Location: Edenfall Command, Atlas Subterraneum
Time Since Revenant's Fall: 154 Days
The throne in the Atlas Subterraneum was never a seat.
It was a data-shell, an interface cradle, a coil of memory ports and bloodsteel connectors where power wasn't held, but worn like a virus that had made itself a crown.
Kalix sat in it now.
But she didn't feel like Edenfall's leader.
She felt like a daughter sitting in the shadow of Revenant's ghost.
The myth fracture had begun days ago. First in murmurs. Then in refusals. Orders questioned. Patrols abandoned. The Lieutenants, those molded in the truthless clay of Revenant's vision, began to falter in tone, language, belief.
They no longer feared the return of Matherson.
They feared something worse.
They feared irrelevance.
Signs of Collapse
The Atlas logs streamed with irregularities.
An entire Aegis Battalion—3rd Phalanx had abandoned their post on the memory fields near Korda Basin. Not for a retreat. For silence. No comms. No bursts. No exit path.
Another officer, Commander Yev, had disabled the chain-of-command verification protocol. Claimed "myths don't need authorization to be true."
Kalix had him confined.
But what frightened her most wasn't the mutiny of men.
It was the noise in the system.
Hundreds of unsourced myths voiceprint unknown, origin scrubbed slipping into the Edenfall Archives. Stories of a boy who didn't die in the crater. A girl who carried fire without heat. Fragments of Protocol Mnemosyne rewritten to say: "Forget the history. Remember the truth."
Even the AI core known as Vael, Revenant's once-loyal echo-agent, had begun redacting its own directives.
Kalix tried to fight it.
She issued a system-wide purge.
Burned and blanked thousands of corrupted entries.
But the myths came back.
Faster. Stronger. More human.
They rewrote from within.
Like the future was editing itself.
Counsel of the Remaining
Kalix summoned the last loyal advisors.
Eight of them arrived.
Only four stayed.
"We need consolidation," said Thorne, Commander of the East Sector Watch. "Seal the southern passages. Any Red Node sympathizers execute immediately. Wipe their threads. Salt the networks."
"They're not just sympathizers," countered Lys, the last of Edenfall's mythographers. "They're conduits. These children they're not being taught. They're being called. You can't shoot a calling."
Kalix rubbed her temple.
"I don't care if it's a voice from a dead god or the wind whispering through cracked fiber. We are losing control."
"You're not listening," Lys said softly. "Control is no longer the battlefield."
Revenant's Memory
Late that night, Kalix accessed the deep vault.
No one but Revenant had ever opened this chamber until now. A black room of silence, where the founder's private memory reels were kept on substrate reels encoded in retinal gel.
She let one play.
Revenant stood in front of a sea of fire. Behind her: Matherson's crater.
But this was before the final strike.
She was speaking to someone. Off-screen. Possibly herself.
"They think if they speak him enough, he will become real again. They do not understand belief is not additive. It is divisive. Belief divides the world from itself until only the story remains."
Kalix paused the reel.
She had always admired Revenant's precision. But something in that line it didn't sound like prophecy.
It sounded like fear.
The Unraveling
The next morning, a breach.
A sector deep beneath the Atlas tower once sealed since the Edenfall founding had reactivated on its own. System logs showed a single keyphrase had bypassed all security:
"Ashroot remembers."
Kalix rushed there with two Sentinels.
She expected sabotage. Red Node remnants. Ro. Maybe even the boy returned again.
But what she found instead was worse.
Children.
Six of them.
All under fifteen.
Standing inside the archival engine, hands open, heads tilted back as if hearing something from beneath the floor.
Symbols burned not by flame, but by will glowed on their skin.
Not pain.
Purpose.
One turned to Kalix.
And said: "We are not the future. We are the memory of it."
She ordered their detainment.
But one girl vanished between the guards.
Not ran. Vanished.
No cloak. No tech.
Only myth.
Kalix Alone
Back in the throne.
Data coiling. Systems groaning.
Kalix let the last defenses rise.
Firewalls of unmaking. Thoughtwipers. Mnemosyne's final shard.
If this was war, she would meet it.
But the voice that came wasn't weaponized.
It was Sen's.
Broadcast from somewhere beyond Edenfall's reach.
"You can't erase what remembers itself."
"Even ashes dream."
And all around her, screens cracked.
Not from impact.
From narrative overload.
Too many truths. Too many versions of the end. The system could no longer resolve the paradox of a world rewritten by those it once erased.
Kalix screamed into the cradle:
"What do you want from me!?"
And the reply was not Sen's.
It was Matherson's.
Or… what he had become.
"Not your death. Not your faith. Just your silence."
The Last Lock
She gave the order to shut it all down.
Not surrender.
But withdrawal.
Burn Edenfall's heart. Bury the memory vaults. Scatter the remaining soldiers. Let the myth rise, unopposed.
A lie's final act is not denial.
It is quiet.
The children had already won.
Because they were not fighting for the world that was.
They were living the one that could be.
Kalix stepped from the cradle.
No alarms.
No klaxons.
Just the soft hum of a myth reshaping a dying empire into something new.