, but rhythm.
One hiss.
Pause.
Two short exhales.
Tarn froze.
“No way...”
It was a Root ping. A dead protocol from a decade ago. A way to signal survivors without speech.
Scraps tilted his head, one optic brightening.
Tarn followed the sound—deeper, through the narrow vein duct until it opened into a forgotten waste shaft.
There, by a broken boiler pipe and a twisted support beam, was a wireline.
Clipped into the wall.
Glowing faintly.
He knelt. Tapped it twice.
Waited.
A response came through—a ping and pause, followed by a slow cycling pulse.
Identification request.
Tarn hesitated. Then pressed his finger to the interface and drew three symbols:
Seconds passed.
Then the panel hissed open.
Inside was a Root pocket vault—barely the size of a market stall. A fireless forge in one corner. A dry-pressure generator chugged softly along the back wall.
And in the center, hunched over a bench, sleeves rolled to the elbow, was a woman with copper-threaded braids and soot-stained goggles.
She didn’t look up.
“You’re either stupid or desperate,” she said. “Which one are you?”
Tarn stepped in slowly.
“Both.”
She turned. Her eyes scanned him—face, build, coat stitching.
Then her gaze dropped to the dog beside him.
Her lips parted.
“Scraps.”
She didn’t ask. She remembered.
Tarn nodded.
She stood slowly. Approached like she was walking into a story she never thought she’d meet again.
“You were the boy. The one he saved.”
“And you are?”
“Name’s Aelra Quinn. I ran comms for Node Seven before the council torched it. Been hiding ever since. Repairing what I can. Listening to the pipes. Waiting for something impossible.”
Tarn reached into his coat.
Set the capsule down on the table between them.
“Then you’re about to hear it.”
Aelra hadn’t spoken in five full minutes.
Not since Tarn placed the capsule on the workbench. Not since he whispered that name.
“Waylan Vire.”
She stared at the memory spool like it was a live explosive.
“I saw that ship go up. I saw the sky open. And then I saw nothing.”
“That was twenty years ago.”
“And you’re telling me… this survived?”
Tarn simply nodded.
Scraps lay coiled at his feet, head resting on one paw, the faint whine of a worn bearing humming from his ribs. His tail twitched once, almost hopeful.
Aelra stepped back from the bench and wiped her hands on a rag already blackened with years of dust and rust. She reached for the side panel of a storage vault and twisted three clasps in sequence. A latch popped with a hiss of long-stilled pressure.
She pulled out a device the size of a lunchbox—square, brass-rimmed, with gears instead of buttons and a circular tray meant for a memory spool.
“This is a pre-Creed coil reader. One of the last clean ones. The signal path’s intact, but the speaker hums like a ghost.”
“Then it’s perfect,” Tarn said.
Aelra set the reader down. Inserted the spool.
Paused.
“If this is real… it changes everything.”
“It already changed me,” Tarn said quietly.
She slid the lever.
The reader ticked. A low whir built up as the gears engaged.
Then—
A voice.
"...If you're hearing this..."
Aelra stumbled back.
Scraps’ eye blinked.
Tarn didn’t move.
"...then I'm dead. Or you're me. Older. Burnt in places I haven’t been burnt yet..."
The voice cracked with heat warp, glitched where the coil had burned—but it was still his.
Waylan Vire.
Aelra covered her mouth.
"The silence isn’t empty. It listens. It spoke back."
"It let me go."
The air in the vault shifted. Felt heavier. Like the walls themselves were leaning in.
"The sky isn’t a ceiling. It’s a lock."
"And we were the key."
Tarn’s hand clenched around the edge of the bench.
"I don’t know what’s on the other side. But it’s watching now. If it saw me..."
"...it’s going to see you next."
—click—
The reader slowed. The coil ticked to a stop.
Silence.
No one breathed.
Then Aelra exhaled. A long, ragged thing full of rust and buried history.
“I trained with Silma Rae,” she whispered. “We were apprentices under a man named Iken.
She was fire. I was iron. We split during the purge at Node Seven.”
“She’s alive,” Tarn said.
Aelra’s head snapped up.
“You’re lying.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“She—she never—”
“She sent me.”
Silence again. But not the same kind. This one trembled with purpose.
“Then it’s starting,” Aelra said softly. “The gears are turning again.”
Tarn looked down at Scraps. Then back to the reader.
“Waylan didn’t fall. He found the door. And now it’s our turn to walk through it.”
They say sound doesn’t travel well in steam-soaked walls.
But that’s a lie.
Especially when the sound is hope.
By dawn, the coil recording had echoed through three safe vaults and two forgotten Root channels. No announcement. No formal directive. Just a copy. A whisper. A breath from the past.
And that was enough.
Tarn stood at the edge of the vault chamber, watching Aelra’s old coil relay sputter to life. The message was transmitting again—this time on a narrowband pulse, low-frequency, buried beneath the city’s maintenance hum.
Aelra worked like a woman reborn. Her hands flew over brass terminals, patching in old modulation lines and cursing every second wasted since the war.
“Once this hits Node Twelve, they’ll wake up the others,” she said. “Silma… she’ll hear it. They all will.”
“And the Council?” Tarn asked.
She stopped. Looked up. Her eyes were sharp, but tired.
“They already know something’s stirring. The sky’s been too quiet too long.”
Scraps stirred beside them, one optic lens flickering in a slow pattern. Tarn hadn’t seen that rhythm before.
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
Aelra squinted. “Pulse scan? No… That’s not an alert.”
She leaned in.
“That’s a response pattern.”
Scraps was receiving something.
Far above, in the Gear Spire's inner sanctum, the Chimera turned.
It had not spoken in two cycles. No protocols. No Saint deployments. No declarations.
Just silence.
Until now.
“Signal detected.”
“Unauthorized transmission. Coil-based. Echo designation.”
The Chimera’s central lens dilated.
“Initiate Ember Lockdown.”
Below the Council, deep in the Core District, Saints stirred in unison.
But not all of them moved.
One stayed still—cloaked in matte black, eyes hidden behind a flat iron mask.
The Black Saint.
He stood at the edge of the air vent, listening to the pulse that vibrated faintly in the city’s bones.
He turned.
No words.
Just a step forward.
And a city that held its breath.
Back in the vault, the relay cracked. A new signal.
Not from the Root.
Not from the Council.
Not from anywhere Aelra recognized.
“What the hell?” she muttered.
Tarn stepped closer. Scraps chirped—a low, warning note.
The signal wasn’t static.
It was a pattern.
“It’s a reply,” Tarn said.
Aelra’s voice dropped.
“From what?”
Tarn looked at the spool. Then at the wall behind it.
“From whatever saw him… and let him go.”
It began, as always, with silence.
No trumpet. No steam-scream. No council decree.
Just a hush that fell across Caligo Verge like a shadow stretching at dusk.
Tarn first felt it in his chest—like pressure before a storm. The coils in the wall crackled, then went still. The Root relay went dark. Even Scraps whined and ducked beneath the workbench, his single optic flickering in tight pulses.
Aelra looked up from the signal array.
“They’ve found us.”
