Location: Ember Cradle, subgrid beneath the Coldlight Faultline
They were born in ash.
Not in fire, not in steel but in the soft crackle of afterwar. In the humming, flickering silence that followed Edenfall's collapse and Matherson's transcendence.
They didn't know what peace was. Only intermission.
And now even that was ending.
1 — Roan's Message
The Ember Cradle hadn't been built for children.
It was a backup node, a systems stabilizer buried beneath the faultline a place where fragments of Kaeda's rewritten code gathered, forming stories instead of directives.
But the children had made it their own.
Drawings on the walls. Secret passageways between cable conduits. Games made from old Edenfall tactigrids.
They were myth-born. Raised not on laws, but on possibility.
And it was Roan, now sixteen, who heard the first echo of Nullhalo awakening.
He was in the Deep Archive Annex when the weave stuttered. Just once.
A tiny tremor. A flick in the mnemonic field.
But it was enough.
He turned to the others Iliah, Vale, Aem his voice sharper than usual.
"It's early. Nullhalo's waking up."
They froze.
They all knew the name.
The weapon that unmade potential. That could collapse not just a person's story but their future selves.
Vale, only fourteen, whispered, "Did Kaeda know?"
Roan clenched his fist. "She must have. That's why she rewrote the Archive. That's why she left us this."
He held up the memory crystal. A gift Kaeda had placed in his hand two weeks ago, before walking into the outer mythspace.
She'd whispered:
"If the world tries to silence you don't scream. Sing."
2 — The Signal Drops
Above them, the weave bent.
Across mythspace, Nullhalo's cradle tore open.
Not with a flash. Not with fire.
But with a forgetting.
Small things first:
Vale's favorite bedtime story vanished from the library grid.
Iliah's memories of her mother's voice dimmed into fog.
Roan forgot the color of Kaeda's eyes.
Then larger things:
The name of the city where Ghostbyte was born.
The coordinates of the Red Node's genesis point.
Half of Matherson's final message, broken mid-sentence.
Something was erasing not just history, but potential.
And it was spreading fast.
3 — The Refusal
Iliah stood up, trembling, as the walls of the Cradle began to flicker.
She turned to the others. "If we stay, it'll take us next."
Roan stared at the crystal. It pulsed with Kaeda's imprint.
He knew what it meant now.
Not a weapon.
A seed.
She had rewritten the Archive, yes. But she had also placed a fallback in them in this generation.
They weren't just survivors.
They were proof.
Proof that memory could evolve.
That myth could become inheritance.
He took Vale's hand. "We don't run."
Aem frowned. "Then what?"
Roan looked up.
"We rewrite back."
4 — The New Code
They ran to the Inner Table.
A myth-forging platform. Built from pieces of Ghostbyte's last compiler rig and Kaeda's voice-layered protocol.
They activated the interface with their touch.
The system greeted them not with boot-code but with story prompts.
"What would you like to remember today?"
Vale's fingers flew.
"The taste of mom's soup."
"The joke Iliah made on the night we found the skylight."
"That Matherson used to hum when he was nervous."
"That Kaeda bled when she smiled too much."
The table pulsed.
Roan added the final line:
"We are the children of Ember. We carry fire, not for burning but for light."
5 — Nullhalo Stutters
At the Coldlight apex, far above the Cradle, Nullhalo surged forward.
But it hesitated.
Something was resisting.
Not data.
Narrative.
The system was designed to erase futures. But the children were creating them faster than it could collapse them.
Every memory they recovered sparked new possibility.
Every story told became a node.
The wave fractured.
Mythspace rebalanced.
Nullhalo shrieked not a sound, but a pressure. A vacuum pull toward non-being.
Roan stood in its wake and said:
"You don't get to silence us."
He stepped forward and sang.
A story-song.
A patchwork myth of his friends, his lost family, the voices he could no longer name but would never let go.
And the weave held.
6 — What Remains
Hours passed.
The sky outside cleared.
Nullhalo's core shuddered… then deactivated.
Its sequence incomplete.
The weave recalibrated around the children's additions.
Some stories would never return.
But new ones had been born.
Iliah turned to Roan, eyes bright with awe and exhaustion.
"You think we actually… stopped it?"
He shook his head.
"No. We did something harder."
Aem blinked. "What's harder than stopping a myth weapon?"
Roan smiled faintly.
"We remembered."
7 — A Distant Signal
Far away, across mythspace, in the last safe sector of Nova's resonance field, Ghostbyte stirred.
He had felt it.
A song not of Kaeda, not of Matherson, not of himself.
But new voices.
Younger. Unfiltered.
Real.
He looked toward the faultline, his fragmented systems realigning.
"Ember," he whispered.
Then: "They're not waiting for us anymore."
Nova stood beside him.
And nodded.
"Maybe they shouldn't."