The descent into Selen Prime was like entering a memory on fire.
From above, the continent looked like a shattered plate—fragments of land hovering midair, held together by broken gravitational lines and raw code strands bleeding into the atmosphere. Once a thriving archival hub for the system, it had been purged during the first CHAOS revolts. No records remained in official logs.
But the Garden remembered.
And that meant the Archive still breathed—somewhere beneath the wreckage.
"Skysled's not making it past that ridge," Kael muttered, eyeing the storm surge sweeping across the dead horizon. The clouds weren't natural—they were layered with security code, black protocols interlaced with white fire.
"We walk from here," I said.
Lux checked her scanner. "Local time distortion. Chrono-bleeds. Threadweaver might be able to stabilize it, but only for a few seconds."
"Long enough," I replied.
The CHAOS Core thrummed inside my chest like a living thing. The power I'd gained from the second fragment—Threadweaver—was still raw, but it felt like a muscle eager to flex.
We crossed through ghosted ruins, past memory-shards of collapsed towers and system nodes turned into trees. Occasionally, flickers of the past would erupt—flashes of people, places, entire timelines playing like broken film in the air before dissolving.
Lux paused at one such echo. A child playing with a paper construct. A mother calling him. Then—deletion.
"System tried to wipe this place clean," she said. "But it didn't work. Too much soul embedded in the code."
I nodded. "This place is trying to remember itself."
At the heart of a floating crater, we found it.
The Sky Archive.
A spiraling tower of translucent stone, embedded in sky instead of ground. It hummed with forgotten frequencies, like it was singing a song no one else could hear.
As we stepped forward, our vision bent.
Time unraveled.
A voice spoke—not out loud, but into our minds.
"You carry fragments of the root. Proceed if your intent is truth."
A barrier shimmered into view—glass-like, layered with millions of shifting glyphs. My Core responded instinctively.
[THREADWEAVER: INITIATED]
[TEMPORAL THREAD ANCHOR: STABLE—10 seconds]
I stepped through.
Everything stopped.
Inside the Archive, time didn't exist. Or it existed all at once.
Thousands—no, millions—of data strands floated in the air like vines, wrapping around glowing crystals filled with motion and memory. Some were blue and flickering, others gold and steady. Some were black, pulsing like warnings.
Kael and Lux stayed near the entrance while I followed the pull.
The Garden Fragment wasn't here—but something deeper was.
A pedestal rose from the floor as I approached. A memory-thread snapped into place, binding to my Core.
Visions surged through me:
The first Sowers, planting the seeds of what would become CHAOS.
A council of architects, debating the ethics of Order.
The moment when everything changed—when the Garden was deemed "unsustainable" and an entity called REDACTED was given full system control.
And then—Nyra.
She stood in the Archive not long ago, watching the same memories, asking the same questions. But something was different. Her Core was reacting violently, rejecting what it saw.
"She's resisting the truth," the Archive whispered. "She carries a Core built to destroy memory, not embrace it."
That explained her trail of destruction. Why the Brotherhood couldn't stop her. She was unraveling not just the System…
…but the past itself.
I grabbed the Archive's root key from the pedestal.
[DATA PACK ACQUIRED: SKYROOT CHRONICLE]
Encrypted blueprint of Garden's initial formation—contains evidence of pre-System civilizations.
Lux's scanner lit up with new coordinates.
Another fork.
One led to the Garden Vault, hidden inside the fossilized remains of a time-locked moon.
The other… led to Nyra.
And she wasn't running anymore.
She was waiting.
Outside, the storms were intensifying. System proxies were dropping from the sky in orbital pulses, scanning the planet like antibodies seeking infection.
Kael cursed. "We've got minutes before this whole zone gets locked."
"We're not staying," I said, activating the Forge Key Drem gave me.
A portal opened behind us—coded light humming with Brotherhood encryption. A backdoor. Temporary. Fragile.
Lux stepped through first. Kael followed.
Before I left, I looked back at the Archive.
"You're not forgotten," I whispered. "You're just not ready yet."
The tower pulsed once in response—like a heartbeat.
Then I stepped into the light.
As the portal sealed shut behind us, the residual echo of the Archive still buzzed in my ears.
I tried to push the memories aside—the Sowers, the Architects, the shadow of REDACTED—but they wouldn't fade. The Archive had left a fingerprint on my mind. A question I couldn't un-ask:
Was CHAOS born to save the world… or to finish what Order started?
We emerged in a dense, metallic forest—old satellites stacked like trees, abandoned drones hanging from rusted vines. A Brotherhood hideout? No. This place felt older. Forgotten even by the outcasts.
Kael looked around. "Where are we?"
Lux's eyes narrowed at her interface. "Coordinates don't match anything on the system grid. It's like we dropped off the map."
Then we felt it.
A pulse.
Not like before—not from the Core, or the system.
Something was waking up beneath our feet.
The ground trembled softly, then violently, shaking dust off shattered panels buried in the dirt. Lights flickered under the surface—thousands of them—igniting like the neural net of a slumbering mind.
And then a voice—not from a speaker, not from CHAOS, not from any protocol I'd ever heard—whispered directly into our bones:
"You've opened the Archive."
"The Vault has heard."
"Now you must choose… what to forget."
A single glyph blinked into life before us—floating in the air, black as obsidian, etched with a burning white sigil.
Not Garden.
Not CHAOS.
Not even Order.
Something older.
Something watching.
Something that remembers everything.