Home / Sci-Fi / The Archivists of Aftertime / Chapter 208: The Fire Without Smoke
Chapter 208: The Fire Without Smoke
Author: Clare Felix
last update2025-09-10 13:56:05

The ice steppes of the north of Valen-III were a clean sheet, a plain of pure white stretched drum-tight under a black sky that went on forever with star after star. It was an expanse of deep negation, a world that resonated with the emptiness the Echo Eaters desired to create. It was there, in that world of sheer nothingness, that the anomaly manifested. Not as an incursion, but as a soft contradiction.

It was Kael, his senses still heightened from riding the emotional tides of the Orchard, who first saw the dissonance. He was doing a routine sweep of the quadrant, a normal charting of psychic emptiness, when his instruments—and his own attuned mind—registered a spike. But it wasn't a spike of agony or disorder. It was a place of… precise coherence. A warmth.

"Something's here," he announced, his voice carrying over the soft thrum of the bridge. "In the northern basin. The readings… they don't compute."

On the primary display screen, the sensors had painted a portrait of impossibilit
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