Kael didn't sleep anymore. Not properly.
When he closed his eyes, the world didn't go black it opened. Sometimes, into memories that weren't his. Sometimes into landscapes built from borrowed pain. The faces he remembered were never whole, and the voices when they came came wrong.
That night, if it could be called night in a realm where the sun sometimes reversed—Kael found a shallow overhang of wind-carved stone, tucked into the base of a shattered hill. The rock glowed faintly with lichenlight, too dim to see well, but enough to remind him this world still had life in it. Or at least imitation.
He sat cross-legged, blade resting on his thigh, back to the wall.
The wind screamed above, tearing across the dunes with voices that almost said names.
He ignored it.
The shrine still throbbed in the back of his mind, like a burn trying to scab over too fast. His hand still bore the mark from the Witness Core. Not visible—just… there. He could feel a slight weight now, where there hadn't been one before. The memories from the core hadn't left. They'd settled.
Mira's face haunted him.
Not because he knew her. But because she'd known him.
She had looked directly at him through the dying fire of a memory centuries old and asked: Why do I know your face?
That was impossible. He hadn't been here then. He wasn't supposed to be here at all.
Unless… unless something else had crossed before him.
Unless he wasn't the first.
The Ash-Touched had said he was the third.
So where were the others?
A cold sound snapped him back to the present.
Bone, crunching.
Kael didn't move. He opened one eye—slowly.
The wind still screamed. The sand still whispered. But something out there had moved against the grain. Something heavier than the dunes. Something that didn't want to be heard, but had made a mistake.
He pressed his back flatter against the stone and shifted the bone dagger in his grip.
A shape loomed just beyond the curve of the rock, low to the ground, crawling.
Then a head. Human-like. But stretched. Too narrow.
Its mouth opened sideways.
Kael held his breath.
It sniffed the air. Or maybe the memories. He could feel the thing's hunger it wasn't physical. It was deeper. Like it wanted to eat the moment of fear before a scream.
Kael waited.
He counted three slow heartbeats. Four. Then—
He struck.
One fluid movement low, fast, silent.
The dagger went up under the jaw, angled forward. The creature shrieked—not from pain, but from disappointment. It didn't want to die fast.
Kael twisted.
The creature collapsed.
And that's when the memory hit.
Not like before. Not one memory. A torrent.
He fell to his knees, gasping as images flooded his mind. Not of one life, but of many stitched together. Echoes of a hundred dying screams caught in a body built from their fragments.
The creature hadn't been born. It had been crafted. Made from pain.
He saw a room. Cold, metallic. Clean. Not like Kael'theran. Earth?
Figures in white. Machinery. A child strapped to a slab. His own face but not quite.
The memory folded over itself. Time looped. He was being born and dissected and remembered all at once.
Then: blackness.
Kael vomited beside the corpse. He felt pieces of it leave him. Thoughts, feelings, griefs that didn't belong. They didn't stick. But they tried.
He staggered back into the stone wall, wiping blood from his mouth.
His head pounded.
This wasn't just memory. This was history.
He looked down at the body.
Its flesh was already peeling. Dissolving. Not into rot but into data.
The coreless kind.
And underneath it, barely visible in the ash, was a symbol.
Not a spiral.
A broken circle, split at the center.
Kael touched it.
A pulse answered. Faint. Very faint.
Dominion Echo Detected.
Category: Prototype Shardwalker
Tag: FORMER UNBOUND / STATUS: TERMINATED
Core Fracture Residue: 12%
Kael's skin chilled.
It had been like him. Once.
This was a memory eater. Or the remains of one.
But it had fallen. Its mind cracked. Its core shattered. It had been twisted into something other things fed upon. A warning.
Kael stood slowly, wiping the blood off his blade.
Something shimmered to his left. Just beyond the edge of the dune.
A figure—not fully solid. Draped in chainlight and broken shadow. Watching.
He turned to face it.
It didn't speak.
It just stood.
Kael reached for his weapon again—but the figure didn't move. It tilted its head, like the first creature he'd fought days ago.
Then it raised its hand—and pointed.
Toward the east.
Kael squinted. There, on the horizon, far beyond the dunes, a glow. Not fire. Not natural light.
System light.
Something was active out there.
The figure nodded once and vanished.
Kael stared into the dark for a long time.
Then he turned, adjusted the bone blade on his back, and began walking.
The wind didn't scream anymore.
It followed.
The walk east was long and quiet. The terrain shifted underfoot more aggressively the closer he came to the horizon. The sand gave way to a strange brittle crust—like scorched skin stretched across stone. Beneath it, he could hear something churning. Not water. Not magma. Something like gears, but organic.
He moved slowly. Cautiously.
After another hour or something like an hour the ground cracked beneath his step and hissed. A vent of hot vapor shot upward. It wasn't steam.
It was code.
Liquid, semi-luminous strings of fragmented command lines, burning into the air like incense.
Kael stepped back.
Dominion activity. Active.
The glow grew stronger.
Then he saw it.
A spire. Tall, uneven, half-eaten by the terrain. Not made of stone, not metal. Something in between. Its surface rippled faintly—like a HUD screen rendered in wrong dimensions. Around it, jagged formations jutted out in the shape of a radial glyph. Twelve points. Twelve fractures.
He stepped forward and the world shifted slightly. Like gravity blinked.
Then a voice.
Welcome, Unrecognized Core Signature.
Dominion Vault 9-A: Memory Containment Sector Breach In Progress.
All protocols suspended. Observation Active.
Kael blinked.
A Dominion Vault.
It wasn't a structure. It was a relic. One of the ancient nodes buried beneath Kael'theran to store unprocessable memories fragments that were too dangerous, too contradictory, too… true.
And it was open.
He took another step forward.
The air warped.
A voice whispered behind his left ear.
Then another to his right.
They weren't his.
They weren't the system.
They were inside.
Kael gritted his teeth.
He knew what came next.
And he wasn't ready.
But he walked forward anyway