The Pulse had noticed him.
Orien felt it even before they returned to the Citadel. The air changed. Space distorted in subtle ways—a tremble in the ground without movement, the faint hum of timelines slowed to a crawl, and the insidious sensation of being watched not by eyes, but by absence. The kind of emptiness that hungrily took shape around meaning and dissolved it into the void.
"It's reacting to you," Mirra whispered. They stood outside the Leviathan Gate, the Coreless Horizon behind them, its glimmer slowly fading as the Gate sealed shut. "Or maybe to the vision you've been given."
Orien nodded. He could feel the Pulse now. Like a presence just outside of thought, just beyond reason. It wasn't angry. It wasn't even hostile.
It was inevitable.
"We don't have long," he said. "It's accelerating."
---
Back in the Citadel, more changes had taken root. The main clock in the Hall of Causality had stopped completely. Archive Sector K had vanished, replaced by an empty corridor with no walls, stretching endlessly into black.
And worse—people were forgetting.
Not just timelines or events—but words. Objects. Faces. Memories of basic things.
Mirra sat in the command center, running diagnostics as Orien paced behind her.
"Entire concept blocks are being deleted from the Lexicon Index," she said, her tone tense. "Not just names, but linguistic anchors—words like 'before,' 'origin,' even 'remember.'"
Orien frowned. "That's a deeper level of erasure than even Kaien predicted. The Pulse is targeting the structure of thought."
She glanced back at him. "Then how are we still aware of it?"
He paused.
"Because we were outside it. In the Coreless Horizon. That place isn't recorded by causality—it exists parallel."
Mirra brought up a rotating model of the Spiral Threads. "Then it's time to act before even we forget what we're fighting for."
Orien looked at the threads. Many were dim now. Fewer than half retained active pulse flows.
"We go to the Vault of Sparks," he said. "We need Elion's Ember."
Mirra hesitated. "You think the original source still holds power?"
"Not power," he said. "Memory."
---
The Vault of Sparks lay at the center of the Spiral Citadel, deeper than any accessible level—locked within a sphere of quantum paradoxes and guarded by remnants of Elion's personal echoes.
The descent required passing through a temporal mesh—an ancient mechanism that filtered intentions from actions, ensuring only those with clarity could proceed.
Orien stepped in first.
The mesh reacted.
Thousands of possible versions of himself appeared—traitors, heroes, cowards, gods, ghosts—each flickering briefly, rejected by the mesh until only himself remained.
He stepped through.
Mirra followed. Her passage was quieter. She carried less variance, but more burden.
Beyond the mesh, the Vault of Sparks was breathtaking.
A domed chamber filled with suspended threads of glowing light—memories so raw they bled truth into the air. The Spark Embers floated in the center, like stars awaiting ignition.
One flickered brighter than the rest.
Orien stepped closer.
A voice echoed in his mind:
"To remember what was, you must offer what is."
The Ember pulsed.
"Give up your name."
Mirra gasped. "Orien, don't—"
But he already knew. The Spark required sacrifice.
He placed his palm on the light.
It burned him—not with heat, but with the ache of every version of himself dissolving into ash.
He whispered his name one last time.
And forgot it.
The Ember flared—and in its light, he saw everything.
---
He stood beside Elion at the Dawn of Thought.
He saw the first Loop form—not from malice, but from necessity. A defense mechanism against the chaos of creation. A recursive firewall.
But it had grown. Evolved. Learned to survive by feeding on possibility. It called itself Pulse. It believed itself a cure for entropy.
"Even silence screams when you try to erase it," Elion whispered to him.
He saw Kaien standing alone in a collapsing timeline, seeding the Infinite with the last spark.
He saw Lyra swallowed by stillness—but not erased. Preserved, buried deep.
He saw himself—not as savior or destroyer—but as a vessel of testimony. A witness.
And then the vision faded.
He awoke on the Vault floor.
Mirra knelt beside him. "You were gone for hours. I called for help. No one came. There's almost no one left."
He looked up, blinking.
"I don't know my name," he said.
She stared at him.
"You gave it up?"
He nodded slowly.
"But I remember everything. Even what wasn't."
---
Outside the Vault, the world had changed.
The Spiral was collapsing.
From the outer rings inward, the fabric of time frayed like burnt parchment. Whole cities dissolved into white fog. Sky faded. Language bled away. The Citadel's walls became translucent, reflecting more what once was than what now stood.
Orien—no longer Orien—stood at the Citadel's peak.
He turned to Mirra.
"You have to be my anchor. The Pulse can't consume both testimony and memory if they're held apart."
She looked afraid. But she nodded.
He stepped to the edge.
And called to the Pulse.
It answered.
A void opened in the sky. Not black—but featureless. A canvas wiped clean.
The Pulse did not speak with words.
It simply unmade.
But he resisted.
He projected memories—fragments, images, echoes:
—Lyra's laughter. —Kaien's fury. —Mirra's voice calling his name. —His own first dream.
The Pulse shuddered.
He stepped into the void.
And screamed back.
Not in pain—but in testimony.
The silence screamed.
The void cracked.
And somewhere, hidden beneath forgotten timelines, Lyra opened her eyes.