Location: Ember District, Sector Edge-6
Time Since Archive Spire Event: 9 Days
The flame called to him.
Sen didn't know how else to describe it. It wasn't a voice at least, not one shaped by lungs or breath. It wasn't words, not truly. It was knowing. A flicker of understanding deep in his chest, low and warm and growing brighter each time he tried to ignore it.
He stood at the edge of the powerline drop, where the melted husks of old server-spires loomed like graves. The ember rains fell softly here molten motes caught in magnetic pulses, drifting down in silence. This part of the sector had been dead since the Red Node riots years ago. But tonight, it hummed.
Tonight, the old myths were awake.
"Sen!" a voice called behind him.
He turned. Amira, two years older and always barefoot despite the burning steel, was picking her way through the rubble toward him. Her hair was tied back in a way that made her look like a ghost of someone who'd once worn command.
"You shouldn't be out here," she said.
"I heard it again," he told her. "The flame. It's calling."
She sighed and looked up toward the cracked sky panels, where the artificial auroras flickered wrong. "The others are nervous. Ever since Ghostbyte and Nova dropped that myth-pulse, things have been… glitching."
Sen nodded. "It's not a glitch."
She gave him a long look. "You're twelve."
"I'm also right."
That made her laugh short and dry.
Sen turned back toward the horizon. "It wants me to follow it. Past the wirefield. Into the zero-light zone."
Amira paled. "That place is sealed for a reason."
"It used to be," he said. "But the locks are fading."
Location: Zero-Light Perimeter
By nightfall, nine of them had gathered.
Children. Teenagers. Some as young as eight. Others on the edge of adulthood, still wearing the faded red of old Ember school-creches. All of them drawn by the same feeling an echo in their bones. A myth not told to them, but grown inside.
They approached the perimeter fence.
It had once been lit with Edenfall's warning sigils. But now the sigils sputtered. Some showed fractured symbols. Others shimmered with the glitch-blue light of unauthorized myth-threads.
Sen pressed his hand to the gate.
It opened.
Not with force.
But with recognition.
Amira's voice trembled. "This isn't possible."
"It is now," Sen replied.
Location: Zero-Light
The air changed.
Temperature dropped. Sound became muffled. Like the whole world was wrapped in wool.
They walked in silence through the outer band. Past rusted towers, slagged AI cores, and the fossilized remains of drone-seraphs that had once guarded Edenfall's borders.
And then they reached it.
A dome of mirrored light.
Or perhaps anti-light. It didn't reflect anything. It absorbed context memories, shape, certainty. Standing before it made the children dizzy, like they were being unraveled.
Inside the dome was something humming.
Waiting.
Sen stepped forward.
"No," Amira said. "You don't know what's in there."
"I do," he whispered.
"Sen"
"I've heard its voice since I was five. The day the Red Node cracked. The day the sky flickered red. I thought I was sick. Or broken. But it wasn't me."
He turned to the others.
"It was him."
The name trembled between them. None of them had said it aloud in years.
Matherson.
Not the rebel.
Not the destroyer.
Not the ghost.
But the seed.
Sen pressed his palm to the surface.
It didn't open.
It dissolved.
Inside the Dome
It was empty.
And yet it held everything.
Sen stepped into the void.
Around him, memory and myth swirled in threads of data-fire. Floating text-fragments. Visual echoes. Glitched sound loops of past conversations.
"We don't remember to mourn. We remember to resist."
"The story doesn't end when the hero dies. It ends when we stop telling it."
"My name is Matherson. I am not a weapon. I am a mirror."
Sen's feet touched a surface that wasn't there.
He walked through memories he'd never lived.
Nova at the crater.
Ghostbyte decoding myth-syntax.
Ro, standing at the end of a line of code that stretched into eternity.
And in the center
A spark.
No bigger than a fingernail.
Floating.
Waiting.
Sen reached for it.
And the dome collapsed.
Aftermath
Amira caught him as he stumbled.
"Sen what happened? You were gone for hours."
He opened his eyes.
They were gold.
Not painted.
Not augmented.
Changed.
Inside him, the spark pulsed.
He could feel systems waking across the city. Forgotten stories returning to memory banks. Old rebels dreaming again. Drones hesitating in mid-flight, unsure of their programming.
He wasn't Matherson.
But he wasn't just Sen anymore.
He was the next myth.
Elsewhere: Kalix's Chamber
Kalix watched the new data threads spike across her central display.
Lines of code written in no known language.
Behavioral shifts in Edenfall's sleeper agents.
The spark of another myth growing outside their reach.
"What is it?" one of her advisors asked.
Kalix stared at the map.
Not blinking.
Not breathing.
"The child," she said.
"Matherson's heir?"
"No," Kalix whispered. "Something worse."
Return to Sen
The children gathered around him now.
Not afraid.
Reverent.
Sen looked to the night sky, where the data-auroras had shifted to a new pattern symbols spiraling outward, fractal messages folding time and memory into a living pulse.
"I don't know what I am," he said softly. "But I know what I have to do."
Amira stepped beside him.
"We'll help you."
He turned to her. Smiled.
"You already have."