“No—” Tarn said. “Not yet. But they’re listening.”
Aelra didn’t argue. She just moved. Quick. Surgical. She snapped shut the coil reader, wrapped the spool in an oiled cloth, and shoved it into Tarn’s hands.
“You’re leaving.”
“I just got here.”
“You just made yourself a target.”
Outside the vault, the Saints moved differently.
The red-robed ones—the old procession Saints—still walked their routes, still clanked their censers and whispered hollow prayers. But people weren’t looking at them anymore.
They were watching the other one.
Clad in matte black. Silent as coal dust. No censer. No markings.
He moved like a rumor walking.
No one saw him arrive. No one saw him blink. He simply was, and with each step, the air got colder.
He didn’t burn.
He drained.
Word reached Tarn via the old knock-line:
Two Root couriers missing.
Node Six compromised.
Node Eleven—gone. No trace.
“They’re not arresting,” Aelra said. “They’re erasing.”
She pulled a sheet of folded brass from the wall and handed it to Tarn. A map. Old Root escape routes, half-collapsed, barely functional.
“You’re going to Node Nine. If it’s still alive, it’ll have a deep vault—might even still have uplink access. Play the log again. Let the other cities hear it.”
“And if it’s not alive?” Tarn asked.
“Then make them think it is.”
Before Tarn left, he paused at the door.
“Why do they call him the Black Saint?”
Aelra didn’t answer right away.
She turned one of the remaining pressure vents off, dimming the chamber.
“Because he doesn’t speak.”
“None of them speak.”
“No,” she said. “They recite. He doesn’t. He doesn’t even breathe.”
“Then what does he do?”
Aelra looked up, and for the first time, Tarn saw fear in her eyes.
“He listens.”
Tarn fled through the sewers as the vault sealed behind him, Scraps limping at his side.
In the street above, a small child saw the Black Saint pass beneath a mural scratched back onto a wall that morning.
Just one word:
RISE.
The Saint stopped.
Stared at it.
Then touched the wall with his fingers—gentle, reverent.
The word turned black.
And the mural flaked away.
The descent into Node Nine was not marked.
No sigil. No Root gear etched in stone. Just a rusted pressure grate beneath an abandoned tram line, sealed by age and stories that always ended with don’t go down there.
Tarn pried it open with a crowbar made from an old Saint's censer hook. The metal screamed as it bent—enough to alert anything with ears or sensors.
But nothing came.
Not yet.
Scraps hobbled behind him, limping more from memory than damage now. Tarn had reinforced the leg brace with two tightening coils and a spine pin from his own boot. The dog didn’t complain.
Not once.
The air inside Node Nine didn’t smell like ash.
It smelled like metal, like wet stone, and old heat—the kind that burns for a century and goes cold in a single night.
The corridor sloped downward at a steady angle. Broken lights blinked along the ceiling, powered by something that shouldn’t still be working.
“Someone’s here,” Tarn whispered.
The walls bore scarring—explosion marks, impact dents, burn shadows.
And then… words.
Scratched into the wall with what looked like fingernails:
He flew. We burned. Do not follow.
Tarn didn’t stop.
Not when the second message appeared:
We buried the voice so the fire wouldn’t spread.
Not when the lights began to blink in rhythm.
Not even when Scraps growled, his ears pivoting toward a side shaft.
The deep vault was ahead.
A circular blast door sat recessed into the floor—a design only used in Root pressure bunkers.
It was half open.
Tarn dropped to a crouch and pulled a knife from his coat—relic-hilted, small, sharp, almost ceremonial.
He didn’t know how to fight.
But he knew how to cut.
He climbed through.
The vault was larger than he expected—three stories deep, built like a rotunda. Steam-core beds lined the walls, long since cold. One flickered.
The room wasn’t empty.
Six figures stood in a loose circle around a central coil bank.
They turned in unison.
Each wore different scrap armor. No uniforms. But they had the Root look—scarves over mouths, eyes that burned with memory.
One of them—tall, gaunt, with a voice like ground stone—spoke:
“You shouldn’t have come.”
Tarn straightened.
“Neither should the man in the rocket. But he did.”
The tall one’s eyes narrowed. “You carry the log?”
Tarn reached into his coat and held it out.
No one moved.
Until a figure from the back stepped forward—smaller, wrapped in layers, hood drawn tight.
“Let him pass,” she said. “That’s the boy Silma Rae protected.”
Tarn turned.
He knew that voice.
“Madre Linn,” he said.
She nodded, slow.
Older now. Worn. But not broken.
“You’ve come to set fire again, haven’t you?”
“I came to play a message,” Tarn said.
“And what if it burns everything left?”
Tarn looked down at Scraps. Then back at Linn.
“Then we let it burn.”
The vault doors sealed shut behind Tarn with a sound like finality.
Heavy.
Echoing.
Full of memory.
Madre Linn stood by the old relay altar—a brass-ringed pedestal once used to coordinate Root strikes in the early revolt. Now, it was little more than a table wired with blackened cables and silent transmitters.
Tarn placed the memory spool on the tray.
The room fell quiet.
The others watched with the wariness of those who had burned before for believing too quickly.
Scraps sat beside Tarn, tail curled tight.
“He flew for us,” Tarn said. “And now he’s come back.”
“No,” said Linn. “You did.”
The coil reader spun up.
The gears turned.
Waylan’s voice filled the room.
Again.
And this time—it didn’t stop at the walls.
Linn had rerouted the transmitter lines, deep-pulsing the message into every Root fragment still clinging to the lower city. Forgotten nodes. Abandoned bunkers. Sealed hatches beneath schools, bakeries, prayer houses.
Wherever memory lingered—Waylan’s words reached.
“The silence isn’t empty. It listens. And now… it sees you.”
Up above, in the Saint Chambers, the Black Saint stood motionless, one hand against a pipe.
The moment the pulse hit the air, he reacted.
Not fast. Not frantic.
Just… precise.
“Rebellion confirmed.”
“Node Nine location triangulated.”
He stepped forward.
And the wall melted open.
Back below, Madre Linn reached into the altar and pulled out an old Root signal core.
“We used to burn messages into brass and smuggle them in bread carts,” she said. “Now we burn them into memory.”
She handed the core to Tarn.
“This is your burden now. You’re not a child anymore.”
“Never was,” he said.
“Then act like it.”
She turned to the others.
“The Root isn’t broken. It’s buried. We dig it out. We give it shape.”
She held up a burned cog.
“No more cracked gears.”
Tarn reached into his pocket and pulled a scrap of paper.
Folded.
Drawn with soot and oil.
A pair of wings.
Rusted.
Rising.
“We follow the wing,” Linn said softly. “The rest will follow us.”
Above them, Saints marched.
And behind them, something far older than them began to stir.
Not machine.
Not man.
Not god.
Ready to speak again.
Part Two: The Saint of Ash
The first mission wasn’t meant to be symbolic.
It was meant to be quiet—surgical, Aelra said. Slip into the old Furnace refinery, reroute the flow grid, overclock the pressure seals, walk away. A cascade failure, not a bang. Something they could blame on age or poor maintenance.
