Home / Sci-Fi / The Archivists of Aftertime / Chapter 226 – The Children of Claire
Chapter 226 – The Children of Claire
Author: Clare Felix
last update2025-09-15 01:51:52

They never called themselves children. They did not even know they were such at first. They were scattered, born under other suns, in winter and desert weather, brought up by mothers and fathers who never mentioned Claire Monroe, never breathed her name. Yet, when they cried as infants, spreading their mouths, the cry was the same—a queer cadence, as if infant lungs had already learned a song.

Midwives were the first to realize. An ocean-world birth on the planet Nereth: the infant cried, and the resonance thrummed through the walls of the birthing hut, making the water bowls clatter. A midwife's hands shook as she said in a hushed tone, "It is the same cry the others gave." She did not understand why she added others. She had only ever cared for this child. And yet the word was true, it was old.

On an underground mining colony on the world of Kalith, a six-year-old boy astonished his father by, in the middle of fixing machinery, uttering sentences no one could decipher. The father in
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