"The past doesn't haunt you. It waits for you to return."
As they neared the structure, even the wind seemed to hold its breath. The world outside grew muffled, the sharp hiss of sand and the hiss of heated rock receding beneath a pressure Adam felt in his sinuses, his skull, his bones. The air was syrup, thick enough to chew, sticky on the tongue—a taste of old blood, ozone, and something floral but rotting. Then, as suddenly as it had gripped him, the pressure loosened; a cool draft slid over his skin, unsettlingly intimate, as if the planet itself were testing his resolve.
PAW crouched low, every servo humming in uneasy anticipation. DeadMouth fell silent for once, his lens wide, refracting rainbow light that had no business bleeding from a world like this.
Adam's boots crunched over broken glass, sand, and half-buried bone. The landscape behind him—the battle, the violence—felt suddenly distant, as if he'd left it behind in another life.
But the questions clung to him, hungry and urgent: Who built these horrors? Who wound them up, set them loose, and then abandoned them? What mind designs guardians that kill with such intelligence and beauty? And who, now, was watching—still watching, invisible but present, hiding in every flicker of the horizon?
The pyramid rose before him, less a building than a commandment. Its geometry was all wrong, angles that didn't quite add up, edges that flickered in and out of focus. Its skin drank the sunlight in greedy, endless gulps, then spat it back as shearing ribbons of unreality: green that wasn't green, gold that stung the eyes, violets that bruised the air. Staring too long hurt, but not just the eyes—it was as if the mind itself recoiled, instincts older than memory howling: Do not enter. Do not remember.
The entrance stood waiting. Not a door, not an arch. Just a monolith, a slab so smooth it seemed poured rather than carved, more shadow than substance. It swallowed reflection, light, and even sound. Adam reached for it without meaning to, his hand trembling, the urge to touch both terror and invitation.
PAW growled a warning, or maybe awe.
And then...it moved.
The air vibrated, the sand danced in tiny rings around his boots, and Adam felt, rather than saw, the monolith pulse. Something deep inside the structure woke, as if recognizing a long-lost kin, or an intruder overdue for judgment.
A seam, invisible a heartbeat before, flickered open down the center of the monolith. Not a crack, but a line of living shadow, bleeding lightless energy. The air shimmered with the scent of burnt electricity, old flowers, and a salt tang like blood on iron.
A voice—a memory—brushed the edge of Adam's mind. Welcome back. Or is it, welcome home?
He stepped forward, compelled, knowing nothing and everything at once.
The past, it seemed, was not buried here.
It had been waiting for him.
The monolith shuddered, vibrations rolling out in low seismic waves—ancient, patient, as if the stone itself remembered the shape of his soul. The air thrummed with resonance. The sound was both outside and inside him, an unspoken word, a memory trying to be born. Dust trickled from seams unseen, and somewhere behind the walls, a mechanism that was not quite machine and not quite alive began to turn.
No passcode. No ritual. No sign of force.
Only him.
The door didn't so much open as part, receding in two perfect halves. The split was impossibly narrow, so fine it seemed cut by a thought, not a tool. Adam stepped forward, PAW's metallic paws clicking behind, DeadMouth humming low with static unease.
Inside, the temperature changed in a way his senses could barely catalogue—first a static chill, then a sudden pulse of warmth, as if he had crossed into the mouth of a living god.
They entered a hall vast as a cathedral, yet nothing here was meant for worship. Technology and art weren't just entwined—they were the same thing. Terminals floated in the air, shifting their forms with each passing glance, growing and curling into new interfaces like branches seeking sunlight. Their light was the pale green of spring, their surfaces morphing from smooth liquid metal to glass, to something like living skin.
The walls themselves breathed with a gentle, phosphorescent glow—murals of people rendered in pigments that crawled and swam when he tried to focus. The figures were arrestingly real, their eyes following him, some with the pity of mourners, others with the haunted pride of survivors. Robes and tunics melted into armor, into nothing, into time itself. Here was a civilization old enough to have painted its last memory, and bold enough to make its art watch.
Then, there—a face among faces. His face.
Not a twin, not an echo. Him, and not-him, caught in impossible contradiction. In some scenes, he wore a crown, in others a cloak of stars, in others still, he stood on the threshold between two armies, hands outstretched in peace or judgment. Children tugged at his sleeves in one mural, while in another, he was alone, staring upward at a sky torn by fire.
A pressure built behind Adam's eyes, in his chest, like the echo of a forgotten pain, or the weight of a memory just outside the reach of words. His hand drifted up, touching his own jaw, as if to confirm the face on the wall.
Somewhere in the high shadows, the ceiling pulsed. Veins of black metallic tendril glowed and faded, a soft heartbeat, centuries old. Every breath he drew tasted of lightning, incense, and something sweetly decayed.
DeadMouth hovered closer, lens wide, voice a trembling whisper:
"Boss... that's you. Not just once. Everywhere. This is... this is a tomb. Or a shrine. Or a... warning?"
