The air inside the Archive didn't just feel ancient—it was ancient.
A thousand years thick, pressed down on my skin like a forgotten curse.
Walls of blackened stone stretched into oblivion above, obsidian pillars carved with languages so old that even the Empire had abandoned their names.
Faint enchantments pulsed between the ruins, whispering broken spells that brushed against me like memories I hadn't earned.
At the center of it all, like a wound refusing to heal, waited a name.
My name.
KAEL SOLHART.
It felt older than breath. Older than the empire that now rotted above our heads.
A scar etched straight into the marrow of the world.
I reached out without thinking.
My fingers found the engraving, rough and alive under my touch.
Not cold. Not warm.
Breathing.
Something deep within the stone stirred, and before I could even react, the glyphs surrounding my name flared to life.
A low, grinding hum filled the air—then the world lurched.
The walls dissolved into smoke.
The Archive vanished.
And the Echoing Hall swallowed me whole.
The vision struck like a blade to the spine.
I staggered, fighting against a tide of alien memories—and yet, they weren't entirely foreign.
A battlefield unfolded before me, drowning under a bleeding red sky.
Storms raged across shattered mountains.
Lightning carved runes into the earth.
And at the center of it all... a man stood.
Me.
And yet, not me.
He wore blackened armor threaded with silver light, each rune stitched into the metal weeping with forgotten power.
In his hand, a jagged sword pulsed—alive, furious, drinking the chaos around it.
Across the torn field, silver-cloaked warriors advanced in seamless formation, chanting in a tongue older than fire itself.
Their weapons weren't made to kill flesh.
They were designed to erase existence.
The other me didn't flinch.
With a roar that shook the bones of the sky, he drove the blade into a crystal altar at the field's heart.
The world shattered.
A shockwave exploded—not force, not magic—but time itself, ripped apart like cheap fabric.
The silver-cloaked soldiers vanished, undone by the wound carved into reality.
The sky fractured.
The mountains screamed.
The battlefield collapsed into screaming silence.
I hit the Archive floor hard, gasping, the vision ripping itself free from my lungs.
My hands trembled.
My mind spun.
Footsteps echoed through the ruin.
A familiar weight dropped beside me—Elira, her face shadowed, her eyes heavy with something that looked almost like grief.
"You saw it," she said softly.
I could barely nod.
Her voice dropped lower, almost reverent. "The Velkaran Sigil War. The battle they erased. A war fought not with armies, but with memory itself."
I narrowed my eyes. "How the hell do you know that?"
Elira's mouth twitched into a smile—no humor in it.
Only a memory of something long dead.
"I was there," she said.
The words slammed into me harder than the vision had.
I blinked. "That's impossible. You're not even—"
She shook her head slowly, cutting me off.
"I wasn't alive. Not really."
Her hand brushed her arm, marveling at its solidity. "I was written. Coded. A prototype consciousness... stored in the Neural Archives before the Concord even rose to power. Data given flesh. A memory... taught to breathe."
I stared at her like I was seeing her for the first time.
How much of her was real?
How much was just... invention?
A ghost in the shape of rebellion.
At the center of the room, something stirred.
A relic.
Old. Hungry.
A tome.
Bound in cracked leather, shackled in iron latticed with time.
It called to me.
I didn't think.
I moved.
Elira didn't try to stop me.
The tome's surface hissed as my fingers brushed it, ancient wards screaming before they shattered.
Inside:
Fracture Theory.
The forbidden art.
The study of how fate, soul, and time could be torn apart like cloth.
I flipped through the brittle pages, eyes locking onto a passage etched deeper than the rest, like a knife carved it:
"If the world remembers a lie long enough,
the truth itself will rot.
Unless a name awakens to burn the rot away."
A chill rippled down my spine.
This wasn't fate.
This wasn't coincidence.
I wasn't meant to exist.
I was designed to be forgotten.
And every breath I took was a crack in the machinery built to erase me.
I closed the tome and tucked it under my cloak, feeling the Archive hum in warning around us.
No more hiding.
No more running.
No more waiting.
"I was born once," I whispered to the dead stones.
"Reborn twice."
I rose to my full height, breath steadying.
"But this... this is the first time I've chosen who to be."
We moved fast through the ruins, Elira at my side.
But the Archive wasn't silent anymore.
It watched.
As we reached the final stairwell, the darkness ahead thickened—and then shapes peeled away from it.
Shadows stepped forward, moving as one.
Armor gleamed—blood-forged, ritual-bound.
Helmets were marked with a crimson glyph: a twisted, burning eye.
The Crimson Shade.
The Concord's secret blade.
The elite.
The executioners.
The ones who answered only to the Crown.
Weapons raised, magic coiled at their fingertips.
We were surrounded before I could even draw breath.
From their center, a figure stepped out.
A wolf among sheep.
Her movements were too precise to be anything but lethal.
Her helmet hissed, unfolding in sections, revealing a face both regal and ruined by battle.
Hair the color of burning copper.
Eyes like blades of winter.
And in her gaze... memory.
Recognition.
"Kael Solhart," she said.
My heart slammed against my ribs.
Her voice was a low whisper, almost lost in the Archive's haunted air.
"I knew you would return."
She smiled—a shattered, broken thing.
"I remember," she said as she stepped closer, the soldiers parting around her like a tide.
"You died in my arms once."
My hand tightened around my sword, the past and present crashing together.
Because nothing forgotten stays buried forever.
Especially not the dead.
"The truth isn't buried.
It's chained, screaming, beneath the weight of our forgetting."