The discovery of the Uncarved Star set up opportunity and panic waves in the fledgling alliance of free worlds. Some saw it as an asset—a dumping ground for painful memories, or a place to create idealized worlds. Others saw it as a bomb waiting for the highest bidder to mold it. The Remembering Pilots were charged with quarantining the system, no simple feat when the world itself actively resisted, its neutral presence difficult to focus on.It was during this tense vigil that a new aberration burst forth. Not a ship, not a world. A tear.It materialized on the bridge of the Remembering Star without warning. A vertical slash of silver light in the air, about the height of a man. It did not give off heat or energy. It gave off potential. From the rift, forms emerged. Three of them. They were humanoid, but their outlines were vague, wavering as if seen through a heat haze. They wore simple, grey robes, and their faces were calm, without the stress lines that marred the face of every ot

The victory over the Threadcasters was a pyrrhic one. The Remembering Star hung in the vacuum above the Preserved world, now thrashing in the tormented convulsions of its recovered memory. Its song in the Cosmic Diary was a stark, psychic wound, a cry of agony that echoed through the fleet and chilled the heart of every Remembering Pilot.Kael, kept under restraint in the pilot's cradle, was struck by the pain of the world as a personal blow. "It's not recollecting the stasis," he gritted through clenched teeth, his knuckles locked on the control bars. "It's recalling the potential the Threadcasters destroyed. It's feeling all possible futures stolen from it, simultaneously. It's… unwinding.".To the main viewer, the face of the world was a nightmare of geological identity crisis. Deserts suddenly flood into oceans that instantly evaporate into fields of shimmering crystalline dust. Mountain ranges project upwards only to buckle in on themselves moments later. It was an experimental w

The Preserved World win was an illusion of an arm. They were mindful still of the resonance of the war, the shocking power of Lira's emotional reflection, but at a price that lingered like the scorching chemical on the mind. The song of the world in the Cosmic Diary, solid as it was once, was now a dirge, a sorrowful, complicated threnody of integrated trauma. They had triumphed, but they had learned healing to be a more laborious, delicate art than the skill of destruction.But the Echo Eaters were not delicate. They were a continuous pressure, a chill tide seeping into the joints of the universe. And in the dark mathematics of war, a tool—a tool of any sort—was an inducement too great to avoid.The strategy was not hatched in the Remembering Star's strategic chamber, but on the fringes. A Remembering Pilot, Rael, nerves fatigued from constant tuning to cosmic agony, encountered an Echo Eater probe siphoning out feeble psychic resonances from a lifeless moon. High Command's instructi

The Valen-III ice plains north were untouched, a white expanse under the blackness of star-filled sky, unperturbed by conflict. It was here that the anomaly occurred. A blaze. A column of fire that rose high at the center of a glacial valley. But it was a blaze that broke all the rules.The Remembering Star's detectors sensed its enormous thermal radiation, but its video inputs saw nothing. No light. No smoke. No flame."It's a ghost," Kael said, bewildered. "The icecaps around it are melting, forming a new river, but the heat source itself is invisible."On the surface, the phenomenon was even more baffling. They encountered a wall of intense heat that made the air ripple. They.''d feel the heat of the fire against their skin, a warm, soothing heat.'' that brought warmth deep into their bones, relieving pains they had never experienced.''d hear it.''.'' The low, reverberant boom of a stellar motor. But.''d see nothing. Their eyes brought back only the untarnished ice and somber rock

It was found in the remains of one of the Architect's Waypoints, a location preceding the Mnemolith itself. It was a crystal, no larger than a hand mirror, mounted in a frame constructed of an unusual, non-reactive metal. It was called the Oculus of Divergence.The first scientist to study it cried out and didn't stop for three hours.When finally he came to rest, he was catatonic, trapped in a waking trance of what his life would have been if he'd never left his native planet. He caught a glimpse of the children he would have had, the house he would have raised, the quiet contentment of the untraveled road. The reality of his actual life—his accomplishments, his friends on the station—became cruel. He had made the mistake. Everything was wrong.The Thousandfold Mirror did not show the future. It showed the present. Every possible present, each one spinning out from every decision ever made. It reflected not only the face of the observer, but the infinite faces of all they might have