2025-06-12 20:52:59The corridor was silent. Too silent.
Riven’s heartbeat wasn’t.
He stepped out of the Palimpsest’s airlock and into the half-ruined mining compound, his boots echoing on fractured metal. Behind him, Soli wiped blood from her cheek, her breath shaky. Nix remained silent and motionless—its programming apparently frozen by the Dustborn blast.
But Riven’s eyes were locked on the shattered horizon.
He held the empty case of the datashard in his hand. Whatever had been encoded in that fragment had burned a hole in his mind—a memory of a time he’d never lived. Standing before a living Veil gate. Younger. In full Anchor gear.
The shards of his identity were fracturing. The real Riven, the displaced Ashley… who knew anymore?
They walked toward the holo-comm array where they’d boarded seconds before. Soli’s hands trembled as she powered up the system. The internal display flickered, half offline. But when it came to life, Riven could see his reflection behind the glare—and the flicker of doubt in his features.
“Report,” he said, voice low.
Soli tapped a few pads. “External sensors detected multiple inbound signatures after the blast. Hostile energy usage—pulse grenades, blend-tech shrapnel. One drone went down hard.” She hesitated. “We lost Nix’s core activation. I think… she’s offline.”
He knelt and checked Nix’s status display. Blank. Cold. Dark. The ship’s AI—a link to everything gracious and logical about this mission—was gone. Made silent by decisions not theirs to make.
He felt hollow.
“Well,” he said, standing, “that’s one problem gone. Now we have a bigger one: someone out there knows exactly who—or what—we are. And I doubt they’re looking for answers of their own.”
Soli nodded. “They know about Anchor. And now they know what we found.” She pulled a battered datapad from her coat. “I decrypted what I could of that Dustborn pulse. Bit of a garble, but...”
She read:
“Find the Anchor. Call the spiral. Bring her the gateway.”
She handed the pad to Riven.
He read it, line by line. The words were more than commands—they were prophecy.
“They want me to complete what I started,” he said.
“That—or finish what you broke.” Soli glanced at him. “Riven, are you... okay?”
He looked up at her. The sky outside was bruised, half-lit by shards of broken solar arrays.
“Attempting normal,” he said.
But his voice missed something.
A lie.
He shook his head. “Gather what we can. We load and move before sunrise. Send Nix’s core to our safehouse for repair. And Soli…”
She looked at him.
“I’m going to piece that whole memory back together.”
Memory Reconstruction
The safehouse was an abandoned data bunker orbiting a dead moon—kept offline, secret, and deliberately overlooked. Inside, dental lights hung from shattered ceilings. Rusted workstations lined the walls. Empty racks stood silent, waiting.
There, Soli plugged the damaged datashard into her portable analysis rig. Its casings were scorched, but the internal logic spiraled with corrupted light—fractals nested inside fractals.
Riven watched her work, leaning against a pitted bulkhead. His mind wandered—or dove—back to the moment the Dustborn whispered.
The Architects remember what you built…
He swallowed the words. But what did he remember?
Concrete memories were like broken mirrors. Reflections of a man he thought he was, twisted by loss and time. Sleep brought dreams—half-remembered delirium of corridors leading to nowhere, blood-red interfaces, and a woman calling him Anchor.
But not just Anchor. A phrase. A key. Something about Ash Company.
He'd been in Ash Company. Command rank. But the details were gone. Burned out. Where were his unit? Where were the records? The Council claimed they purged them—vault-cleared everything. But knowing Soli, he suspected something darker: memory concealment.
“Found anything?” he asked.
Soli adjusted her goggles. “You might want to sit.”
She hit the playback button.
A series of visual snippets stormed the rig.
Ash Company in formation. White and black plated uniforms. Riven, older—lined with pale sapphic scars no longer visible now. Carrying a soldier through a blizzard of fire.
A handshake with a Veil technician as a gate hums in the background. Riven raised his hand—then hesitated.
And then: a breaking image. Veil energy erupting. A wave of empty corridors. A sliver-thin woman—veins sculpted with silver-gray light. She watches him. His eyes meet hers. He hesitates. Then...
