On the third moon of Arkalon VI, a disciple knelt inside a chamber of obsidian and copper, lit only by a single blue flame hovering midair. Around her, silence. No windows. No exits—only a presence.
The summoning had arrived hours ago. The tone had not been angry. Not urgent. Just final.
Her name was Kaelor Thorne, a former artificer of the Second Master's school, long believed to have been expelled. Whispers had it she'd defected to the Fifth and Sixth. Others claimed Benedict had left her behind on a failed expedition. Both were true.
She stood now, long coat catching the shimmer of glyphlight along the wall. Her right eye glowed faintly—cybernetic and old, replaced after the Arc Spire Collapse. The hum of internal mana regulators pulsed faintly beneath her skin.
> "Ashcroft," Kaelor said, trying the name out loud. It still tasted like blood and iron.
A voice echoed through the flame. Not a master, not quite a person.
// You are instructed to observe. Interfere only if necessary. Disruption must appear incidental. //
Kaelor nodded once. "And if he opens the vault?"
// Then you recover what he finds. Or destroy it. //
The flame dimmed.
She didn't move. Instead, she let her thoughts drift—unwelcome memories pushing through the cracks. A lab filled with sunlight. A mother's voice echoing across datapads and exposed circuits. Yllira Thorne, her mentor, her guide, her mother. The Third Master.
Yllira Thorne. Founder of the registry. The open-access idealist.
Kaelor remembered the lectures, the endless debates about responsibility and freedom. Yllira had always believed that knowledge should be free—Kaelor had once agreed. Until freedom brought exploitation. Until open schematics were weaponized. Until no one answered for the consequences.
She had pleaded with her mother to stop the release of the Pulse-Core drafts.
Yllira had refused.
And so Kaelor had left.
> "Still chasing your legacy," she whispered, eyes burning. "Still grooming successors while you abandoned your own blood."
The room remained silent. But Kaelor didn't need a reply. The summons had come from her new patrons now.
And she would answer it on her own terms.
With a twist of her gauntlet, a drone pod unfolded from her belt and zipped into the air. She keyed in a low-band tracker ping to follow the pulse-signature of the artifact team.
> "Let's see how far your ideals take them, mother. And how far I'll let them go."
She moved to the rack beside her cot—an austere slab of hardened foam—and checked her loadout: two magnetic disruptors, an old Thorne-modified scrambler rifle, pulse shields etched with self-built null glyphs, and a set of mobility stabilizers built off a now-banned Yllira design. Irony was a luxury she permitted herself.
Before leaving, she paused by a locked case. Her fingers hovered over it.
Inside: a cracked photograph. A much younger Kaelor and her mother, before the fame, before the fractures. Yllira smiled in the image, arms around her daughter, datapads in their laps.
Kaelor looked away.
Chapter 53: Echoes of the Left Behind
\[Kaelor's section remains unchanged.]
---
At the basin, the compass flared to life.
A low hum pulsed through the ground. Lights—soft, bioluminescent lines—began to trace the surface of the vault. The terrain shivered. Then parted.
Benedict stood at the edge with the others, watching as a spiraling staircase descended into shadow. "This isn't a ruin," he murmured. "It's a memory."
They descended into a great circular chamber filled with stasis pods, crystalline data libraries, and massive constructs slumbering in long-dead silence. In the center: a Pulse Nexus Core, still flickering with echo-code.
Marin whispered, "This tech is older than anything in the archives. Possibly older than the registry."
Yara scanned a crystalline shard. "Encrypted memory crystal. Marked for auditory retrieval."
Then, without warning, the vault lit up.
A fractured AI echo emerged—fragmented, broken, and ancient. Its voice crackled across the vault:
// Welcome... You are late. The Cascade could not be stopped. The civilization you seek is ash... //
It paused, skipping.
// This system was built on borrowed time... Echoes of pulse unbound. //
Benedict approached the Pulse Core. Against Yara's protest, he linked his relay bracer to it.
"You shouldn't—" Yara stepped forward, but the pulse had already begun.
The Core pulsed. Code streamed in—then reversed. Parts of his bracer interface warped, began rewriting themselves.
Alec yanked the connection. "You're being overwritten!"
Benedict stumbled back, vision blurred. Patterns lingered behind his eyelids.
Yara caught him, hand on his shoulder. "You alright? Your pulse is fluctuating."
"I saw\... something. The code—it's recursive, predictive, almost like it's—"
"Like it knows you," she finished. Her gaze lingered a moment too long.
"We've got what we can," Marin said. "The structure's integrity is declining. We need to leave. Now."
As they gathered the memory crystals, Yara paused. "We shouldn't leave without at least copying the layout."
"Map it on the way out," Benedict said. "No time for deep scans."
"Next time, consult the team before plugging your brain into ancient civilization tech," she said.
"Next time, I'll bring tea and a checklist," he replied dryly.
"Good. Because I'm writing it down: 'Don't nearly get possessed by a dead AI.'"
He smiled faintly. "Sounds like a solid field rule."
They ascended as the vault trembled. Lights flickered. The ground above groaned.
On the ridge, Kaelor watched through her optics.
She noted the instability. Her finger hovered over the trigger.
Then, she paused. Watched instead.
As the team emerged from the collapsing basin, Yara clutched something.
A crystal recording.
She stared at it in silence.
It showed a younger artificer—taller, thinner, but unmistakably Benedict—speaking to an unseen figure beside the Nexus Core.
Yara whispered, "That's not just him... that's him before the registry existed."
Benedict looked at her, his face pale. "I've never seen this before."
She stepped closer, quieter now. "Are you sure? Because the resemblance... it's not just visual. His voice. The cadence. It felt like you."
Alec glanced over, uneasy. "Could be a decoy. A prototype. A twin?"
"No," Marin said softly. "This isn't coincidence. It's a message."
Kaelor narrowed her eyes. "Or maybe... you have seen it. You just forgot... or chose to forget."
She turned and vanished into the ridge mist.
Her part wasn't finished. Not yet.