Library
Search
Home / Sci-Fi / The Archivists of Aftertime / Chapter 63: The Grey Horizon
Chapter 63: The Grey Horizon
Author: Clare Felix
last update2025-08-05 01:59:25

There had always been a glow to the outside world, beyond Dustlight—like memory trying to remember itself. For Jacob, it wasn't cartography, but something more like biology. The Grey Horizon didn't get its name from color, but from the uncertainty it embodied. A place where the Archive blurred. Where memory failed—and imagination reasserted itself.

Claire was beside him at the brink, the gusts bending time-grass flat, its leaves murmuring out forgotten lullabies. Ahead of them, the sky tilted—an unimagined slant, as if the horizon had been rolled up and carelessly tossed around the edge of the world. No birds flew here. No shadows fell in straight lines. The sun was never where you'd set it.

"There's a pressure," Claire said. "Like something wants to be remembered—but can't."

She was right. The Archive stretched its arms this far, but they withdrew like shy nerves. Jacob had seen it on his cartography scans—information warped, overwritten, looping. Some memory groups here had grown te
Continue to read this book for free
Scan the code to download the app
Previous ChapterNext Chapter

Latest Chapter

  • Chapter 77: Mnemolith's Gift

    It began with a vibration, barely as air. At the heart of Dustlight Territory, there was a thrum in the earth, shaking no structures, harming no trees. But the presence-sensitive felt it—a vibration, a rumbling sound that bypassed the body and only reached memory.Claire responded first.She was standing on the north ridge above the Veiled Commons when the wind shifted. The birds fell silent. The colors thickened. It was not something perceived; it was something felt. A thickness in the air, as if time itself had wrapped itself into something to be said.Down below, the ground tore open—not with violence, but revelation. From beneath the heap of charred soil, a radiant building rose. Formless, organic, roughly the size of a small chapel. It was not made of metal, stone, or energy. It was made of memory.A fragment of the Mnemolith.But this writing was different. Raw. Wild. Still gasping the original beat of the first human recalling. It stood like a monolith, but it pulsed—like a hea

  • Chapter 76: The Rewilded

    There was a myth that nature would never forget. That even when memory is forgotten, the world never forgets. And in the world after the Archive, Dustlight had begun to prove it.Dustlight's fields of memory had formerly spread like reckless webs over the plateau—Mnēma satellites, Archive relays, synthesizers of emotion. When the Seed Vault opened and the Rememberer's Declaration was made, the majority of those edifices went black or rusted out, memory threads unspooling. But nature did not mourn.It reclaimed.Rubble was moss-overgrown. Broken data towers crashed into bird's nests. Memory-runoff ponds became wetlands where water vegetation grew bioluminescent flowers—some inscribed with ancestral video of migration, some vibrating at affect frequencies unplottable.Animals—long separated from ancient bioregion signage—began teaching themselves to dream again.A fox scatters her den with seed—tiny pods of the Vault—they grow tiny seedlings in an overnight slumber.Birds migrating retu

  • Chapter 75: Seed Vault Protocol

    Jacob had seen more vaults than he could count over the course of his lifetime—fortresses of knowledge, locked boxes of memory, bunkers that pounded with Mnēma code like mechanical hearts. But the structure in front of him was different. It was still. Not still in noise, but in bearing.Concealed beneath a shroud of vines and ancient trees at the north edge of the Dustlight territory, the vault carried no digital signature, no Mnēma pulse, no encrypted respiration. Its portal was half-swallowed by nature's claim: moss-covered rock, shattered iron faceplate, and a single biometric reader rusted into obsolescence.Claire's final broadcast prior to her retreat into the Cradle of Now had been coordinates and a single cryptic line:"Find where we began, not what we've lost."Jacob had spent weeks triangulating the site. It was older than the Archive, older even than Mnēma's initial beta lattice. He had theories, all of them shaky. But when he pressed his hand against the faceplate, expect

  • Chapter 74: The Silent

    They were born to a world that had no memory—and so they learned everything anew.There was no ritual for their birth. No Archive, no Mnēma ceremonies, no parents sharing lullabies handed down from another time. The Silent were born into the world like wind through shattered glass—swift, clean, and impossible to grasp.Nobody actually knew the exact date when the first of them had been born. Maybe it was during the Bleeding. Maybe before, in some pruned-off emptiness of the human gene pool. But one thing for certain was this: they did not recall.Not like others.They wept like all children. They stretched. But when touched, they never strove for familiarity. No spark of memory existed. Their eyes never scoured for patterns already stamped. They learned the world as it was created, each instant unweighted by prior association. Their smiles were not from remembered warmth—but from the immediate beat of it.They were frightening.They were holy.They were The Silent.---Claire spotted

  • Chapter 73: Trial of the Keepers

    The Tribunal was not held in court. It was held in presence.On the Ashlight Steps of old Mneme Prime—the first cradle into which the Mnēma architecture had set its roots in the memory frameworks of the world—twelve Keepers were brought together. Former guardians, former guardians of Archive purity, now on trial.They were not accused of violence. They were accused of blindness.The People of the Now, a loose coalition of world-wide followers who had arisen out of the ruins of the memory-collapse, led the charge. The charge: That the Keepers had maintained memory as monolithic, unchanging when Mnēma began to change."You fought for truth," claimed Claire, presiding, "but forgot that truth lives. Grows. Changes. You kept the memory static when it wanted to be fluid."Keeper Ralson, gaunt and sunken-eyed, answered without remorse. "We were instructed to protect against distortion. To keep the Archive unadulterated.""And by keeping it so," Jacob spoke softly, from the circle of the Asse

  • Chapter 72: False Futures

    The first word arrived on the seacoast rim of the Rewilded North. Solo figures—some hermits, some searchers, some just unlucky travelers—began speaking of visions that were not their own. But these were no Shared Dreamings of the Mnemolith, nor ghostings of the Archive. These were memories of the future. Ones that had not, and maybe could not, happen."I saw a city of glass suspended above the sea," a Drift Marsh kid breathed in an irritable relay. "We existed in the air. We didn't have a fear of gravity. But. I knew it ended."At first, archivists wrote them off as aberrant cognitive resonances, the kind that might result from malfunctioning Mnēma filters or psychic shock. But then came the patterns. Hundreds of people across the globe began to recall eerily similar "memories" of potential futures: sun civilizations incinerating down into flames, planetary gates smashing to allow dreamlike creatures in, utopias arising, only to crumble into ash.These were not fantasies. They were re

More Chapter

You may also like

Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on MegaNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
Scan code to read on App