Her name was Maren Vale.
Chief of strategy. Loyal to your traitor—not out of adoration, but ambition. Sharp-eyed, better at secrets than speeches. She found the letters. Read them. Not all, but enough to feel the chill behind your script.
She started asking questions.
Not out loud. Not yet. Just careful ones. "Who's Caelum Dross?" "Is that a leaked memo or forged?" "Did we always support that policy?"
She found echoes in your prose.
And that was by design.
You let one of your proxies tip her off anonymously—a voice disguised, but intentionally flawed. Enough for her to trace it.
She arrived at a forgotten archive in the outskirts. You watched from afar as she unearthed your original name, saw the files half-redacted, felt the sting of everything you had been before you were erased.
Maren paused there.
She didn't report what she found.
Not yet.
That night, she wrote a message. Encrypted. Buried in layers of code only you could read:
"If this is you—if you've come back—I want to understand. Before I stop you."
You didn't reply.
You leaked a new document the next morning—something explosive, something tied to your traitor's real crime. The kind that knocks balance off its axis. The news went wide. The traitor flinched.
And Maren?
She stared at the screen for an hour.
Then she whispered the name no one had dared speak aloud—
"Caelum."