But Tarn had other plans.
He crouched atop a rusted catwalk, overlooking the pulsing heart of the Furnace Grid, the heat lines below throbbing like veins beneath the city’s skin. The control room stood across a narrow beam, guarded by two Saints—standard robe-class, not Black.
“You sure about this?” Aelra’s voice crackled softly in his earpiece, patched through a relic comm rig Scraps had sniffed out from the Node Nine archives.
“You were supposed to be in and out. No message. No fire.”
Tarn pressed his palm against the inside of his coat, feeling the warmth of the wing stencil etched in carbon soot.
“They burned the last message,” he whispered. “Let’s leave them one they can’t.”
He moved fast.
Low. Silent.
Scraps darted across an upper ledge, leaping with uncanny precision from beam to beam, a ghost with gears for bones. As the first Saint turned, confused by the echo of claws, Tarn was already moving behind him.
A shock-syringe to the neck.
A knee to the control switch.
The lights dimmed. The pressure gauges spiked.
“You’ve got three minutes before it blows the overflow seals,” Aelra hissed.
“Then let’s not waste the paint.”
Tarn knelt by the outer furnace door and pulled out the stencil—wings, half-spread, sketched from memory. Weylan’s memory.
He sprayed quick—just soot and solvent—but it clung to the door like ash to bone.
When the power plant erupted in steam and blacklight, the city above flickered.
The wing glowed on the steel like fire left its mark.
Elsewhere...
The Black Saint stood in the shadow of the Chapel Spire, unmoving.
A lesser Saint approached. Whispered something about sabotage. About symbols. About wings.
The Black Saint turned slowly.
Behind his mask, something stirred.
A memory.
A name.
“...Tarn.”
Back Below...
As the wing burned into memory, Tarn and Scraps vanished into the ventways.
The city would wake to a blackout, a ruined pressure tower, and a symbol no one had seen in decades.
And from that point on, they’d start calling him something new:
The Wingmarked.
Chapter Eleven: The Memory Forge
Tarn didn’t sleep much after the refinery.
None of them did.
The Root had burned embers before. Spoken in whispers. Scrawled silent messages on alley walls and under Saint censors’ boots. But never a symbol that bright, that loud.
And certainly not in flame.
They regrouped beneath the South Dock, in an old water filtration vault long since converted into a Root comm-hub. The space still stank of rusted salt and bad filtration foam, but the relay lines ran clean, and the back wall still held a functioning forge terminal—ancient Root tech known as a Memory Forge.
Built for one purpose:
To interpret surviving code that shouldn't exist.
Tarn sat across from Scraps, who lay on a cooling mat, optic dim but alert. The dog had begun emitting intermittent pulses since the refinery mission—brief, high-frequency chirps that echoed faintly in the coil stacks and set old Root tech buzzing.
Aelra ran diagnostics.
Madre Linn watched from the wall, arms crossed, like she’d seen this storm building for twenty years and was finally hearing its thunder.
“These pulses aren’t from the log,” Aelra muttered. “They’re deeper. Embedded inside Scraps’ logic mesh. Buried below system memory.”
“Can you decode it?” Tarn asked.
“Not alone. But the Forge can.”
The terminal hissed to life—steam-fed, gear-driven, its reading bay glowing with faint blue glyphs. Aelra lowered a brass needle into Scraps’ central spine port.
The Forge clicked.
Buzzed.
Then—played sound.
First came static.
Then, a voice.
But not human.
Not Weylan.
Something older.
Metallic, yes—but not mechanical. Rhythmic, but without syntax. It sang, almost, in a language of harmonic distortion and reversed pulses.
Scraps whimpered. Not in pain. In recognition.
The transmission continued—rising, falling, pulsing like breath.
Aelra stared at the readout.
“This isn’t data. It’s a response pattern.”
“To what?” Tarn asked.
“To Waylan.”
The Forge translated what little it could into Root glyphs. Most of it was nonsense.
But one phrase blinked back in red:
KEY RECEIVED
INTERFACE REQUEST PENDING
LOCATE: TARN.
Tarn stepped back.
“It knows me?”
Aelra’s hands trembled slightly.
“No. It doesn’t just know you.”
She pointed to the Forge display.
“It’s waiting for you.”
Scraps chirped again—sharp, insistent.
The terminal flared.
Another string appeared.
DOOR OPENED.
DOOR REMEMBERS.
DOOR IS BECOMING.
Linn whispered like she was reciting an old poem:
“The breach never closed.”
Up above, the Black Saint stood on a rooftop as smoke from the refinery still curled into the air.
His mask lens flickered—receiving a signal he wasn’t meant to understand.
A voice. Glitched. Burnt. Familiar.
It spoke the name again.
Tarn…
The first sign was the steam.
It seeped through the vents like breath—cooler than the ambient heat, laced with that metallic mineral scent that didn’t belong in any working system.
Tarn had just finished rerouting the relay map with Aelra when Scraps snapped upright.
Tail stiff. Optic blinking red.
“Movement?” Aelra asked.
Scraps didn’t growl. He didn’t bark.
He just stood, shoulders low, and stared at the northern corridor.
Tarn moved toward the security screen.
And froze.
A figure—masked, black-robed, slow, relentless—stepped out of the mist that had no right to be there.
“He found us,” Tarn whispered.
“No,” Aelra said. “We woke him.”
They didn’t run.
Tarn knew better. You don’t outrun a ghost in its own tomb.
Instead, they lured him.
Deeper.
Into the vault's oldest wing—the part even Linn called cursed. The well chamber. Long sealed. Forgotten even by most Root survivors.
They passed broken wall-markers.
Etchings of water flowing upward. Symbols for interface, gate, and containment—Root terms used only in pre-Breach archives.
“You sure about this?” Linn asked.
“No,” Tarn said. “But Scraps is.”
The dog was already at the door.
Waiting.
The Saint stepped through behind them, silent as ever.
But something flickered in his lens.
Recognition.
Not of the room.
Of Scraps.
He took one step forward—and the floor hissed beneath them.
Water surged through brass veins in the stone.
Light woke across the ceiling in rivulets and glyphs.
And from the center of the chamber, the Hydrologic Core opened like a steel blossom—rising from its submerged bed, water flowing in geometric pulses.
Shook.
His mask buzzed with low static.
Tarn watched as his hands—once precision-calibrated for death—began to tremble.
“He remembers,” Aelra whispered.
“Or the Core remembers him.”
Suddenly the Core pulsed.
A voice—not spoken, not heard, but felt—moved through the air like pressure before a storm.
KEY CONFIRMED.
TARN.
LISTEN.
Tarn stepped forward.
“I’m here.”
The water danced.
And the Core responded.
THE BREACH IS OPENING.
AND YOU ARE THE BRIDGE.
The Saint dropped to one knee.
Not in reverence.
In instinct.
The light from the Hydrologic Core reflected across his matte-black mask, fracturing it in soft ripples. His fists clenched. His body trembled. Steam curled from his breath, though the air was cold.
Scraps growled, low and uncertain.
