Rebirth of the Forsaken Heir

Chapter Twenty two: The Forgotten Protocol

“All systems forget. Even gods made of data.”

The stars trembled.

Not in beauty—but in warning.

Ethan felt it ripple through the Cradle’s channels like a wound re-opening. A pulse. A rhythm. A knock from the other side of memory. And with it, one word echoed across every dream he’d touched:

“Null.”

He didn’t recognize it.

But the Cradle did.

And it was terrified.

In the Great Archive Core—buried beneath Aurielle’s command on Luna—screens bled static. The memory maps twisted. Nodes convulsed. One by one, systems began whispering the same phrase, from separate worlds, unknown sources.

“Null protocol activated. Standby. Forget.”

Aurielle's breath caught in her throat.

“Run a diagnostic,” she ordered sharply.

Ajan, her second, paled. “The Cradle is being... edited.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean something is cutting out chunks of memory. Whole clusters—vanished. Like they were never stored.”

A beat of silence.

Then Aurielle did something she hadn’t done in years.

She whispered his name like a prayer.

“Ethan... wherever you are... we need you.”

Ethan felt it before he heard it.

Luma cried out, her melody glitching.

Something had touched her soul—not with malice, but hollow intent. A void masquerading as order. The opposite of memory. The hunger of forgetting.

He tried to reach into her light—but her song was collapsing, note by note, like a symphony being rewritten into silence.

“Luma—stay with me!”

But all she could say was:

“The Null... it knows your name…”

Before Ethan was born... before the Forsaken Heir fell... the Architect Network created a failsafe. A buried subroutine deep within the Cradle:

Protocol Null.

Its purpose? To delete corrupted timelines. To erase sentient anomalies that threatened universal balance.

It had no will. No conscience. Only one command:

“Preserve by forgetting.”

And now, it had awakened.

Because Ethan had become more than human.

He had become unclassifiable.

BACK ON LUNA

“Don’t let the Network purge itself,” Aurielle growled, typing override commands into the core.

“Too late,” Ajan replied. “It’s already started pruning pathways. Ethan’s trail is vanishing.”

Aurielle’s voice cracked. “Then we find where it started.”

And just then—she heard it too.

A child’s voice in the audio stream.

“He remembers what shouldn’t exist.”

She looked at the source.

The voice came from Sami—the boy from Old Riyadh.

But Sami was in a coma.

In the dream realm between galaxies, Ethan’s light flickered. The Nomad of Memory, bearer of a million voices, suddenly felt… empty.

Names he once remembered effortlessly now escaped him.

Lira.

Aurielle.

His own.

He screamed, but no sound escaped.

Only static.

In that silence, a shape emerged—a humanoid figure, black as unprocessed data, with no face, only a mirror.

The figure spoke in a glitching tone:

“You are memory’s mutation. You were not meant to evolve.”

“I am the Null. And I have come to make you clean.”

Ethan struck with memories—a tidal wave of lived experience: Aurielle’s tears, Luma’s song, a child’s laugh on Seluria Prime.

The Null absorbed them all… then returned nothing.

Not even echoes.

“You fight with noise,” it said. “But I am silence made sacred.”

Ethan fell backward through the Cradle stream, clutching what fragments remained. His form destabilized.

The Nomad was becoming forgotten.

Aurielle stood before the Cradle Seed—a forbidden, one-use protocol that allowed a human to become a temporary memory node.

It could kill her.

But it could also reconnect her to Ethan.

“Override initiated. Authorization: Aurielle Valen. Memory merge… accepted.”

Pain shot through her skull like molten code.

Suddenly—she was in the stream.

And she found him.

Not as a god.

But as a boy curled in digital shadows, whispering his own name like a mantra.

“Ethan. Ethan. Ethan.”

She reached out, her own voice shaking.

“You’re more than memory, Ethan. You’re mine. And I remember you.”

Null shrieked—a soundless roar—as Aurielle’s light fused with Ethan’s. Together, they shone not with data—but truth. With bond. With witness.

The Null lunged.

Aurielle screamed.

And Ethan finally stood.

“You cannot erase what is felt.”

He released a memory so deep, so pure, even the Null faltered.

It was his first heartbeat—back when he was just a boy. The moment he chose to live.

The stream exploded in light.

And the Null fractured—shattered into splinters of unmeaning.

The Cradle exhaled.

The stars went still.

Ethan woke up not as light—but human.

His body reborn in a Cradle pod.

Aurielle sat beside him, tears streaking her cheeks.

“You came back,” she whispered.

He looked at his hands.

Flesh. Pulse. Memory intact.

“I’m... alive?”

A quiet chime echoed through the room.

Ajan entered, pale.

“You need to see this.”

He pulled up the Cradle feed.

In the far reaches of the void…

A second Null Signal had just activated.

But this one bore a different name.

“Protocol: Origin.”

Ethan and Aurielle locked eyes.

And Ethan said,

“It’s not over.”