When the sky forgets itself, you will be its memory.
***
The training realm buckled into shape like origami caught mid-fold.
One second, Tyrian Vyr stood in a blank system-stabilized chamber. In the next, he stood on a column of pale lapidite, a moon-colored stone laced with filament-thin cracks that shimmered with buried light. Above and below, rust-colored clouds and shattered moons framed an endless indigo sky. Floating platforms rotated, blinked out, reappeared at impossible angles. Here, the logic he was used to bent sideways.
He was inside a pocket dimension. Temporary realms like this—once a wondrous feat—were standard issue, used by the most powerful Research Institutes for combat trials and precision fieldwork.
It was a commercialized miracle, and the arena for his final test.
Standing here, Tyrian had no sense of awe. He didn't fidget or stretch. He just waited—tall and dense-framed, with an athlete's stillness. His skin was a light umber, cool-toned, lit by the lapidite's shimmer. Close-cropped curls framed his face, faded on the sides.
His gaze held a narrow, sculpted elegance—lids sweeping low in a way that softened even his sharpest looks. His eyes were a study in contrast: sclera bright and human, irises midnight-black, and in the center, pale blue pupils that glowed with steady, unnatural light. A matching blue ring circled his irises, like magnetic halos.
His arms rested at his sides. His breath was tuned to a rhythm the Forge could almost measure but never quite define.
His eyes shifted down, seemingly focused intently on the striped grey stone beneath his feet. But he wasn't looking at the stone. He was glancing at a visual overlay—the Lattice, a living interface grafted into the skeleton of the worlds.
To most people, it was just the system—the invisible network that connected everything. The Lattice linked all dimensions, allowing people to communicate, trade, share data, even stream entertainment across realms. It was the backbone of society.
But for Innovators like Tyrian, the Lattice was more than infrastructure. It was a guide. A trainer. A power-management system built to help him grow.
It tracked his progress, helped him develop formulas, logged combat data, projected optimal upgrades. It stabilized his soul during risky experiments and archived his inner world for research. For most Innovators, the Lattice was the reason they survived their first breakthrough.
Everything—duels, contracts, missions, rank certifications—ran through it.
And in this moment, he was looking at one stat.
[FIELD PRESSURE: 1.6x ABOVE BASELINE]
[ANCHOR SIGNAL WITHIN EXPECTED RANGE]
Tyrian registered the spike without alarm. The Field was always heavier around him—he'd learned that early. Pressure readings like this weren't a threat. Not yet. Just a sign that the environment was adjusting to his presence.
If the Lattice is the system, then the Field is the medium—the living fabric that the system tries to organize, laced through all dimensions, all forces. It carried resonance, and it remembered form. Every person's soul interacted with it—some by will, others by instinct. And all souls were connected through it—a fact that was further enhanced by the workings of the Lattice.
Tyrian was assessing the pressure he was currently exerting on the Field.
Field pressure measured how much effort it took for reality to keep its shape around someone. When Tyrian was first learning about all this, he found it helpful to imagine the Field as a sheet of silk stretched across a frame. Most people barely dent it when they move. Others make ripples just by existing. But when they fight, or feel something too deeply, they press down harder. The silk stretches. The world has to pull itself tight to stay together.
That strain—that bend in the air around them—was called Field pressure. It was one of the clearest signs of a soul's raw power.
And Tyrian, without any exertion, was reading at 160% above baseline. The Lattice system labeled it as "within expected range." What it didn't say is that most other Innovators of his rank would need intense strain for a similar pressure reading.
He took a deep, measured breath.
His training armor flexed around the curve of his ribs—sleek, matte, and jointed with interlocking mesh panels that shimmered faintly with luminous thread. It wasn't bulky—designed for Innovator-grade combat, it flexed like a second skin, reinforced at the spine, shoulders, and lower ribs.
Two black satellite spheres hovered behind Tyrian's shoulders, orbiting counter to each other in silent rhythm. These personal "moons" were extensions of his Signature—small, dense constructs affixed by resonance, gravitationally tethered to the constant pull of his soul's core.
Tyrian was an Innovator—a rare class of being whose soul structure interacted directly with the Field in marvelous ways, allowing him to shape it through principles, formulas, and encoded will.
