2025-05-17 15:06:53The ceiling above Riven was a smooth black slab, unbroken by panels or lights, yet everything in the room glowed with a low, sterile white — like the ghost of sunlight, filtered through poison.
He lay motionless, muscles stiff from cryostasis, heart thudding too slow. The med-bed hissed beneath him, scanning his vitals with silent judgment. A line of machines beeped with lifeless regularity near his head. Everything here felt too clean, and quiet. He could taste the synthetic air like ash on his tongue.
He wasn’t alone.
Beyond the glass wall of the recovery room, figures moved like shadows, dressed in long coats that rippled like oil slicks. Their faces were blank. Not masked—just... forgettable. He tried to sit up.
A sharp stab in his lower back froze him in place. His ribs screamed.
“Easy,” a mechanical voice said.
A small drone floated into view. It looked like a surgical lantern grafted onto a wasp. “You are experiencing cryo-dissonance. Please refrain from violent motion.”
Riven ignored it. He had questions—none of which the drone would answer. He waited until it retreated into its charging alcove, then reached slowly beneath the blanket. Cold metal met his fingers — a hidden port in his side, an old war implant. Still functional.
They hadn’t deactivated it.
Idiots.
With a practiced flick of thought, he accessed the implant’s interface. Ghost-code flickered across his vision — letters burning in his periphery, unstable. The signal was weak in here. Shielded. But not impervious.
He tunneled through back channels in the station’s mesh, searching for archived data. Most of it was locked behind Interzone firewalls, tagged “Veil-class Black.” But some of it bled through.
[FILE: CRUCIBLE-89: Hale, Riven – Tactical Summary]
[Accessed: Unauthorized | Penalty: Termination]
He ignored the warning and dug deeper.
Years of combat logs scrolled past. Names of dead soldiers. Maps of star systems that no longer existed. Audio clips warped by radiation damage. But when he reached for the most critical piece—The Collapse—the files weren’t just corrupted.
They were gone.
Purged.
Nothing remained from the final twenty-three hours before the Veil fell. Not even system logs. Someone had erased history.
His history.
Static buzzed in his inner ear then a whisper.
“We’re watching, Commander Hale.”
The voice came not from his implant, but the intercom overhead. Male, brittle, somewhere between sarcasm and suspicion. Riven didn’t flinch. He reached calmly for the data jack and severed the connection, severing pain along with it.
He sat up fully, breathing through the agony.
Across the room, his reflection stared back from the obsidian wall. Gaunt. Pale. More scars than he remembered. But that wasn’t what caught his eye.
On his left shoulder — carved deep into the skin, half-healed — was a symbol he didn’t recognize.
Three lines intersecting a circle. Crude. Ancient.
It was burned into him.
He ran his fingers across it slowly. Not a brand. A knife had done this.
He had questions again.
A sharp hiss broke the silence as the glass door slid open. A figure stepped inside, tall and thin, wrapped in a cloak that shimmered like metallic dust.
Council.
The woman’s face was sharp and severe, her eyes dark enough to drown in. “Commander Hale. You’ve been busy.”
He didn’t answer.
“I see you’ve accessed classified files. That’s a violation.”
“I’m a walking violation,” he rasped.
She didn’t smile. “You were given clearance only because the Council deems you potentially useful. Please don’t make us revise that judgment.”
“What happened to me?” Riven asked.
“You were cryo-shelved after the Black Accord. Following the Veil Collapse.”
“Why?”
“Because no one knew what else to do with you.”
There was honesty in that. Cold, bureaucratic honesty.
The woman stepped closer. “Your memory is still fragmented. That’s expected. But the world has moved on, Hale. The Veil’s remnants are unstable. The border gates no longer follow coherent physics. Civilizations have collapsed. The Interzone is barely holding together.”
“You said you needed me for a mission,” Riven said.
She inclined her head slightly. “A Veil fracture was detected on the outer edge of the Eridan Break. We believe something is trying to come through.”
“Something?”
“We don’t know what. That’s the problem.”
“And you want me to go see?”
“You were there when the first rupture occurred. You survived what no one else did. Whatever's out there might recognize you.”
Riven shook his head, “No.”
A long silence.
“Why not?” the woman asked.
“Because I’ve seen what happens when people tamper with gods,” Riven said. “And the Veil isn’t a gate. It’s a warning.”
Her eyes flickered—just briefly. A tiny crack in the Council mask.
“Then you remember more than you should.”
He turned to the window, watching the empty stars hang like broken glass. “No. I remember less than I need to. And someone made sure of that.”
She said nothing.
He looked at her. “Tell me what I did. The files are gone. I want the truth.”
She hesitated.
Then she reached into her coat and pulled out a small obsidian shard. She placed it on the table beside his bed.
“A partial fragment,” she said. “From your own war journal. It survived the collapse firewalls.”
He stared at it.
“I’m not doing this for the Council,” he said flatly. “I want to know who I was. What I broke. And why I’m still alive.”
“That’s fair,” she said.
And then, without ceremony, she turned and walked away.
The door slid shut behind her.
Riven reached for the shard. As he touched it, heat bloomed through his fingers. The surface shimmered—and a fragment of memory slammed into his mind like a freight train.
Flashes of light. Screaming metal. A child burning. Veins of lightning crackling through space-time as reality screamed and folded inward. Riven — standing at the gate, his hand outstretched, the command code on his lips.
And then: nothing.
The memory shattered.
He gasped and let go.
He looked down at his hands. They were shaking.
From the shadows outside, the Council agents still watched. Always watching.
But they hadn’t seen what he’d just seen.
Not yet.
Riven Hale leaned back against the cold metal wall and stared at the ceiling. Something was broken in the stars. And whatever it was, it had carved a symbol into his flesh.
Something wanted him to remember.
But the worst part wasn’t that he didn’t.
The worst part was the feeling he already had… once.
And had chosen to forget.
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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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