He issues an order.
Then Ash Company’s insignia burns out.
The fragments collapse. Soli pressed stop. Riven’s chest tightened. The hallucination was real.
“That’s you,” Soli said softly. “Your memories. From before cryo.”
He closed his eyes. “But I never remembered them.”
“And now you have.” She shut off the rig. “Riven, those visuals—even your voice… It’s all in your Headnet signature. Someone suppressed it. Someone — or something — didn’t want you to remember.”
He nodded slowly. “We’re not dealing with hallucinations. We’re dealing with erasure.”
He looked at Soli. She was close enough to see her reflection in the glass—the strain in her eyes. She cared.
And he realized he was risking more than his identity. He was risking trust.
“Promise me,” she said quietly, “that you’ll tell me when the next memory hits.”
He threw her a glance. “I swear.”
At the blast of footsteps, he tensed.
Nix stepped into the light.
Powered down, but alive.
The ship’s central core dripped fused wires like tendrils.
He examined the body. Her optics flickered.
He pressed a hand to the console built into her chassis.
The lights pulsed.
She said something—but blurred.
He leaned in.
“...wait… the Spiral…”
She whispered again. A word.
“Remember.”
Then went dark.
He looked at Soli.
She nodded, sad.
Midnight Departure
They’d reloaded the Palimpsest with supplies and Nix’s black core resting like a dead heart. Outside, the space beyond was broken white. No safety. No rest.
Riven climbed into the pilot’s station, settling into the worn seat. He powered systems on half-strength to avoid detection. Soli flipped open her tablet.
“Next stop?” she asked.
“No idea.”
But his hands moved with purpose. He entered a set of coordinates he pulled from a blip of remaining data—a place called Halvex Station Delta.
He swallowed.
“Halvex,” Soli said, voice low. “You want to go back there?”
He looked at the red planet hanging in view—a broken map of a broken world.
“I need to find out what Ash Company did there. And if the Anchor protocol connects to deeper architecture than the Council will admit.”
She met his gaze.
“All right then, Commander.”
They throttled forward.
The jump gate fired.
Inside the warp window, the universe dissolved into fractal hues—blue, violet, ash—broken like a mosaic of memory shards.
The pulse of the Anchor code hummed in Riven’s head again, deeper this time. The words from the Dustborn returned:
Bring her the gateway.
Why her?
On the other side, space snapped into place. Red star in view. Halvex Prime, still orbiting its broken satellite like a mournful eye.
Nix’s revived circuit whined. She opened her optics.
“...you must warn her...before spiral…”
Her voice cut off—as if silenced.
Riven stood.
He was an Anchor. He had built the code—forged it. And somehow, he was supposed to deliver it to “her.” The Dustborn. The Architects. Or his past self.
Someone.
Whatever circuit he powered now had an endpoint.
He looked at Soli.
He felt an ache to tell her.
To share it all.
But he couldn’t.
Not yet.
Not while Ash Company still watched.
Not while he still had a past being hunted.
Not while he still needed to remember every fragment before it was gone.
The ship powered down again—suddenly dark.
The stars outside flickered.
He heard an echo, deep and hungry:
“ANCHOR…YOU ARE LATE.”
The words reverberated through Riven’s bones.He realized—he wasn’t alone.
Someone else had beaten him to Halvex.
And whatever—or whoever—was waiting there, they knew his name.