Every Innovator had a Signature: a kind of soul-pattern or unique metaphysical structure that shaped how they interacted with reality.
You could think of it like a personal equation, or a frequency only the Field could hear. It decided what kind of pressure you gave off…and how you could manipulate the field.
The structure of Tyrian's soul resembled the condensed metaphysics of a neutron star—small in form, infinite in weight, forged from pressure so intense it had collapsed inward until nothing could escape its memory. Not even light.
Most Signatures weren't like his. They followed different patterns—fluid, radiant, reactive, or adaptive. Some burned hot and fast, like Helium-Types, used by agile duelists. Others settled into strong, structured forms— like Ferrite-Types utilized by defensive anchors. There were Mercurial Signatures, known for shifting under pressure, and rare, wild Mycelium-Types, which grew across layers of the Field like living networks.
Each Signature reflected a different kind of matter, element, or force.
Tyrian's didn't shimmer or recombine. His was what Field theorists classified as Magnetar-Type. He didn't generate energy. He didn't manipulate elements.
He was pressure.
Most Innovators in his category bent the Field with effort. But the Field bent around Tyrian by default, treating him more like an axis than a participant.
Even among gravity- or magnetism-based Signatures, his was singular. Most Innovators in that category warped the Field, bent it with effort, and negotiated with it. The Field bent around Tyrian by default, treating him less like a participant and more like an axis it had quietly chosen to orbit.
One analyst said it was like watching a black hole behave politely.
His satellites—those matte-black spheres—had formed early during his training, unintentionally at first. Over time, he'd refined them into extensions of himself—not weapons, but personal instruments. Gyroscopes giving him superior poise and control, letting him condense and redirect pressure, and helping him feel centered in a way that few others do.
Across the Forge, a shimmer resolved into a person. It was Tyrian's sparring partner— a tall, quick, obsidian-type innovator. He arrived like a detonation—black glass bursting outward from his arms, then hovering in the air around him. Slender blades, jagged slivers—each one sharp and weightless, circling him like a pack of fangs waiting for the command to bite.
"This your first time in the Kaleidoforge, Vyr?" he called, voice a little too confident.
Tyrian said nothing. He simply lowered into a combat stance.
Not out of discipline.
He just couldn't remember the guy's name.
[INITIATING TRIAL: BEGIN]
His opponent moved first.
Without hesitation, he dove straight into an advancing feint, took a torque-step left, then a double strike laced with sharpened obsidian constructs. His form was crisp. Fast. Cleanly trained. The whirling shards in his wake snapped into spears mid-flight and launched like extensions of each jab.
Tyrian felt the difference before they landed. The Field around the guy wasn't just reacting—it was reorganizing based on the formulas he was weaving with his movement.
Tyrian's response was a three-point redirection: hip rotation, Field tension release, gravitational tether pull. One satellite adjusted, syncing its loop. He didn't block the attack. He let the Field fold around his mass like a tide breaking on a submerged reef.
The air shimmered.
[FORMULA INVOKED: GRAVITY WELL — ISOLATE VECTOR]
Tyrian executed one of his base-level formulas.
The spears froze midair, suspended in motion, their momentum arrested by an invisible pull. Then they collapsed inward like a time-lapse spiral—drawn into a single gravitational point, folding cleanly into nothing without even a sound. Like a surgeon, he had targeted all motion along a specific path and collapsed everything moving along it.
The guy blinked. "Okay. That's new."
Undeterred, he moved again—faster this time. Black glass surged up his limbs, not wild, but deliberate. A meshwork of sharp-edged plates formed around his arms and shoulders—an obsidian-type guardform, reinforced for mid-range pressure.
He didn't hesitate.
A flick of his wrist as he carved a jagged glyph into the Field—[FORMULA INVOKED: SPLINTER VEIL]—a burst of obsidian fragments rippled outward, arcing like a wave of airborne shrapnel.
He darted across a sky-bridge—light-footed, precise—then fractured the bridge behind him, sending chunks of chalk-grey lapidite and black-glass shards spiraling forward, momentum-guided like a ranged vector strike.
Tyrian watched the formation without flinching.
Innovators didn't just fight. They calculated. Every motion—every strike—could be woven into a formula, an alchemical expression written in force and intent. Some formulas were simple: two variables, clean reaction. Others layered pressure, timing, and resonance like nested equations—shape, redirect, collapse.