Tarn stood frozen, one step from the Core’s edge.
The water pulsed again. This time, not to Tarn.
To the Saint.
DESIGNATION: NULL
MEMORY REDACTED.
ORIGIN: ROOT NODE TWO.
Aelra gasped.
“Node Two? That was… burned. Before the Ember Hunts even started.”
Madre Linn’s face went pale.
“They said no one survived.”
“No one did,” Aelra whispered. “Except him.”
The Saint fell forward, mask clanging against the grate.
And then—cracks formed.
Hairline fractures across the obsidian plate. Not physical. Internal.
His comm unit flared and failed.
And from deep within, a voice escaped. Not mechanical. Not robotic.
“…I was… Vail.”
The word hung like smoke.
Lost. Buried. Burned.
“Vail? That’s who you were?”
The Saint—Vail—didn’t respond with words.
He shuddered.
And then screamed.
A raw, human sound that tore through the vault, rattled the pipes, and made the Hydrologic Core flare blue.
Memories bled into the water.
A face.
Silma Rae, reaching for him as fire poured into a Root vault.
“Get to the breach. Warn them!”
Then white.
Then silence.
Then—rebirth, in a Creed lab. Saints standing over him. His memories carved away like infected flesh. Root etched out of him. Replaced by protocol.
And over it all, a voice like boiling stone:
“You are not Vail. You are the blade. The silence. The end.”
Back in the present, Vail tore off his mask.
The man beneath was gaunt. Scorched. Alive.
His eyes met Tarn’s.
“I killed my name,” he rasped. “But the water remembered it.”
“The Council broke you,” Tarn said. “We can fix you.”
Vail laughed, dry and hoarse.
“I don’t need fixing. I need forgiveness”
Aelra stepped forward.
“Then help us open the breach. Help us end what they started.”
Vail’s jaw clenched.
He looked to the Core.
It pulsed again.
THRESHOLD NEARING.
INTERFACE REQUEST STANDING.
CHOOSE.
The Core hummed like a held breath.
Lights danced across the water’s surface—not random. Deliberate. Structured. A language translated through rhythm and pressure, not words.
Vail stood near the edge, no longer the Black Saint but not yet fully the man he once was.
The water responded to him differently now—rippling in long, low pulses that resonated in the bones more than the ears.
Tarn watched from the threshold.
He felt it in his chest.
The choice.
Not forced. Not commanded.
Just offered.
THRESHOLD REACHED
TARN: CHOOSE.
RETURN MEMORY / BREAK THE LOCK / CLOSE THE DOOR
Aelra ran a diagnostic on the relay pipes lining the chamber.
“Whatever this thing is doing… it’s drawing water from below the foundation grid. That's pre-city. Older than Caligo Verge. Maybe older than the continent.”
“It’s not just a computer,” Tarn said.
“No,” Linn whispered. “It’s a mouth. And we’ve just asked it a question.”
Tarn stepped forward, watching the Core ripple.
Then he took Scraps' cracked collar—the one Waylan had etched with a gear and a single wing—and pressed it to the water.
The glyphs flared.
And the chamber changed.
Vision.
But not like light.
More like memory.
Tarn stood on cracked stone beneath a fractured sky—not black, but violet. Not stars, but fractures. Shifting above him. Watching.
A voice—his own—echoed backward in time:
“If you’re hearing this… then I never stopped.”
And in the sky above, he saw the rocket again—but from above, not below.
And in its trail: a string of glyphs, unraveling like a language spoken through flame.
Then everything collapsed into water.
And Tarn gasped back into the chamber.
The Core spoke again.
This time with weight:
A NEW KEY HAS BEEN FORGED.
YOU MAY ASK ONE QUESTION.
The chamber dimmed.
The water stilled.
Tarn felt everyone’s gaze.
Aelra. Linn. Vail. Even Scraps, standing tall despite the limp.
“One question…” Tarn whispered.
The chamber held its breath.
Not just quiet—but expectant.
The kind of silence that feels like standing on a cliff and knowing something is about to whisper your name from below.
The glyphs on the walls dimmed. The water stilled.
Only one thing moved:
Tarn.
He stepped forward slowly, boots echoing against the soaked stone.
But he didn’t speak.
Behind him, the others waited.
Aelra turned her back, fidgeting with the coil relay like she couldn’t bear to hear it.
Madre Linn stood as still as scripture. Her eyes were closed. Maybe praying. Maybe remembering.
Vail leaned against the wall, hands shaking. He hadn’t said a word since his mask cracked.
And Scraps? Scraps watched Tarn with one eye glowing, head tilted in that way only something half-machine and all-heart could manage.
Tarn’s mouth opened.
Then closed.
His mind spun through possibilities, each one more unbearable than the last.
“What happened to Waylan?”
Too selfish. Too final.
“What is the breach?”
Too broad. Too unknowable.
“Why me?”
Too cowardly.
He thought of the Council.
Of the cracked wing burned into the refinery wall.
Of the way Scraps had laid beside him in the gully, covered in dirt, still warm.
He thought of the people who still didn’t know they’d been chained.
And then Aelra said, without looking up:
“There’s no good question, Tarn.”
“I know.”
“Then pick the one you’re most afraid to hear.”
Tarn stared into the water.
And finally spoke.
“...Not yet.”
The glyphs pulsed.
INCOMPLETE QUERY.
KEY MAY RETURN.
The Core went dim.
Not offline.
Just waiting.
Linn let out a breath like she’d been holding it her whole life.
“Smart.”
“Or cowardly,” Tarn said.
“No,” Vail murmured, voice thin. “It’s faith. You only ask the question when you’re ready to live with the answer.”
Far above, in the Council’s sealed tower, the Chimera flickered.
A dozen robed figures sat beneath its eye.
The console before them pulsed:
KEY INTERFACE ATTEMPT DETECTED
REQUEST: OVERRIDE BREACH LOCKDOWN
The Council Leader turned pale.
“We burned that system decades ago.”
“Then someone rebuilt it,” another whispered.
The Chimera answered for them:
THE DOOR HAS REMEMBERED.
Back in the vault, Tarn turned to Aelra.
“Then we get ready.”
“For what?”
“To ask.”
The crater wasn’t on any map.
Not anymore.
It had been paved over, covered with slag and scaffolding, renamed a “structural failure zone” by the Furnace Council. But the people still called it what it was:
Skybreak.
Tarn stood at the edge, boots sinking into soot-thick mud. Scraps trotted beside him, legs whirring faintly, optic glowing low as if the air itself was triggering memory.
The earth here felt wrong.
Still scorched after twenty years. Still humming faintly with resonance—like the sky had screamed and the ground never stopped listening.
The crater itself was a jagged scar, a half-collapsed impact zone filled with broken girders and crushed tower bones. Rust clung to everything. So did silence.
Tarn scanned the outer rim, eyes narrowing.
Aelra’s makeshift scanner pulsed at his belt, its needle ticking rapidly.
“Core signal residue,” he muttered. “Still active. Even after all this time.”
“You think Waylan made it back here?” Aelra’s voice came through his relay—she was monitoring from a nearby ridge.
