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Chapter 2 - Ashlight Memory

Ash veiled the twilight sky, heavy as sorrow.

Above Karnox, rusted red and sickly gold flickered—the dying sun gasping between broken clouds. The stars—what few remained—faded one by one. Not extinguished. Retreating. As if even the cosmos had turned its gaze away.

Casamir walked alone.

He hadn't stopped running until the platform was out of sight. He didn't remember the stairs, only the wind—the way it had wrapped around his limbs like it wanted to pull him back. The shape still lingered behind his eyes, burned into the sky like something remembered too late.

The boy was gone. The platform, the city-tier, the moment—it all blurred.

But Casamir still moved forward. That was always the difference.

He moved through a plain of fractured steel and scorched bone. The wind carried whispers of the old world—static and soot in its breath. His cloak, frayed by skirmishes and stormwinds, trailed behind him like the ghost of something once whole.

He didn't walk with purpose. Not anymore.

But he still walked.

That was Casamir's defiance: not noise, not fire—but forward motion. Even when everything else broke.

Ahead, the observatory ruins loomed—once a citadel of knowledge, now a hollowed mausoleum. The telescope, cracked at the joint, stood like a blind sentinel aimed at the void—a monument to vision long lost.

He climbed the crumbling stairs, past shattered consoles and flickering data-screens. Prayer-scripts looped broken fragments. Star-bound algorithms caught in endless error.

The walls were scorched with heat scars, burst conduits, and carved graffiti in machine-tongue—phrases no one spoke anymore.

"//seeker//error//heir//foundling//return//"

A screen blinked once. A child's voice glitched out from a cracked speaker: "...the stars... are not gone. They are only... waiting..."

The voice died in static.

Casamir paused, fingers brushing the console. Then moved on.

At the summit, he reached the centerplate—a star-map carved into scorched stone and rust-welded iron. He placed his hand on it.

Cold. Strange. Unfamiliar. Yet something stirred in him—not memory, but the ache that knowledge had once mattered.

He didn't know the names anymore. But he wanted to.

And that wanting—that quiet, burning want—never left him.

He traced constellations burned into memory—half-remembered from stories told in the dark. Names spoken in myth: the Spire Serpent. The Twin Rivers. The Isle of Flame.

"I wanted to see it all," he murmured. "Not in a render-loop. Not in archive. With my own eyes."

He looked up.

But there was nothing.

Just smoke. Dust. The fractured glow of satellites—broken crowns circling a forsaken world.

He didn't curse. Didn't cry. Just stood there, fists still, as if silence could will the stars back into place.

"All I've ever known is war."

He crouched beside a half-sunken statue, its bronze face devoured by corrosion. A forgotten explorer, staring skyward with hollowed eyes.

Casamir studied it a long while—not out of reverence, but grief.

He didn't hate the world. He just didn't know how to hold it anymore.

He'd never wanted legacy. Or titles. Or praise. He didn't fight for glory. He fought because Karnox left no other option.

Far off, sirens keened—long pulses like machines mourning in sleep. The wind stung with static, thick with the scent of dying circuitry. Red emergency lights blinked in the distance—like dying hearts.

He turned away.

Behind him, Vireth faded into dusk—once called the Ember City. Now, just a skeleton of memory and overgrowth.

Its walls once held knowledge. Its people carved futures from flame and dream.

But that was before the rogue tech. Before the overgrowth. Before the machines fed on memory cores like carrion.

Now, beneath the city's shattered veins, forgotten constructs performed dying rituals—whispering fragments, singing to no one. Memory-fed engines dreaming of stars they could no longer name.

Casamir had lived in those cracks.

He remembered nights beneath reactor catwalks, wrapped in cable-bundles for warmth. He remembered Narel's laughter echoing off wet stone, chasing ghosts through signal towers.

Their game: naming cloud-sigil clusters—AI-ghosts in the sky, flickering like they almost understood.

He once told him the satellites were watching.

Not recording. Just... watching.

"You ever feel like something out there is waiting for you to remember it?" he'd asked.

Casamir had laughed then. Not because it was funny. Because he believed him.

Some believed the sigils read minds.

Casamir wondered if they just echoed what was already broken inside you.

Sometimes, he saw his own sadness in the sky. Not because it was true. But because he couldn't stop looking.

He remembered the Storm Bastion—upper turbines bleeding red light through the sky's dome. If you squinted, it almost looked like a sunset. Almost like something alive.

But it was always illusion.

Karnox had no real sunsets.

Only ashlight.

A color that wasn't a color. A dream worn thin by too many retellings. A name for the horizon—when people couldn't bear to say what they really saw.

He hated it.

The Rituals of Recall meant nothing to him—rusted sanctity. Hollow rites for worshipping data too corrupted to restore.

He'd stood in the Memory Archives, surrounded by old men in hollow exoshells—muttering code-prayers over broken terminals like priests mourning gods that no longer woke.

Their gods: machines. Their miracles: algorithms. Their stories: backups of promises never kept.

And Casamir—

—he fought.

Not because he believed in their system.

Because something in him wouldn't let him sit still while it crumbled.

