Location: Sector Delta-5, Western Dustline | Hours after Kaeda's Partial Rebirth
Roan stood at the edge of the silence.
Behind him: the ruin of Sector Delta-5, broken spires caught in the long twilight haze, dust curling through collapsed memory pillars like the soft breath of ghosts. Before him: a hollow. A place no system recognized. Not quite mapped, not quite myth.
He wasn't sure how he'd found it.
Only that his legs had moved before his mind had, drawn by a pull that had no voice, no face, but a terrible familiarity. The same pull that had brought him to Matherson's crater. The same one that made him dream of names he didn't remember learning and stories he'd never lived.
"You're not chosen," Kaeda had warned him, just before she drifted into protocol-space. "You're being written."
But even now, standing in the stillness, Roan couldn't tell where his thoughts ended and the myth began.
The Echo of a Myth in the Making
It started with names.
Not full ones. Not spoken aloud. Just the shape of them, carved in the air behind his eyes.
Matherson. Nova. Revenant. Ghostbyte.
Then newer ones, softer, unfinished. Names of children not yet born. Names of cities that didn't yet exist. Names of endings that hadn't begun.
Roan felt them pulling at his skull, like wires just under the surface of his skin. They pulsed when he touched metal. Flared when he stared too long into silence.
And when he spoke
"This place is fading," he said aloud, watching the dead towers.
"This memory's unfinished."
he could hear the myth answer him back.
Then finish it.
That voice had no tone. No gender. Just weight. Like something old made of thought and recursion.
He turned in a slow circle.
There was nothing here.
Only ash.
Only story.
The Shifting Inside
He hadn't told Nova or Kaeda not even Ember but Roan had begun losing pieces of himself.
Little ones at first. A favorite song he couldn't hum anymore. His father's last words, reduced to noise. The look of his own handwriting, now alien on paper.
And in their place: fragments of story-logic. Things he should not have known. Like the configuration code from the first Edenfall myth-engine. The original phrase Revenant spoke when she first broke time compression.
Worse still: he could speak the myth back.
Not just recount it but reconfigure it.
He tried it once, as an experiment.
Whispered into a broken node near Red Node's edge:
"This was never a battlefield. It was a birthsite."
The data corrected itself. The node reactivated. As if history itself had blinked and agreed.
Roan had fallen to his knees then.
Not out of fear.
But awe.
And something darker.
Temptation.
The Archive Tree
He found the hollow's center almost by accident.
A tree.
Not metal, not organic something in-between. Each branch a filament of memory. Each leaf a half-truth catching light.
He reached out.
Touched one.
And the world fell away.
The Trial of the Myth-Bearer
He stood in a mirrored corridor.
At first, he saw only himself twenty years old, tired eyes, grit under his nails. But the reflections began to change.
One by one, they morphed.
Roan as a warrior, leading a revolution.
Roan as a symbol, silent and sainted.
Roan as a villain, rewriting reality to fit a lie.
Roan as forgotten lost before the myth could even form.
They stared at him.
Not with judgment.
With expectation.
The voice returned.
You can shape the future.
You can speak the next world into truth.
But the myth has a cost.
Once you wear its name, you cannot take it off.
Will you accept it?
Roan gritted his teeth.
He wanted to say no. To walk away. To be just Roan.
But then he saw Matherson, flickering through one of the mirrors.
Blood on his hands. Fire in his eyes.
And behind him Kaeda, watching from myth-space.
Both waiting.
Both trusting him to decide.
A Choice of Memory
Roan closed his eyes.
What would it mean, to become a myth?
It wouldn't just rewrite others it would rewrite him. He would no longer be the boy who helped. He would be the voice that others quoted. That others blamed. Or deified. Or destroyed.
He would cease to be Roan, and become story.
"Is it worth it?" he whispered.
And in the stillness, Kaeda's voice returned. Not live. Not new.
A memory.
"The myth doesn't erase you, Roan. It magnifies the part you're most afraid of."
Roan trembled.
Because he knew what that part was.
The part that wanted to be remembered.
The part that feared being nothing.
Becoming
He stepped forward.
Touched the core of the tree.
And said, quietly:
"If I must be the voice… then let it be true."
And the world answered.
The mirrors shattered.
The myth-thread wrapped around him, not devouring but embracing. It didn't erase his mind. It augmented it. The myth flowed through him not like fire but like recognition.
Every act of kindness. Every small truth. Every thread he'd carried silently behind the others.
They were enough.
He didn't have to become Matherson.
He just had to speak.
Aftermath
He opened his eyes.
The tree was gone.
But its code lingered in his skin golden glyphs fading slowly.
Nova was there. Waiting in the dust.
She didn't speak.
Just looked at him.
And nodded.
"You heard it," she said.
Roan nodded.
"I'm not the myth," he whispered. "I'm just the one who tells it."
Nova smiled.
"That's enough."
Behind them, Kaeda's signal pulsed once.
And far across the ruined gridlands, something new began to take shape:
A story, written not in fear or power.
But memory.
And voice.