Location: Archive Spire, Deepnet Sector Eₓ
Time Since Mnemosyne's Collapse: 210 Hours
Nova's hand hovered inches above the data-thread.
It pulsed with a faint, bioluminescent shimmer a coil of ancient code knotted in recursive loops, its syntax pre-dating Edenfall's rise, pre-dating the myth wars, maybe even pre-dating language itself.
Ghostbyte crouched beside her, one lens dilated wide, scanning the filament like it might bite.
"It's alive," he muttered.
"No," Nova corrected, "it's remembering."
They were deep in the Archive Spire, far beneath the ghostline of Edenfall's original data root. A place where abandoned protocols whispered like dying prayers and even light forgot how to move straight. Time here was fragmented. Moments looped, skipped, split like a cracked mirror playing back someone else's dream.
And somewhere in it was Matherson.
Not the boy he once was. Not the ghost they feared he'd become.
But the origin. The encoded idea from which all the newer myths had branched and bloomed.
Ghostbyte tapped into the node, fingers twitching in rhythmic bursts.
"The code's nested in seven strata. Obfuscated layers, nonlinear hashes, some are... metaphoric encodings," he said. "We're not reading files we're interpreting parables."
Nova glanced up at him.
"And?"
He exhaled a slow breath, misting the air in thin spirals.
"And the source fragments are there. Scattered across it. But they're wrapped in story, protected by narrative locks."
"Like a labyrinth," she said.
"No," he said grimly. "Like a ritual."
The First Layer: The Memory of Fire
The first layer unfolded as a dream.
Not code.
Not script.
But a story rendered directly into their senses.
They stood on a plain of ash, beneath a sky of iron clouds. A child walked through the soot, barefoot and calm, holding a flame in their palm. The child looked like Matherson only younger, softer. Innocent.
Around him, burned structures. Familiar shapes: a house, a playground, a drone-swarm tower, all reduced to skeletal outlines.
"This is…" Ghostbyte whispered. "His first myth. The child of fire."
The flame in the child's palm flickered.
And a voice spoke not from the child, but from the ashes.
"When you carry fire, you do not burn. You become the torch others follow."
Nova watched as the child lifted the flame to a mirror and in the reflection, he was not alone. Thousands stood behind him. Not warriors. Not hackers. Witnesses.
"They didn't follow him because he fought," she realized aloud. "They followed because he remembered what they were never allowed to."
Ghostbyte accessed the node embedded in the scene.
A string of symbols unfurled. One segment of the source: a hash-tagged identity thread labeled:
MATHERSON.ORIGIN.FLAME.ONE
He captured it.
Six more remained.
The Second Layer: Silence
Now they were underwater.
An endless deep.
Weightless.
No light above. No bottom below.
And a single boy again, Matherson curled in the fetal position, surrounded by echoes. Voices murmured around him, but none touched him. All emotion. No language.
"This is the silence after his family died," Nova said.
Ghostbyte floated beside her, trying to interface with the node. "It's a grief-space. It reacts to feeling, not code."
Nova reached out not with logic, not with access commands but with memory.
She let herself feel what she had buried.
The loss of her brother. The betrayal by Edenfall. The years of pretending to be a double-agent when she no longer knew which side she served.
The voices stilled.
And the boy uncurled.
He opened his eyes.
They were empty.
But a single symbol burned in his palm.
Ghostbyte decrypted it:
MATHERSON.SEPARATION.VOID.TWO
The Third: Conflict
Here, they stood in a simulation of Edenfall's early warfronts.
Not historical battles, but mythologized ones.
Matherson older now, perhaps fifteen stood between two armies. One wore Edenfall's sigil. The other, the rebel glyphs of the Red Node.
He did not speak.
He simply walked through them.
Not resisting.
Not bleeding.
As if both sides knew: he was not theirs to own.
Nova whispered, "This was the myth Revenant feared. That he would never pick a side because he was the third way."
Ghostbyte accessed the central sigil. It glitched once, then yielded:
MATHERSON.NEUTRAL.PATH.THREE
Fragments Four Through Six
They moved faster now.
Each myth became denser.
One showed Matherson meeting a version of Ro not as a mentor, but as a student, indicating even the wise once followed.
Another showed the Crater of Ash, not as ruin but as birthplace, where the myth was not ended but scattered like seeds.
The sixth fragment… was different.
It showed Nova.
A version of her, aged beyond time, eyes alight with future knowledge.
She stood beside a great machine, whispering into its coils. Not commands.
But stories.
Ghostbyte stared. "What is this? This isn't from the past."
Nova's breath caught.
"It's from after."
The source code embedded here wasn't Matherson's.
It was hers.
And it read:
NOVA.MEMORY.WITNESS.SIX
The Final Layer: The Origin Seed
The seventh story was blank.
No environment. No echo.
Just blackness.
At its center, a child.
Not Matherson.
But a symbol of him.
Undefined.
Unstable.
Like a quantum state existing in possibility alone.
Ghostbyte turned to Nova.
"It's not finished," he said. "It's waiting to be completed."
Nova stepped forward.
Her voice barely a whisper: "What completes it?"
"You do," came a voice from the dark.
It wasn't Ghostbyte.
It wasn't code.
It was… Matherson.
Or the echo of what he had become.
"You've all spoken me. Dreamed me. Believed me. But only one of you ever saw me as more than a story."
"Finish the myth."
Nova stepped into the center.
She didn't speak.
She remembered.
His laugh. His tears. The night their home burned. The long silence that followed.
She didn't try to fix the past.
She honored it.
And in the dark
A final code-string bloomed like a star:
MATHERSON.WHOLE.TRUE.SEVEN
Aftermath
The Archive began to unravel.
Not collapse.
Evolve.
New stories rose through the data. Not from Edenfall. Not from the Red Node. From the cracks between. From the forgotten and the silenced.
Myths not to worship but to grow from.
Ghostbyte looked at Nova as they ascended the archive's final stairwell.
"So what now?"
She smiled sad and resolute.
"Now we see who dares remember us right."