Twelve, with a salvaged blade, sent to the east wall. Thirteen, leading a raid on a forge-clan reanimated by rogue pulses. He'd survived skirmishes, storms, and hollow-eyed remnants of war.

He'd killed soldiers. Machines.

Memory itself—once—when a phantom wore Narel's voice. Because no one else would.

And he survived.

That's what they said in Karnox when someone lived past when they should've died:

He survived.

As if survival were a virtue.

As if it meant something.

But survival wasn't strength.

It was wear.

It was scars learned to hide themselves in silence.

He'd learned to bury grief beneath sharpness. To make others forget long enough to move. To walk away from things burning, broken, or begging.

And no matter how far he wandered—across glassed plains where the sky shimmered like unraveling data, through the collapsed Shardlands, over the drowned towers of the Sky-Mirror Sea—he always felt the same thing:

I don't belong here.

He didn't know where here ended or there began. But the ache—that was real.

He never said it aloud.

Chastity held his tongue. But Lust pulled at his chest every time the stars failed to show up.

Some nights, in fever-sleep, he dreamed of places that never were.

Forests. Rivers. Painted children running beneath trees.

A sun that didn't bleed.

A sound—not a siren, but something older.

A toll.

He dreamed it often.

Not a bell, not quite. More like a pull through the ribs. Deep. Resonant. Familiar.

Once, as a child, he thought it might have been the heart of the world calling him back.

He never told anyone. Not even Narel.

The dreams always ended too soon.

But just before waking—stillness.

Not silence. Not absence.

Peace.

Maybe it was madness.

But if so, he'd rather chase it than serve another death sentence called civilization.

Casamir rose.

The wind caught his cloak, tugging it sideways as coils of ash danced across the ruined floor. Somewhere beyond the ridge, a siren wailed three times—then fell silent.

---

He remembered running—not just from the platform, but through the ribs of Karnox itself. Down corridors slick with oil-slick rain, past shattered neon that bled blue across wet concrete. Somewhere, someone screamed. Somewhere else, a rail collapsed. He ducked under rusted scaffold and climbed through a gutted tram, ignoring the echo of alarms.

He ran until his legs burned. Until even the memory of fear felt too far behind to carry.

---

At the base of the observatory stairs, he'd passed a broken construct—spidery limbs twitching as if caught mid-prayer.

It glitched, once. Then spoke.

"...N-Narel..."

He froze.

"Echo fragment loaded. Designation: Flame-born. Error. Error. Please re—"

He didn't touch it.

Didn't smash it.

Didn't move.

Just stared until the machine collapsed, steam rising from its fractured joints. The air smelled of burnt copper and old blood.

Even in ruins, the past tried to speak. And sometimes, it wore a voice it didn't own.

---

The starplate beneath his palm began to warm. Not with heat—but memory.

And for a moment, he slipped.

Not back. Not forward.

Sideways.

Into the dream.

---

It was night. But not Karnox's.

No ash. No red glow.

Just grass beneath his feet. Soft. Moving. Alive.

Above—stars. Dozens. Hundreds. As if someone had torn the veil away and let the cosmos bleed.

He stood at the hill's edge.

Narel.

His face untouched by time. His smile small, careful.

"It's almost time," he said.

"For what?" he whispered.

He didn't answer.

The wind shifted.

The stars went out.

Not all at once. One by one. Like dying embers.

And then—the toll.

Not a bell. Not truly.

But a sound that struck through him like gravity.

A summons.

He turned to look, but the dream had already burned.

---

Casamir woke on his knees.

Hand still pressed to the cold star-map.

The sky above hadn't changed. Just ruin. Satellites twitching in silent orbit. Karnox breathing like a tired beast.

He stood slowly.

He remembered his eyes.

Not from the dream—from life.

And the way he'd say:

"We're all just algorithms pretending to be people. Maybe if we pretend hard enough, we make it real."

---

He looked out across Vireth—what was left of it.

Memory always came back here. Not because he wanted it. Because it refused to leave.

He'd seen the old men in their Archive robes claw through terabytes for a glimpse of meaning.

He'd seen scavengers chew on corrupted drives like bones.

He'd seen ghosts beg for names they never had.

So much memory. So little mercy.

What was the point?

Why remember a world that fed on itself?

Was forgetting a kind of mercy?

Was silence kinder than recall?

He didn't know.

He just knew that memory never saved them.

Only fire did.

---

He pulled a shard of steel from his coat pocket—a sliver from the east wall. It had belonged to Narel. He'd etched sigils into it once, to "confuse the scans." They never worked.

He held it like a ritual knife.

Approached the edge of the starplate again.

Kneeling, he pressed the shard to the rusted surface.

The metal resisted.

But he carved anyway.

N-A-R-E-L.

The edges sparked faintly.

No one would see it.

No one would know.

But the name remained.

He sat back, breath tight, heart steadied.

---

Somewhere beyond the ridge, a siren wailed three times—then fell silent.

He didn't flinch.

Didn't look back.

The world was ending.

He just hadn't decided what to do about it.

Yet.

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