Location: Obsidian Core, Subgrid Vein-3
At first, there was only warmth.
No light.
No pain.
No gravity.
Only memory coiled and knotted and alive inside her chest, like a heartbeat that had learned to hum.
Kaeda didn't remember dying. But she did remember being forgotten.
She remembered the glass walls of Edenfall's "sanctuary program," the soft clinical voices that told her not to fear, that her brother was "being helped." That soon, the echoes in her mind the names, the dreams, the flickers of futures that hadn't happened yet would stop.
She remembered the injection.
And then
Darkness.
Until now.
Now, she stood barefoot in a vault made of whispers and light, blinking as Nova and Ghostbyte stared at her like she'd stepped out of a holy text.
"You..." Ghostbyte whispered. "You're real."
Kaeda tilted her head, her voice rasped and unused. "I was always real. You just buried me under someone else's idea of silence."
Nova approached with reverence, offering a thermal jacket, which Kaeda took mechanically. The touch of fabric against skin felt alien. Time hadn't passed for her it had bled through.
"You've been in stasis for over twenty years," Nova said gently. "The myth Matherson he encoded your memory into the Protocol Mnemosyne. You were the origin key. The first spark."
Kaeda frowned. "You speak of him like a story."
Ghostbyte flinched. "He became one."
Kaeda's eyes narrowed. "Then you don't know him at all."
The Memory Within
She sat as they activated low-light nodes around the chamber. Ghostbyte tried to feed her information maps, timelines, what Edenfall had become, what Matherson had done but she waved it all away.
"I don't need data to remember who my brother was," she said. "He wasn't born a myth. He became one because they broke everything he loved and expected him to remain human."
Nova watched her carefully. "He left us a path. Clues. Protocols embedded in memory and myth. But the final key led here. To you. Why?"
Kaeda looked up, eyes haunted. "Because I'm the only one who knows what he really feared."
Ghostbyte leaned forward. "Which was?"
"That one day," Kaeda said, "he would forget himself."
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke.
"He knew myth had power," she continued. "But he feared the cost. Not just losing his past but losing his anchor. That the story would grow so large it would consume the person it began from."
She placed a hand over her chest.
"So he split me from it. Hid me where even he couldn't reach. Because I remembered him before the uprising. Before Edenfall twisted him. Before the data-baptisms, the red-net rebellions, before Mnemosyne."
"Then what are you now?" Nova asked. "A person? A construct?"
Kaeda smiled faintly. "Both. And neither. I'm his truth."
In the Wake of Divinity
As they moved from the vault's heart to the surface skimmer rails, Ghostbyte linked Kaeda to the undernet carefully, cautiously. He filtered her feed so she wouldn't see the world all at once.
But Kaeda felt it anyway.
The tremble of machines unsure whether to record or erase her.
The hush of myth-born children whispering about flames and echoes.
The void in Edenfall's mainframe Kalix gone silent, the Erasure Engine cracked from the inside out.
She closed her eyes.
They didn't need to see her.
They felt her.
Somewhere, a child dreamt of a woman who walked out of a vault with fire in her eyes.
Somewhere else, an old soldier forgot his reason for fighting but remembered a girl's name he never knew.
Kaeda.
The myth had already shifted.
She wasn't just the origin.
She was the next verse.
At the Threshold
Nova guided them into a safehouse on the outer rim one of the last Red Node sanctums not yet devoured by narrative rebalancing.
Inside, dusty terminals flickered. Wind whispered through cracked synthglass. Ghostbyte worked silently, stabilizing systems.
Kaeda stood at the threshold, staring at the stars beyond the broken dome.
Nova approached.
"You don't talk much," Nova said.
Kaeda didn't smile. "I talked too much once. It got my brother hurt."
Nova paused. "He hurt himself. For us. For something he believed in."
"He believed in me," Kaeda replied. "Not the world. Not your rebellion. Not your systems. He believed I'd remember him, even when the rest of you turned him into a god or a ghost."
"And did you?"
Kaeda looked away. "Yes. But he stopped remembering himself. That's why you need me now. You want to bring him back."
Nova hesitated. "We want to finish what he started."
Kaeda turned.
"No. He never wanted to finish anything. He wanted to be allowed to stop to rest. You took that from him when you turned him into a symbol. A flag. A war cry."
Ghostbyte looked up from his rig.
"She's not wrong."
Nova's voice hardened. "Then why did he leave us the protocol? Why the myth-paths? The Echo Lock?"
Kaeda shrugged. "Because he loved you. Not because he wanted to be worshipped. Because he hoped you'd eventually find your own way, and stop using him as the excuse."
Nova looked away.
The truth settled like ash.
The Child of Fire
That night, while the vault slept and systems ran dark, a ripple passed through the undernet.
Kaeda dreamed.
And through her dream, a city burned.
But this time, it didn't scream.
It sang.
And in the ruins of Edenfall's great towers, children walked through datafields reborn in flame, holding hands, eyes closed and they saw him.
Matherson.
Not with power.
But peace.
And they let him go.
Kaeda woke with tears in her eyes.
And for the first time since she opened them, she smiled.
"He's free," she whispered. "And now it's our turn."