The hum of failing power systems was the first thing Riven Hale heard as consciousness clawed its way back into his body. It wasn’t a sound one forgot — low, droning, always just under the edge of hearing, like a machine whispering the countdown to its own death.The cryochamber hissed as the seals decompressed, clouds of sterile vapor spilling into the room like ghosts eager to flee. Riven's eyes fluttered open, pupils contracting sharply as the station’s dim emergency lighting pulsed in blood-red cycles. He sat up slowly, joints creaking as if he were ancient stone stirring after a thousand years.In many ways, he was.His skin was pale from stasis, muscles tight and sluggish from years frozen in bio-suspension. Every breath felt like sand scraping inside his lungs. But worse was the emptiness — a yawning, cavernous blankness where his memories should have been.He could remember his name. Riven Hale. The name felt weighted, sharp, like a blade sheathed under his skin.He could reme

The maglev train hummed like a dragon taking a breath.Riven traveled in a dark, sharp train shooting along inside the orbital complex, well below the public floors. Glass walls passed on either side, revealing rows of empty docking bays and dark, skeletal ships — rusty hulks of a war nobody remembered winning.Across from him, Agent Rho remained still. She'd said nothing since they entered the ship. The faint pulse of blue energy at the back of her right ear told him she was analyzing at least three streams from the Council. Listening and computing day and night.He preferred silence.The tremor in his fingers had finally stopped. That symbol carved into his shoulder still ached beneath the synth-fabric of his tunic. He hadn't dared scan it yet. Whatever it meant, it hadn’t been meant for the Council to see. Not yet.“You ever been to the Inner Spire?” Rho asked without looking at him.Riven stared ahead, “No.”“You’ll like Chancellor Kheir. She’s theatrical.”“I don’t like anyone.”

Halvex Prime was a corpse world.The sky above was an ochre smear of radiation clouds, torn apart by gravitational scars that pulsed visibly in the atmosphere—wounds where the Veil had once tethered itself to reality. Snow made from ash fell in thick flurries, coating the ruined monastic cliffs in silence. Once a place of meditation, the Temple of the Ten Thousand Echoes now sat split down the center, like a brain cleaved mid-thought.Riven trudged through the debris field, his boots crunching over broken reliquaries and shattered synthstone tiles etched with fading sigils. He’d seen war zones before. He had made warzones before, but this was something different.Halvex hadn’t been bombed. It had been unwritten.Reality itself had fractured here. Like something had peeled back the rules of causality, and left the world trying to remember what shape it used to be.And somewhere inside this broken temple was a signal. A beacon pinging faintly in a narrow-band military code—one he hadn’t

The Arcturus Drift was not a station but a precariously stable ecology of bolted habitats, orbiting trash, scavenged freighter hulls, and gravity-reversed asteroids—all tied together by jury-rigged tunnels and anarchy. It lazily rotated in the orbit of a faint, dying star, half-illuminated by artificial flares and digital firework advertisements flickering in twenty languages. Riven had witnessed more organized war zones.The Drift was where secrets smoldered.Riven descended from The Vanta's landing clamp and into the reek of sweat, smoldering synth-meat, ozone, and unresolved stress. Street vendors crowded the walkways, peddling weapon mods, pirated memory splices, and off-color AI fragments. Music thumped somewhere in the depths of the bazaar, syncopated and industrial, as if someone had attempted to convert a dying motor into a drum.Above, a frayed pennant said in neon letters: "BUY WHAT'S FORGOTTEN, SELL WHAT'S DENIED."Nix's voice hummed quietly in his ear. "Security override:

The AI fragment had said nothing since they departed the Marrowhold. But when The Palimpsest glided into low orbit around a nameless planetoid for emergency calibration, the sphere—tethered in the rear compartment—sparked to life.Riven was the first to see.He sat alone, gazing at the sleek, thrumming shell of the logic core while Soli labored at the front. The ship's steady thrum was the sole sound until the lights softened slightly and the AI core beat with an almost unfelt rhythm—three, then nothing. Three again. He thought of a heartbeat. No—a beacon.Then, the voice, not in speakers.Not in his ears.It cut through all that."ANCHOR DETECTED."The words ripped across the back of his mind like icy fingers.Riven was on his feet, attuned in an instant. "What did you say?""ANCHOR RIVEN HALE ACCEPTED."He took a step back, hand reflexively reaching for the sidearm holstered at his hip. But how do you shoot something in your head?"Define 'Anchor,'" he growled."YOU ARE THE REMNANT