“No,” Tarn said. “But something did.”
Scraps led him down into the gully’s heart, toward a half-buried dome of scorched metal—the fractured tip of the Echo-9 rocket.
Tarn crouched beside it and placed his palm against the hull.
The metal was cool now.
But it trembled beneath his touch.
Inside the capsule, the walls were blackened, the systems fused.
But one thing remained: a circular port, untouched by fire, etched with the same glyphs as the Hydrologic Core.
Tarn stared at it.
“This wasn’t just a rocket,” he whispered.
“It was a transmission pod.”
Suddenly, the scanner howled.
“Incoming surge—Tarn, get clear!” Aelra shouted.
Too late.
The port lit up.
Steam hissed from ancient valves.
And a holographic projection burst from the floor, hazy and glitching.
It wasn’t Waylan.
It was something Waylan had seen.
A shape—not human. Not mechanical.
A figure composed of data light and memory bleed, flickering like thought made visible.
And it spoke in the same harmonic cadence the Core had used.
Only one phrase came through clearly:
“You are not alone.”
“Is this the breach speaking?”
Scraps barked once.
The figure flickered again. Shifted.
And took on a familiar shape.
Tarn’s own face.
Distorted. Older. Changed.
“You opened the door. You just haven’t walked through yet.”
Then it collapsed.
The port shut.
And silence returned to Skybreak.
“What did you see?” Aelra asked over the relay.
Tarn didn’t answer right away.
He looked down at the collapsed shell of the rocket, then up at the sky.
“Not a ghost,” he said. “Not Waylan.”
“Then what?”
“A message.”
He turned back toward the city.
“From me.”
Back at Node Nine, the projection played again.
Aelra had rigged a field capture using the forge’s logic filter and a converted memory braid—old Root tech once used to copy Saint sermon patterns and repurpose them into counter-signals.
The recording—Tarn’s distorted reflection—looped silently.
It didn’t speak again.
It just watched.
“It’s running predictive recursion,” Aelra muttered. “A breach-loop. It’s trying to match Tarn’s neural pattern to a version of himself that’s already—”
“—stepped through,” Tarn finished.
“You think that was really you?”
“I think it was a version of me.”
He looked down at Scraps, who hadn’t stopped staring at the screen.
The dog’s optic blinked in a pattern that matched the reflection’s eye movements perfectly.
Madre Linn entered quietly.
“The breach remembers through echoes,” she said. “It doesn’t store memory like we do. It reflects it back.”
“You mean that wasn’t the real breach?” Aelra asked.
Linn shook her head.
“No. That was a question.”
Tarn sat in silence, watching himself flicker.
The holographic version blinked in perfect sync with his real eyes now—slightly delayed, but learning.
Not just a copy.
A mirror.
“It’s trying to build a version of you that will say yes,” Linn said.
“Yes to what?” Tarn asked.
“To crossing through.”
Aelra leaned forward.
“But what if it already has? What if the version we saw was the one who did—and now it’s sending him back?”
“You think I’m supposed to meet myself?”
“No,” she said. “I think you’re supposed to replace yourself.”
The Core activated in the background—unprompted.
Glyphs flooded the screen in sequence:
RECURSION EVENT DETECTED
CODE: REFLECTION 1.0.3
PREPARING INTERFACE SIMULATION
WARNING: MULTIPLE BRANCHES INCOMPLETE
Scraps whined.
Then growled.
Then… barked.
The projection flickered.
And smiled.
“It’s not just watching anymore,” Tarn whispered.
“It’s becoming me.”
Up above, in the Council tower, the Chimera’s voice rasped through its filtered lungs:
BREACH SHADOW DETECTED
LOCKDOWN OVERRIDE FAILED
TARN INTERFACE NEARING STABILITY
And in the shadows behind the gears, the Council panicked—for Tarn was no longer the key.
He was the door.
The chamber dimmed as the Hydrologic Core rerouted power to the simulation array—a skeletal framework of brass ribs and mirrored pools surrounding Tarn like a broken cage built for thought.
The glyphs above the Core pulsed faster now, casting fractured reflections across the ceiling.
SIMULATION INTERFACE ACTIVE
CODE TREE: REFLECTION-DELTA
USER: TARN
INITIATE FIRST DECISION BRANCH
Tarn stood still, arms at his sides, staring into the first mirrored pool as it rippled.
Then shifted.
Then formed an image.
✦ Branch One: Submission
In the first pool, Tarn saw himself in chains—led quietly through the Council halls, a Saint escort at his side, the wing symbol branded into his neck like a warning.
“This is the future if you surrender,” Aelra said behind him, her voice cold. “If you let the breach go silent.”
“Alive,” Tarn said. “But owned.”
Scraps growled softly.
“Next,” Tarn whispered.
✦ Branch Two: War
The second pool lit up in red tones.
Tarn stood before a crowd of Root rebels, his arm raised. Behind him, the city burned. The wing was everywhere—etched in fire, spray, and ash.
He watched himself smile as smoke rose behind him.
Then—the scene jumped.
Saints marching. Counterattacks. Civilians hanged in the square.
A whisper overlaid the image.
"You became what they feared."
Tarn clenched his fists.
“No.”
“You're seeing what happens when you fight without memory,” Linn said from the shadows.
✦ Branch Three: The Gate
The third pool rippled.
And showed a door.
A real one.
Massive. Seamless. Set into the side of a skyless cliff beneath violet light. Tarn—another Tarn—stood before it, alone, with Scraps at his side.
The door opened.
Light flooded out.
That version stepped through.
And was erased.
Not destroyed. Not killed.
Just… gone.
And the voice returned:
ONE CHOICE REMAINS
Tarn stumbled back, breathing hard.
“What happens to the ones that step through?”
“We don’t know,” Linn said. “No one has returned.”
“Except maybe you,” Aelra added. “You saw yourself. That projection. Something crossed back.”
Scraps barked.
Twice.
A rhythm.
The same one from the launch site.
“That was me,” Tarn said. “But not yet. Not this me.”
“Then you have a question to answer,” Linn said. “And a version to become.”
The Core pulsed again.
All three pools evaporated into steam.
And a single phrase appeared in the air:
FINAL INTERFACE READY
The gateway didn’t look like a door.
It looked like an answer no one had been brave enough to ask.
Set deep beneath the Hydrologic Core, past vaults no Root map ever marked, the breach chamber was not man-made. Not fully.
Its walls were too smooth.
Its curve too perfect.
The metal lining its inner rim reflected no light—as if the chamber had grown up through the ground like a tooth, or a thorn.
Tarn stood at the edge, staring at the glyphs pulsing along the breach gate’s curve.
“We always thought Waylan built that rocket,” Aelra said behind him. “But I’ve been over every schematic. Every wire. Every valve. That guidance port—”
“It wasn’t ours,” Linn finished.
“No,” Aelra said. “It was like something left behind. Or given.”
Scraps approached the gate.
His optic flashed.
And from deep within his core, the holographic projection returned—this time clear, steady, and no longer smiling.
It spoke a single phrase:
“Seed vector confirmed. Loop anchor found.”