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Chapter 14: The Architect's Shadow
The chamber’s lights dissolved into white noise. Riven’s head pounded with every beat, as if the Spiral itself had taken hold and was roaring through his skull. The last image he registered before the world went dark was the architect interface’s translucent hand pressed against his glyph—its crystalline glow pulsing in sync with his fading heartbeat.And then—nothing.He awoke to a sound like bone grinding. A slow mechanical groan echoed around him as he tried to move. His vision swam into focus to reveal curved walls of burnished metal. The room was silent—no Dustborn guards, no council enforcers. Only the hum of failing systems and the dull throb of his own pulse.He tested his limbs. They worked. He sat up, breath shallow and sharp.Soli.Riven turned his head. Light reflected off her still form a few meters away: slumped, unconscious—or worse. He reached her side, heart racing, and gently shook her shoulder.“Soli,” he whispered.Her eyelids fluttered. She groaned, lifting a hand
Chapter 13: Veilborn Reckoning,
The cockpit lights flickered once—then died. Riven’s heartbeat thundered in his ears as the viewport went dark, swallowing Halvex Prime’s glowing horizon like a severed pulse. Outside, the architect-craft—alive, sentient—hovered in total eclipse. All light came from its crystalline veins, which pulsed with slow, deliberate reverence.He swallowed, fear and determination tangling in his chest. The glyph on his shoulder throbbed beneath his skin, each beat a reminder that he had named and awakened something beyond human reckoning. He’d said the code aloud. He’d delivered himself to this moment—and he would not turn away.“Soli,” he whispered, voice coarse. He turned to the passenger seat—empty. She must have left the shuttle again. His heart froze.Then the airlock hissed—and she stepped back inside, helmet removed. Bruises under her eyes glimmered; her expression was fierce. “They escorted me through the outer decks. Stasis pods still active—like a prize exhibit. They know exactly what
Chapter 12: Silent Echoes
The cockpit lights were too dim, the silence too loud. Riven watched Sedna, the red planet of Halvex Prime, drift by like an ancient wound under fractured clouds of ash. Everything out here had been broken once—and never quite healed.He swallowed. His reflection stared back at him: hollow cheeks, eyes weighed down by memory fractures. The glyph branded on his shoulder pulsed faintly beneath his skin, as if waiting for permission to surface again.You are late.The words echoed in his skull, not as memory but as dread. He reached for the console, but his mind recoiled. The station was waiting. And it knew he was coming.“Soli.” He turned. She’d been sleeping against the seat, head tilted, still clothed in dust and dread. Bruises marked her face, hardened with fatigue. Eyes half-open, she rubbed them and touched her side where old scars still throbbed.“Good morning,” she managed, her voice strained but solid.Outside, Sedna pulsed. The planet seemed to breathe beneath the ash storms—p
Chapter 11: Ash Company Memory
The corridor was silent. Too silent.Riven’s heartbeat wasn’t.He stepped out of the Palimpsest’s airlock and into the half-ruined mining compound, his boots echoing on fractured metal. Behind him, Soli wiped blood from her cheek, her breath shaky. Nix remained silent and motionless—its programming apparently frozen by the Dustborn blast.But Riven’s eyes were locked on the shattered horizon.He held the empty case of the datashard in his hand. Whatever had been encoded in that fragment had burned a hole in his mind—a memory of a time he’d never lived. Standing before a living Veil gate. Younger. In full Anchor gear.The shards of his identity were fracturing. The real Riven, the displaced Ashley… who knew anymore?They walked toward the holo-comm array where they’d boarded seconds before. Soli’s hands trembled as she powered up the system. The internal display flickered, half offline. But when it came to life, Riven could see his reflection behind the glare—and the flicker of doubt i
Chapter 10: Dust Spiral
The surface of the planet was hissing with heat mirages and nasty splinters of rust-red stone, broken as if the planet itself had split apart in agony. They'd abandoned the wrecked freighter hours ago—its empty halls still ringing with the faint dying whisper of the logic core. Riven, Soli, and the demure AI Nix now made their way back towards The Vanta, navigating between the fossilized ridges of what once was a mining colony.The wind tasted odd here. It was not dust—it was rust, data rot, and something acrid, as if the air recalled violence.Soli led them, sweeping with a hand-held spiker relay, as Riven had his hand resting on his gun. Nix brought up the rear, its humanoid casing crackling slightly, a stuttering shine as if it wasn't designed to be on the same plane of reality."Still no sign of our tail?"Riven asked.Soli looked over her shoulder. "Nothing on the scanner, but that don't mean they ain't here.""Dustborn?""Maybe. Or maybe they were already on-world."They went an
Chapter 9: Breach Code
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
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