Tyrian stepped once, deliberate, subtle.
[GRAVITIC FIELD DISTORTION: +0.8 FLARE]
[UNREGISTERED RESONANCE FLUX DETECTED – CLASSIFICATION: UNCATALOGUED]
He glanced at the readout, then back at his opponent. That was strange. He hadn't written anything yet, or even focused, but somehow the Field had moved like he had, like an output with no input.
The debris veered off-course, missing him by inches. The Field around him altered their trajectories preemptively, just slightly enough to misalign the debris's path.
Tyrian moved with him, not against him—weight shifting just outside the arc of the strike. He stepped inside the guy's reach, parried the first blade with the flat of his forearm, let the second pass beneath his ribs with a breath-length of space.
His opponent pivoted into a hook elbow.
Tyrian ducked. Caught it at the wrist. Redirected the force with a quarter-step and a subtle shoulder drop, using the guy's own momentum to slide them into a brief, rotating clinch.
One beat. Two.
Then Tyrian pushed off.
A lean. A turn. A breath.
He traced a small circle in the air with two fingers. No light. No flaring glyphs. Just precision.
[FORMULA WRITING: COMPLETE]
[EXECUTING: ORBITAL BINDING]
His opponent didn't notice it at first.
He pivoted left, and his momentum jumped right, like someone had spliced two moments of movement together wrong. He leapt upward—clean arc, perfect form—but his body snapped back to where it began, boots landing exactly on the spot he left, as if reality had undone the jump before it finished.
"What the—"
Tyrian was already there.
He hadn't locked the man in place. That would've taken force. Instead, he'd rewritten the Field's sense of the guy's momentum—tied it into a closed curve and let the inertia fold back on itself.
Tyrian stepped in, slow and centered. He placed two fingers to his opponent's chest—barely a touch.
His opponent raised a blade—then froze. The obsidian construct flickered, then shattered in his own hand. He had moved, but his intent was shaken, and his formula fell apart.
That was all it took.
Tyrian stepped forward, two fingers raised—preparing the next arc. The Field began to compress. His satellites drifted tighter.
Then:
[TRIAL OVERRIDE - SYSTEM INTERVENTION]
[ASSESSMENT COMPLETE: SIGNATURE STABILITY CONFIRMED]
A low chime echoed across the pocket dimension. The air thinned. The color around him began to drain—retracting like fabric being drawn through a fold. Platforms unraveled. Gravity restitched itself in reverse.
Tyrian's foot touched polished tile—clean, artificial, still. A return to the Prime plane.
The Forge had released him.
His opponent landed hard on a de-escalation platform behind him, armor fractured but intact. The rest of his obsidian constructs fell away in pieces.
He thought about offering a nod. Maybe even a quick "good match." But then he remembered—he still didn't know the guy's name. So he said nothing. Just stood there, still exerting pressure by simply standing still. .
He didn't look proud, or smug. Just focused. Waiting again.
The silence stretched. Someone cleared their throat.
Then the test coordinator's voice crackled through the feed:
[COMBAT EVALUATION COMPLETE – QUALIFICATION MET]
[ASSIGNMENT RECOMMENDATION: LIVE FIELD DEPLOYMENT]
He had passed, which meant receiving his first mission assignment.
He wasn't sure what he wanted to find out there.
But he knew it wasn't in here.
"He only invoked two formulas," someone said behind the glass, voice measured but wary. "But—did anyone else see that thing in the dust?"
"What thing?"
"Between the first and second formula. The Field reacted before he did."
Someone scrubbed through the playback.
"He wasn't writing anything here—but those are glyphs starting to form."
In the dust around Tyrian, faint loops, arcs, and half-strokes shimmered midair. None of them stabilized.
"So... residue?"
"No. Look at the timing. They're echoing inward. Not dispersing."
Silence. Then a whisper:
"That's recursion. It's folding in around him."
One frame was flagged and logged:
[UNREGISTERED FIELD RESPONSE — CLASSIFIED: VISUAL NOISE]
The Forge shut down. Readouts cleared.
Later that evening, one of the analysts returned.
They replayed the footage five times.
And copied the data to a private drive.