“That phrase again. Seed vector. What does it mean?”
Aelra hesitated.
Then pulled a tattered Root document from her satchel—a coil-spun manifesto, archived from the earliest nodes.
“It’s mentioned here. Once. Scrawled in the margins of Silma Rae’s breach notes.”
She read aloud:
“The ship was never meant to return. It was a vector—a planted cause. One designed to ensure the breach would be answered by the right kind of mind.”
Tarn felt cold.
“The ship wasn’t made to fly.”
“It was made to change whoever did.”
The Core responded without being prompted.
SEED VECTOR SUCCESSFUL
RECURSION LOOP CLOSED
BEGIN FINAL INTERFACE
And for the first time, the glyphs addressed Tarn not as a question.
But as a fixed point.
YOU ARE THE BRIDGE
YOU MAY NOW CROSS
Scraps sat beside him.
Still.
Tarn looked back at Aelra and Linn.
“If I go through—”
“We’ll hold the gate open,” Linn said.
“And if I don’t come back?”
Aelra touched his shoulder.
“Then make sure whatever you find is worth not coming back for.”
And the light swallowed him.
The air inside the breach chamber felt thin.
Not from lack of oxygen—Tarn had breathed thinner in the Cradle District tunnels—but from something deeper. Expectation. Like the room itself was holding still so it wouldn’t scare him away.
The Hydrologic Core loomed behind him, pulsing slow and steady. It had already said all it would say:
“Seed vector confirmed.”
“Recursion loop closed.”
“You may now cross.”
Scraps stood at the edge of the platform, unmoving, his optic focused on the shimmering arc of light ahead. Not glowing. Not blinding. Just... open.
Tarn stared into it.
No horizon. No figures. No silhouette of Waylan waiting beyond the veil.
Just soft light and the sound of memory unwinding.
“I thought it would be louder,” he whispered.
Linn stood nearby, her expression unreadable.
“Beginnings usually are.”
Aelra adjusted the coil regulators along the breach gate’s control arm.
“It’s stable. For now. But the Core’s pulling more from below than I’ve ever seen. It’s not just opening for you—it’s building something with you.”
“Then I’d better not disappoint.”
He stepped toward the breach.
Scraps followed without hesitation.
The arch wasn’t hot.
It wasn’t cold.
It was aware.
He felt it run along his skin—not touching, not pushing, but tasting.
“You are the bridge.”
The words weren’t said. They were felt.
Like gravity turned into language.
Just before he crossed, he looked back.
Linn gave a small nod.
Aelra didn’t look up—she was crying, quietly, working harder than ever to pretend she wasn’t.
The breach pulsed.
And Tarn stepped forward.
The world shifted.
Not the way space bends when a train tunnels through a pressure fold. Not like falling.
It was a rearrangement of being.
His body pulled forward without motion.
His thoughts stretched behind him like threads of soldered memory.
Then—silence.
Not quiet.
Not absence.
True stillness.
A hum. A breath.
Nothing.
Then everything.
Tarn opened his eyes.
And the threshold was behind him.
Not closed.
Not gone.
There was no sky.
Just light.
Soft. White. Endless.
Not harsh or sterile—but controlled. A warmth that felt like memory more than heat.
He stood on a platform of black glass, surrounded by monolithic shapes—not buildings, not exactly. More like machines left running without a purpose. They pulsed in rhythm, slow and calm, as if breathing.
Scraps stepped beside him.
Unphased.
“Is this... the breach?” Tarn whispered.
The voice was not external.
Not from a speaker.
It was in the air.
In his thoughts.
A resonance.
“This is the chamber between. The waiting place. The reflection layer.”
A light shimmered ahead.
Tarn walked toward it.
And saw himself again.
Not a hologram.
Not a clone.
But a potential.
This version stood taller, older—his coat heavier, marked with a dozen stitched repairs and the faint lines of a life lived differently.
He turned, eyes sharp.
“You made it.”
Tarn stepped forward cautiously.
“What are you?”
“A possibility. One the breach ran more than once. I survived what you’re about to face.”
“And Waylan? Did he?”
The man’s expression faltered.
“Not like you want him to. He tried. But the breach... it didn’t open for him.”
“Why?”
“Because he wasn’t the answer. He was the question. And questions don’t cross.”
Behind the other Tarn, a massive construct loomed—half-arch, half-engine, humming with
breath and pressure. Not fire-powered. Not water-fed.
It was a machine made of choice.
Tarn stepped toward it.
The older version didn’t follow.
“Whatever you see on the other side… don’t trust it until it asks you a question.”
Tarn frowned.
“What does that mean?”
But the reflection was already fading.
Not disappearing.
Becoming part of the machine.
The archway opened.
And from within came the first truly foreign sound Tarn had ever heard.
Not a voice.
Not a hum.
But music.
“Let’s go,” Tarn said softly.
They stepped through.
And the door closed behind them.
There were no streets.
Not in the way Tarn understood them.
What surrounded him now was a city made of ideas—a half-formed architecture built from familiarity, but wrong in all the ways that mattered.
The alley ahead looked like the one behind the ash towers in Verge… but the bricks were etched with Root glyphs that had never been carved there.
The arch over the square reminded him of the Forge vault’s entrance… but it pulsed like a heartbeat, subtly warping with every thought he had.
“This place…” Tarn whispered. “It’s pulling from me.”
Scraps walked slightly ahead, tail down, scanning everything with quiet caution. The reflections in the glass panes around them showed different versions of Tarn—some taller, older, injured, even laughing. One stood beside Waylan. Another walked alone.
In one, Scraps was missing.
Tarn turned away.
The buildings themselves had no doors.
Just archways with smooth stone facades that offered nothing until he stepped close. When he did, the surface shifted—became scenes from memory, but rendered wrong:
“These aren’t mine,” he said.
“Not exactly.”
A new structure rose ahead: a dome.
Geometric. Clean. And silent.
When he reached it, the stone didn’t shift.
It spoke.
“You remember imperfectly.”
Not internal.
It was ambient thought.
“Memory is incomplete. This place finishes the picture.”
“Why?” Tarn asked.
“So you know what not to trust.”
Inside the dome: a single chair.
And on it—a book.
Bound in metal. No title.
When Tarn opened it, the pages were blank.
Until he thought of Waylan.
Then words appeared—flickering into form, describing scenes he’d never witnessed, but felt:
He stepped into the breath of the breach and asked nothing. That was his answer. The ship turned, and memory bent around him like time closing a wound.
Tarn shut the book.
“This place knows him.”
The dome responded.
“This place knows you.”
Scraps padded forward and scratched lightly at the far wall.
It melted open.
Behind it: a long bridge.
Lit with blue fire.
At its end: another door. Not steel. Not stone. Not breach-born.
Organic.
Like a petal made of bone and sound.
And beyond it?
Something was singing.
“You ready?” Tarn asked.
Scraps gave one soft bark.
“Let’s see what lives past memory.”
They stepped onto the bridge.
And the door began to open.
The door opened like breath.
Not with mechanics or sound, but with invitation—the kind that makes your skin feel thin and your thoughts louder than they should be.
