In a quiet ward of the orbital colony Horizon Prime, two children were born. The massive station hummed with the steady thrum of life support and the faint whisper of artificial gravity, a sterile cradle for humanity's future.
The first never drew breath. The infant's tiny chest rose once, a silent miracle, then stilled forever. To the parents who had waited years for this moment, it was an unimaginable tragedy—another life extinguished before it began. They could not know that a second, silent miracle had occurred. For inside that body, something ancient lingered. The soul was not new. It carried the full weight of another existence: a soldier's life, brief and brutal. The roar of explosions, the relentless chatter of rifles, the sharp sting of betrayal, and the final, cold silence of death. A veteran mind, trapped in a body too fragile to contain it.
Moments later, that fragile vessel failed. The child died. And yet the memories, so heavy with war, did not vanish. Like a disembodied echo, they spilled outward, searching—a storm of forgotten history desperate for a host—until they brushed against another newborn just a few halls away.
Kael Veyra.
A healthy baby, ordinary to the doctors. But as the torrent of alien memories rushed into his forming mind, a force too great for his tiny vessel, it nearly broke him. His small body trembled, eyes staring blankly at the sterile lights above, a silent seizure of the soul. Most of the memories buried themselves, locked deep within him—too heavy for an infant to bear. What remained were fragments: the rhythm of marching boots, the snap of commands, the instinct to scan a room for exits. Half-glimpsed, half-forgotten, like dreams after waking, they were the faint whispers of a life he had never lived. Kael would grow up with no understanding of what had brushed against him that day. He would only carry the faint sense of being "older" inside, a boy who learned faster, thought sharper, and carried a quiet discipline beyond his years.
But he was not alone in carrying echoes.
Elsewhere, on the far side of the colony's central torus, another child stirred.
Lyra Calden.
Unlike Kael, she remembered clearly. She had lived once as a mecha pilot, her last moments consumed by the searing fire and twisted steel of her cockpit. This time, she opened her eyes already knowing who she had been, the taste of smoke and victory a faint phantom on her tongue.
Two children, born into a time of peace, bound by a war that had ended long before they would ever meet. Two echoes, carried into new lives. And destiny waited to bring them together.