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Chapter 112 – The Patchwork Accord
The ashes had not settled, but the people were already beginning to speak again.
No longer whispers. No longer questions about survival or silence.
Now, they asked—
"What do we do next?"
The field where the Reclamation Herald had dissolved was now quiet, but not empty. Rebels moved among the scattered remnants of code-ruined earth, recovering memory tokens, salvaging pieces of runic tech, helping the wounded. Some wept, not from grief—but from remembering what they had almost lost.
Erevan stood at the center of it all, arms crossed, his expression unreadable.
But inside, the silence was breaking.
He looked up at the Beacon's central node—flickering but intact. Serah had managed to shield it with her emergency latticework during the Herald's final burst. Yuren approached him, dragging behind him a broken Tower sigil, once part of the enemy's core.
"Thought you'd want this," Yuren said, tossing it to Erevan's feet. "One more lie, unmade."
Erevan didn't reply at first. He stared at the symbol. The Tower's mark.
He had once wanted to destroy it completely.
Now, he wasn't sure that was enough.
"We can't just burn down what was," Erevan finally said. "Not anymore. Not when there are people who still need something to build from."
Nyara approached then, her gaze distant but steady.
"And so you call them?"
He nodded.
"One by one. Memory by memory. Every erased faction. Every silenced rebel. Every forgotten node where the Tower left its ghosts."
Serah joined them, her fingertips glowing faintly from residual runic threads. "You're suggesting we gather them? All of them?"
"I'm suggesting we give them a voice."
He stepped forward onto the Beacon platform. The light from its base hummed weakly, not just with power—but with potential.
"I'm calling it the Patchwork Accord."
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The first to arrive came not because of a summons, but because of a shared wound.
A group of drifters from Node 7.2, faces etched with deep scar-lines—not from war, but from memory deletion. Most of them could barely recall their names. But they recognized Erevan.
Or rather—they recognized the weight he carried.
"You're the one who defied the Silence," their leader said, a grizzled woman with half her face etched in static burns. "You walked the void and came back remembering."
"I did," Erevan replied.
The woman met his eyes.
"Then I'll follow. Even if I can't remember why I started fighting… I want to remember why I still can."
Others came soon after.
A trio of bio-mancers, long-thought dead, who had rewritten their own biology to hide from the Tower's sensors.
A blind Archivist who had encoded forbidden truths into her skin, turning her entire body into a living scroll.
Even a former System Warden—a traitor to the Tower itself—dragged into the Accord's orbit by the song Nyara had sung.
Each brought fragments.
Scattered truth.
Torn oaths.
And Erevan listened to all of them.
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In the nights that followed, they held a gathering—not a council, not yet. There were no banners, no declarations of rule or command.
Just a fire in the center of the Beacon camp.
And stories.
One by one, they spoke—not of battles won or lost, but of people remembered.
"I had a brother once," said the girl who had sung down the Herald. "He taught me how to laugh with my eyes, even when our mouths had to stay shut. I don't know where he is now. But I remember his smile. I choose to remember it."
"I was a scavenger," another said, voice shaking. "I sold information for survival. I betrayed three people I called friends. The Tower said I was unworthy of remembrance. But… I kept a drawing they made. I want to earn it back."
Not all were forgiven.
Not all wanted to be.
But all were heard.
And that alone was enough.
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Yuren watched the flames crackle, arms folded behind his head. "You're really going to try and unify all these broken things?"
Erevan didn't look away from the fire.
"I'm not trying to forge an empire. I'm trying to light a signal. So that when the next Herald comes, when the next overwrite begins—they'll hear more than silence."
Serah leaned against the pillar beside them. "Then we need more than memory."
She tossed Erevan a small shard—a piece of the Herald's core.
"We need infrastructure. We need a network."
"Then we'll make one," Erevan said quietly. "Out of memory. Out of scars. Out of the things they told us were too broken to be used again."
He looked up at the sky.
The Tower was still there.
Watching.
Waiting.
But for the first time, Erevan didn't feel like a lone voice in the dark.
He had echoes now.
And they were growing.
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Author's Note:
The Patchwork Accord is more than a gathering—it's the start of something deeper. A network of remembrance. A rebellion not just of force, but of story.
Chapter 113 will dive into one of these stories, as a former Tower Warden steps forward with a secret that could shatter the next phase of Reclamation entirely.
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If you believe in this story, let it be remembered.
— Dorian Blackthorn
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