The Architects of Dust

Chapter 5: Ghosts of Halvex

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 heard since the days of Ash Company.

His unit, and his ghosts.

He reached a broken archway and stepped inside.

The monastery’s central chamber was in ruins, but its memory remained.

Columns spiraled upward like petrified tendrils of thought. Light from a fractured ceiling beam glinted off the ice crystals clinging to prayer circuits carved into the walls. In the center of the room, embedded in the floor like a forgotten tooth, lay the half-buried remains of a holo-terminal—still blinking.

Riven crouched beside it.

The system was ancient. Pre-collapse tech, scavenged and patched with external memory banks jury-rigged to maintain function. He ran his palm across the cracked interface and felt it respond. A flicker and a heartbeat.

Then, the projector engaged.

A ghost appeared.

It was a man in black armor, worn and scorched. One pauldron was marked with the sigil of Ash Company: A burning crow, wings outstretched, cradling a dying star.

The ghost's helmet retracted.

It was him.

Riven staggered back a step.

His past self stared ahead, expression grim, eyes sunken with sleepless purpose. There was blood smeared across his jaw and a sharp tension in his voice as he spoke.

“This is Lieutenant Riven Hale, Ash Company command. Veil anomalies continue to escalate across quadrant sectors. We’ve confirmed psychic bleed in non-augmented personnel. Reality anchors are failing to sync. Several team members… they’re hearing voices from under the Veil.”

“I recommend immediate shutdown of the Halvex Node. If anyone hears this, get out. This place is not just corrupted. It’s awake.”

The recording ended.

Then another began automatically—this one from a different angle, helmet-cam footage shaking as it followed Riven and three other Ash soldiers navigating through a warped corridor.

“You think this is just glitching nav maps?” one soldier muttered. “I walked through this same hallway three times. Same blood on the wall. Same shadows.”

“Focus,” Riven’s voice snapped.

They reached a door. A red sigil pulsed on it—half-drawn in blood, half-burned into the metal by some unidentifiable force.

“What is that?” asked one of the soldiers.

“I don’t know,” Riven said.

But then past-Riven turned to face the camera, eyes wild.

“Except I do.”

“Riven—what the hell are you—?”

“It’s a message. From the other side.”

The footage stuttered, froze and  then looped.

Riven stepped back, a cold sweat sliding down his spine.

He remembered the mission to Halvex. The breach containment, and the screams. The collapsing anchor points. But not this. Not the recordings. Not the way he’d spoken.

Not the symbol—the one carved into the door. The same one he’d seen carved into his own skin two nights ago.

He moved deeper into the ruins.

The further in he went, the more of the monastery's inner sanctum he discovered—the scroll rooms. Now frozen solid and filled with shattered memory crystals; the echo chambers. Where monks once recorded interdimensional frequencies to meditate on the noise between universes. And the pit—a deep, spiraling shaft beneath the main chamber where chants once rose like incense into the cold air.

At the bottom of the pit was another data node. This one was different.

Less military, more... ceremonial.

Riven tapped into it.

A pulse of heat traveled through his fingers.

Then came the voice.

“He came from the Shattered Future…”

It was a monk’s voice—thin, dry, almost flutelike.

“…and walked among the Echoed Dead. He bore the Mark of the Architect, and where he stepped, the laws of time grew sick.”

The data stream blurred, then realigned.

“We tried to warn them. We told the Interzone—the Veil was not passive. It learned. It remembered.”

Another image appeared. A mural, painted in psionic ink, depicting a figure with one foot in light and the other in chaos. It looked like Riven. But the eyes—burning with the sigil—were not his.

He backed away from the node, breath sharp in his chest.

This wasn’t just history.

This was a warning.

His past self—a version of him—had already known the Veil was corrupting minds before it fell. And he had spoken of it like it was alive.

That couldn’t be right.

The Veil was a dimensional partition. A metaphysical barrier designed to keep raw probability—the chaotic multiverse—from bleeding into realspace. It didn’t think. It didn’t speak. It was a mechanism.

Wasn’t it?

He reached for his wristpad and connected to Nix.

“Run a frequency scan on the glyph I saw in the footage. Compare it to the one I found carved into me.”

A pause.

Then a soft ping.

Match: 99.82%

He exhaled slowly.

Someone—or something—was reaching back from the collapse. Using him. Had used him before.

And if he’d forgotten that...

...what else had he lost?

Outside the ruins, the ash-fall grew heavier.

The beacon from his ship pulsed faintly in the distance, cutting through the swirling haze like a heartbeat. He began the climb back out of the pit, mind burning with new questions. A memory war was stirring inside him, scratching at the walls of whatever had been stitched together during his cryosleep.

He paused near the shattered archway of the entrance.

The wind carried a whisper.

Low, distant but unmistakable.

“Riven…”

He turned no one.

Just the darkened ruins of Halvex. The cold bones of a world that remembered more than he did.

But the whisper wasn’t random.

It came from deep within the Veil.

And it knew his name.