Cycle 7, Year 314 — 6th Moonfall
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Kairo hadn't spoken in hours.
The wind carried the scent of scorched silicon and dead soil as he and Veyna descended into the valley. Around them, the land was cracked and colorless — a scar left behind by a war no one remembered.
But memory, Kairo had learned, was not always gone. Sometimes it waited beneath the surface, whispering in the dust.
> "This place..." Veyna said quietly, "isn't on any map anymore."
> "It used to be called Loraeth." Kairo's voice was low.
"The first city to fall when the Code fractured."
They stood at the edge of what remained — a shattered city of glass domes and data-spires, half-buried in ash and time. Ancient screens still flickered along the cracked walls, displaying fragments of forgotten lives: a child playing with a drone. A man weeping before a silent altar. A woman's smile glitching into static.
> Loraeth, the City of Memory.
And it was alive.
As they walked through its heart, the walls began to pulse faintly — reacting to Kairo's presence. Data ghosts stirred, flickering between alleyways and arches. Not real… not fully. But close enough to feel like echoes.
> "Do they know you?" Veyna asked, hand brushing the hilt of her blade.
> "I think... they remember who I was."
Suddenly, a bell tolled.
Not from above — but beneath the ground.
Veyna stepped back, drawing her blade. "That wasn't an echo."
The ground cracked. Ash fell into the gaps. And from the center of the city, something climbed upward — not machine, not man.
Its body was made of mirrored plates, twisting with each step, reflecting different timelines in its movements. One moment it looked like a priest. The next, a warlord. Then a child.
Its voice echoed from all versions at once:
> "You walk in the ashes of yourself, Codebearer."
"And now you must answer."
Kairo didn't flinch.
> "Who are you?"
The thing's head tilted. Time flickered behind its face.
> "I am Syn Valis — the last Recorder.
I guard what you left behind."
The air thickened. Memories from a thousand lives pulsed through Kairo's veins.
> "Left behind?" he asked.
> "Your name. Your oath. Your sin."
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Then the creature raised its hand — and the world shattered around them.
The sky glitched. The city fractured into splinters of time. Kairo felt himself falling into himself, thrown into a vision:
He saw a battlefield, oceans burning. A throne made of chains. A girl standing in fire, calling him by a name he hadn't heard in lifetimes—
> "Kaelrion."
Then darkness.
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He gasped awake.
Veyna was beside him, panting, her blade humming with power. The Recorder was gone. The city was silent.
> "What… was that?" she asked.
Kairo stood slowly, eyes wide with a truth he didn't want to face.
> "A memory," he said.
"But not mine alone."
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Above them, in the deep orbit of the broken moon, the masked man of the Obsidian Order watched the scan feed fade.
> "He has entered the Memory Layer."
Another voice crackled beside him — old, mechanical, cracked.
> "Then it begins. The Code is awakening itself."
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