The valley was burning. Not from war. Not from the Rift. From precision. The kind of burn meant to erase, not conquer.
Reven crouched on a ridge with Kaela and Lirien as the first wave of white-clad enforcers swept through the ruins below, silent, methodical, leaving nothing untouched. Buildings collapsed inward without fire. Trees withered in seconds under memory-stripping pulses.
It was a purge. A clean slate by force.
"They're not harvesting," Lirien said quietly, wings tight against her back. "They're sterilizing."
Kaela spat into the dirt. "Guess we made them nervous."
Reven didn't speak. He watched.
Watched the way the patrols moved in exact patterns. Watched the way survivors who fled were tagged with pulses of blinding light and then stood still, blinking, empty.
They weren't killing. They were unmaking. Turning memory into silence and Reven knew the silence would spread until there was nothing left but a world that remembered nothing.
Unless he stopped it. They descended before dawn. No banners. No battle cries.
They slipped through the purge lines like ghosts, one by one taking down sensor towers, disabling key relays. The Curated Ones didn't react like soldiers. They reacted like algorithms recalculating anomalies.
Reven didn't fight them with brute strength.
He fought them with disruption.
At each critical node, he overloaded the signal grids with Rift resonance, just enough to fracture the perfect loops of memory suppression.
The world pushed back harder every time.
At the third relay point, a larger figure dropped into their path, heavily armoured, masked by a smooth, featureless helm. Not a Curated One. Something worse.
Kaela stepped forward, blade gleaming.
The figure didn't attack. It spoke.
"Designation: Revenant Class Anomaly. Directive: Containment and Termination."
Lirien flared her wings, her voice a whisper. "They built executioners."
"Just for me," Reven said grimly.
The figure moved. Fast, faster than the Curated.
Reven barely brought his blade up in time to deflect the first strike, a blow that cracked the ground beneath his boots.
The fight wasn't elegant. It was survival.
Reven ducked under a second strike, felt the air shear where the armoured fist passed. Kaela lunged from the side, blades flashing, carving a line across the enforcer's flank but it didn't slow.
Lirien dropped from above, driving a compressed gust straight into its spine, staggering it forward.
Reven didn't waste the opening.
He drove the shard harness on his back into resonance, pulsing Rift-forged memory through his blade and cut.
The strike wasn't physical. It was conceptual.
The executioner froze mid-motion, joints locking.
Its systems couldn't process the variables Reven embodied, the memories he carried, the decisions he made.
It collapsed without a sound. They didn't stay to admire the victory. More would come and soon, not just soldiers.
By nightfall, they reached the signal tower perched on the edge of the Shardbone Plateau.
The highest point for miles. A place to be seen. A place to be heard. Kaela set the signal repeater salvaged from the last outpost into place.
Lirien calibrated the frequencies, eyes glinting in the low light.
Reven stared out across the darkened world, the Rift scar faint above, and felt the weight of choice again. But this time, not just for him. For all of them.
"Once we light this up," Kaela said, "there's no hiding."
"They already know I'm alive," Reven said. "They already decided what I am."
He placed his hand against the repeater core. Memory pulsed under his skin.
Rift memory.
Human memory.
His memory.
"We don't fight in the dark anymore," he said.
He pressed the activation rune.
The tower flared to life, sending a pulse of raw, uncurated memory across the broken world.
A reminder.
A refusal.
A declaration.
Far away, in the fortified remnants of the Supreme citadels, alarms screamed.
The council gathered in haste, projections flickering across shattered war tables.
One figure, the Supreme Archivist watched Reven's signal cut through their control nets, unravelling their harmonized memories.
"This is no longer containment," he said.
"This is rebellion."
And with slow, deliberate words, he spoke the sentence they had feared for centuries.
"Target Reven. Full priority. Termination at any cost."