Tarn stepped into a vast chamber of pulsing light.
It wasn’t empty.
But it wasn’t filled with objects.
It was filled with moments.
They floated through the air like soft-glowing threads, each one humming with faint resonance. Some stretched high above like stars pinned to invisible ceilings. Others curled around stone pillars that looked grown, not carved—like roots fed on forgotten futures.
Scraps didn’t bark.
The room responded.
He bowed his head.
Tarn followed suit without knowing why.
“What is this place?” he whispered.
But not with a voice.
With a memory he’d never lived:
He was sitting beside his mother.
She was alive.
Reading to him from a metal book with glowing pages.
Outside the window, the city was green. No ash. No Saints.
Just a breeze and birdsong.
He blinked.
It vanished.
“That didn’t happen.”
“No,” came a voice, finally. “But it could have.”
A figure emerged from the air.
Not a god.
Not a machine.
A shape formed from coalescing possibilities, constantly shifting—Tarn saw his own face in it, Waylan’s, Vail’s, Silma’s. Even Aelra’s—though younger. Laughing.
It settled into nothing distinct.
But the presence remained.
“This is the Archive,” it said.
“Where every path not taken is stored.”
Tarn swallowed.
“You mean... parallel lives?”
“No. Unlived ones. The things that almost became—but didn’t.”
“Why show me this?”
“Because you are about to choose a path that erases all others.”
Tarn looked around.
He saw a thread labeled with Waylan’s symbol—but it was frayed, pulsing weakly.
Another bore his name, but the letters were reversed, flickering.
He reached toward it.
The figure raised a hand.
“If you touch it, it becomes real.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
“It stays here. Waiting. Like the rest.”
Scraps barked—twice.
Urgently.
A new thread descended from the ceiling.
It was fresh.
And blank.
“What’s this one?” Tarn asked.
“That,” the voice said, “is the life you’ve yet to choose.”
The light flickered.
Then whispered—
“Ask your question.”
And he knew—this was the moment.
Only once.
Only now.
Tarn reached for the blank thread.
It was warm.
Not like heat—but like breath on glass. The way a name sounds in a room after someone has left.
It coiled gently around his wrist, not pulling… just waiting.
“What do I ask?” he whispered.
The Archive didn’t answer.
Because that was the point.
The question had to be his.
He looked at the other threads.
But the blank one?
It held no history.
Just promise.
“I’ve wanted to know what happened to Waylan since I was old enough to remember ash,” Tarn said quietly.
Listening.
“I want to know if he’s alive. I want to know if he crossed. I want to know if he’s proud of what I’ve become.”
“But I think…”
He swallowed.
“The real question is this:”
Tarn looked up at the Archive, into the shifting, impossible face.
“Was I made… or did I make myself?”
The room changed instantly.
The threads began to burn away—gently. Not like fire. Like truth. Like pages curling in a warm wind.
And then the Archive spoke—not in sound, but in certainty.
“Waylan asked to be allowed through.”
“You never asked.”
“You were invited.”
Tarn stepped back, breath stolen.
“Then… I was meant for this?”
“You chose it. That is what made you worthy.”
The blank thread wrapped fully around his wrist.
And turned gold.
Solid.
Real.
“You are not his echo,” the Archive said.
“You are his answer.”
The doors ahead opened.
Not mechanical. Not magic.
Just... open.
Tarn turned to Scraps.
“Let’s find out what’s waiting on the other side of the question.”
Tarn didn’t feel his body pass through the door.
He only knew he had crossed because the world changed—not in shape, but in response.
There was no floor.
No sky.
Just presence.
The space he entered bent to him—not visually, but emotionally. Every breath he took carved the air like ink. Every thought left faint patterns behind, then erased itself to try again.
This was not a world of rules.
It was a world of reflections waiting for instruction.
Scraps padded forward, his paws making no sound, his form flickering at the edges like it too was being rewritten.
“Where are we?” Tarn asked aloud.
The room replied with color, then shape, then language.
“We are where you become.”
From the mist formed three paths—fluid, breathing, moving in rhythm with his heartbeat.
One path was golden and branching, its lines fractal and infinite, beautiful in a way that felt... heavy.
The second was gray and still, like stone under snowfall. No movement. Just permanence.
The third was shifting, constantly folding back into itself. It glitched at the edges, repeating fragments of his own voice.
And then—
From behind him came the first true sound:
Not his.
Not the Archive’s.
But familiar.
“Tarn.”
A figure stood at the edge of the not-room.
Tall. Worn. Kind.
Waylan.
But… younger?
Or older.
Or neither.
“You made it,” the figure said.
Tarn stared. “Are you—?”
“Yes.”
“I’m what’s left of him here. A thought that stayed.”
“Then he’s alive?”
“He was. But time doesn’t work here the way it does there.”
“Why didn’t you come back?”
Waylan’s echo smiled softly.
“Because I was never supposed to. I wasn’t the answer. Just the spark.”
Tarn stood still, the three paths glowing beside him.
“And me? What am I?”
Waylan stepped back into the mist.
“You’re the question the breach wants to become.”
One path burned brighter.
The others dimmed.
And the world asked, without voice:
What will you build from yourself?
The mask still sat on the table where he left it.
Black. Perfect. Empty.
Vail stared at it as if it might speak. Sometimes, in the quiet hours between relays and static pulses, he thought it did.
But maybe that was just the programming echoing back.
Node Nine had gone silent since Tarn crossed the breach.
Linn moved quietly now.
Aelra worked without words.
Even Scraps was gone.
And Vail?
He stayed behind.
Because that was what he was built to do.
He touched his chest—where the Creed had placed the seal.
Not physical. Not visible. But real.
Buried in the wetware beneath his spine.
A construct.
A purpose.
PROTOCOL 47: SEAL LOCKDOWN.
It was burning now.
A pressure behind his thoughts, like a migraine made of code.
If breach stabilizes… seal it.
If Tarn crosses… terminate.
If Core completes loop… collapse.
He’d never known it was there.
Because he was never supposed to.
Vail stood and walked to the forge panel.
The terminal still hissed with ghost heat.
He placed his hand on the brass.
The screen lit.
User Confirmed: SAINT-47
Protocol Status: ARMED
Override: Not Found.
A voice behind him.
Linn.
“You’re going to trigger it, aren’t you?”
He didn’t turn.
“It’s not a choice. It’s... in me.”
“So was the Root,” she said. “Before they took it.”
He clenched his fist.
“What if I am the lock? What if I was meant to end this?”
“Then end it on your terms.”
He turned, finally.
Eyes hollow.
But not hopeless.
“I can feel him. Tarn. He’s in.”
“Then go to him.”
“If I do… I may bring the protocol with me.”
“Then break it on the other side.”
He looked down at the mask.
And picked it up.
This time, he didn’t wear it.
He tucked it under his arm.
And left it behind.
The breach didn’t resist him.
That terrified Vail more than anything.
No resistance. No defense. No sound.
The portal beneath the Hydrologic Core had once screamed for anyone but Tarn. Now, it opened for him—for the lock.
The crossing wasn’t violent.
It was too smooth.
Like his body had once been mapped by this place and was now sliding back into old grooves. Preapproved. Prewritten.
Like I was always meant to return here...
The moment he stepped through, Vail felt the weight change.
Not gravity.
Not atmosphere.
But awareness.
Like the breach itself had taken a breath and said, Ah. You.
He stood in a space that mirrored nothing—white and glass, but not reflective. The surfaces didn’t echo his image—they recorded it.
And then they spoke it back.
Not in voice.
In shapes.
Every movement he made, the walls responded: arcs, pulses, mathematical poetry rendered in motion.
He moved forward.
The ground flexed.
a voice.
Not in his mind. Not over a speaker.
But inside his spine.
The failsafe.
Protocol 47: Breach Proximity Detected.
Lock sequence armed.
Final seal enabled.
He staggered.
Gripped a wall that wasn’t there.
He could feel the countdown begin.
His heart rate was now a trigger.
If he panicked—if he broke—the breach would close.
“Tarn…” he whispered, trying to call across the distance.
There was no answer.
But there was presence.
A flicker of heat on the edge of perception.
A trail.
He followed it.
As he moved deeper, the walls began showing memory echoes—not his own. Tarn’s.
The Forge.
Scraps, injured in the gully.
Aelra smiling, candlelight on her hands.
Waylan’s face, blurred but glowing.
And then—a glimpse of the Archive.
Tarn, standing before the blank thread.
And Vail understood.
He hasn’t made his choice yet.
And I might be what stops him.
He fell to one knee.
The failsafe burned hotter now.
His hand reached toward the over
ride embedded in his own neck.
If I rip it out, I die.
If I let it run, Tarn loses everything.
He stared at his fingers.
Then at the shimmering trail ahead.
He laughed.
Dry.
Tired.
Alive.
“I was built to seal the breach.”
He stood.
“Then maybe I’ll seal it from the inside.”
And walked forward.
The lock that chose not to close.
Tarn stood before the final door.
It wasn’t made of steel.
It wasn’t built of Root code or Council-grade stone.
It was made of him.
Memories.
Regrets.
Instinct.
And choice.
The breach had built it from the shape of his becoming—a synthesis of everything he was and everything he might never be.
And now, it waited for him to decide.
The Archive's voice echoed softly from the chamber behind.
“You may enter as you are… or as you choose to be.”
“But once chosen, all others fade.”
Tarn looked at his reflection in the fluid pane of the door.
He didn’t look like a savior.
He looked tired.
Worn.
Ash on his collar. Guilt in his eyes. Scraps at his side.
“So, this is it,” he whispered. “I pick the version of myself that carries forward.”
“No,” came a new voice behind him.
“You pick the one who deserves to.”
Mail stood at the end of the bridge.
No mask.
No robes.
No weapon.
But his hand trembled at his side, the muscles beneath his neck twitching like something inside him was trying to pull him back.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Tarn said.
“And yet,” Vail said, “here I am.”
They faced each other in the white quiet of the breach’s final chamber.
The air hummed—not with pressure, but with possibility.
“I know what they buried in me,” Vail said.
“I can feel it winding tighter with every breath I take.”
“I am the failsafe.”
Tarn’s fists clenched.
“Then why didn’t it trigger?”
“Because I saw you,” Vail said softly.
“And for the first time, I wanted something else to live.”
The door flared with light.
Its form shifted.
Two versions of Tarn now stood in the reflection:
A third began to form.
Unfinished.
“What happens if I step through?” Tarn asked.
Vail shrugged.
“I’m not the breach.”
“But I think… you become the version of yourself that you chose to believe in.”
“And that version remakes the world on the other side.”
Tarn looked at the door again.
Then at Vail.
“And you?”
Vail smiled faintly.
“I was built to lock the door.”
“But now… maybe I’ll hold it open.”
And for the first time, the door didn’t resist.
It opened.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Other Side of Silence
Crossing the threshold felt like stepping into his own breath.
There was no sound.
No light.
No movement.
Only being.
Tarn thought of nothing—and the world around him formed accordingly.
It began as stone.
Warm. Polished. Familiar in weight, but not in origin.
Then came air—clean, scented with electricity and distant rainfall.
Then came color, but not from light. The color came from thought—as if the world knew he needed it to feel real.
Scraps padded beside him, entirely intact. No limp. No ticking core. Just whole.
“Are we dreaming?” Tarn asked.
“No,” came a whisper—not from the breach, but from the space around him.
“You are now in the echo of your choice.”
He looked around.
The landscape before him was a living horizon—cities not built, but grown, their shapes bending like roots toward the sun.
No Saints.
No Council towers.
But not peace, either.
The world wasn’t finished.
Because he hadn’t finished becoming yet.
Then he saw them.
Figures.
Far off—walking toward him.
Some looked like people he remembered.
Others, like versions of himself.
And then…
Not young. Not old.
Not whole.
But present.
Flickering.
“You made it,” Waylan’s voice echoed.
“Not through force. Not through fire.”
“Through choice.”
Tarn stepped closer.
“Is this what you saw?”
Waylan shook his head.
“No. I saw only the lock.”
“You became the key.”
Behind him, the breach began to pulse.
Vail’s silhouette stood in the doorway, hands raised.
Holding it open.
The failsafe was collapsing.
Vail was… vanishing.
But not in pain.
In release.
Waylan stepped aside.
And the world shifted.
Not into a utopia.
Not into ruin.
But into something new.
A voice rose—Tarn’s own voice, older, steadier.
“The silence was never empty.”
“It was waiting for us to listen.”
The world wasn’t perfect.
It wasn’t supposed to be.
Tarn stood at the center of a city that had no name yet—a place shaped not by memory, but by motion. It grew with every step he took, paths unfolding like veins from a heart that had just begun to beat.
Above, there was no sky.
Only a ceiling of light and mist, slowly clearing.
Beneath his boots, the ground hummed—not with machines, but with promise.
Scraps trotted ahead, tail swaying.
No longer an archive.
No longer a survivor.
Just… a dog.
Whole.
Tarn carried nothing with him now.
Not the spool.
Not the crest.
Not even the wing.
What he carried instead was intention.
“The Root believed in rebellion,” he said aloud, though no one answered.
“The Creed believed in silence.”
He stopped at a rise where the horizon bent upward like a cradle.
“But belief doesn’t build. Becoming does.”
A soft wind moved through the new air.
And for the first time, feathers drifted down—not from birds, but from the place the breach had once occupied.
They weren’t literal.
Just symbolic.
A sign that the world remembered how to fly.
Behind him, the breach closed—not with violence, not with light.
With a slow breath.
Like a final exhale.
And Vail’s voice echoed once.
“Hold the door open, even when it hurts.”
Tarn knelt and pressed his hand into the earth.
It didn’t burn.
It didn’t resist.
It responded.
From the soil grew a tree—metal-limbed and feather-leafed, its bark etched with Root glyphs and Waylan’s mark side by side.
It would take time.
But the world would grow again.
In rust.
In ash.
In feather.
And in flight.