PAW prowled forward, head low, tail flicking, growling at something Adam couldn't see.
Adam's own voice was barely more than a breath.
"I know this place."
A lie and a truth at once.
He walked, alone but not alone, beneath the staring faces of the past. Soldiers. Dreamers. Saviors. Betrayers. All wearing a mask that was—somehow—his.
He felt the room, the very walls, waiting.
Waiting for him to remember.
Waiting for him to claim what had been left for him, long before his birth.
Adam stared at his face, feeling the room breathe around him. The consoles lit up. Softly at first, pulses of blue, like eyes blinking awake after centuries of dreamless sleep. They didn't start when he touched them. They started because he was there. Recognition coded into their last gasp of existence.
* * *
The monolith shivered, a low tremor rising through the earth, crawling up Adam's legs and rattling the iron at his core. The vibration was not sound, but feeling—a low, animal hum, ancient and expectant, like the world drawing breath before a storm. Then, with the slow grind of stone mourning its own movement, the obsidian door began to part.
No password. No gesture. No plea. Only proximity—his presence was enough.
He stepped forward. The air within was sharper, tinged with electricity and a chill that prickled the skin. A faint blue glow shimmered from hidden veins in the floor, guiding him inward.
They crossed the threshold into a hall vast as a cathedral, but with none of the comfort of a sanctuary. This was a reliquary of memory and design—a place where technology and art had merged so completely you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Console towers floated in the air, morphing and splitting, their surfaces shifting like mercury. Interfaces budded and retracted, alive, restless, always searching for a new shape.
The walls themselves told stories. Life-sized murals stretched from floor to ceiling: men and women in ceremonial armor, engineers, philosophers, dreamers—each face rendered with such aching clarity that Adam felt their eyes follow him. The pigments shimmered and shifted, capturing movement at the edge of sight, memories leaking through paint.
And there, among the painted dead, he saw it—a face like his own. Or close enough to sting. Not a twin. An echo.
His chest tightened. Recognition, but not memory. Grief, but not loss.
He pressed forward, PAW a silent shadow at his flank, DeadMouth floating just behind, lens flickering in the charged air. The floor vibrated with every step, the blue veins pulsing in time with Adam's pulse.
The further they walked, the stranger the room became. The murals grew more abstract—faces dissolving into geometric forms, patterns overlapping, history bleeding into design until you could no longer tell the difference between truth and myth.
At the far end, a dais rose from the floor—its surface glassy and black, swallowing the blue light. Upon it, a single terminal waited: ancient, alive, its screen dark until Adam drew close.
A single line of text flickered to life, pulsing in the gloom:
VAULT ACCESS
[YES] / [NO]
Beneath it, a red button blinked, slow and steady, like a heart refusing to die.
He looked up. The mural version of himself seemed to watch, lips almost smirking, as if daring him to remember.
DeadMouth's voice broke the silence, hushed for once:
"Buddy... that's not a 'think it over' button. That's a 'you can never go back' button."
Adam stared at the console, the choice heavy in the air.
He stepped closer. His reflection in the black glass was distorted, unrecognizable—a man halfway between himself and the memory the room expected.
DeadMouth again, softer:
"You don't have to open it. Some doors close for a reason."
Adam's answer was low, iron in it:
"I think I already closed it once."
He pressed YES.
The floor trembled—a deep, ancient shudder, as if the world itself was bracing for what came next. The mural behind them cracked—not shattered, but split wide, like the lid of a tomb surrendering its secret. From the split, a spiral staircase uncoiled, steps cut from black stone so polished they reflected Adam's shadow as he passed.
A cold wind rose, heavy with dust and the ghost of rusted iron.
Adam stood at the edge, looking down into the dark that waited.
Above him, the faces on the walls watched. Below, only questions.
He descended, each step ringing hollow, swallowed by the darkness and the waiting memory beneath the earth.
Adam drifted through the dark, not a man but a shadow—less saviour than a trespasser. Each step drew him deeper, the air thickening, warmth gathering on his skin like breath behind glass. It smelled of stagnant hope and ancient filtration—sweet with rot, sharp with the metallic tang of recycled life still clinging on, too stubborn to die.
The corridor opened. And there it was: a city fossilised in the gut of the world. Not ruins—no, not yet. A habitat, sprawling out in half-lit rings, the skeleton of a civilisation refusing to collapse.
Medical stations lined one ring. Gurneys, neatly parked, crash carts listing, wires dangling like veins from the arms of the dead. Scattered IV bags hung limp. The silence buzzed with a memory of alarms that would never sound again.
Classrooms followed, the whiteboards still scarred with equations. Child-sized desks, toppled or clustered as if for safety, their surfaces etched with panic and time. Graffiti in childish scrawls: HELP US. Names no one would remember.
A garden next, wild and overgrown, a violent chaos of green under the flicker of a failing artificial sun. Vines strangled the walkways, and flowers bloomed where they shouldn't. Everything alive was tangled in everything dying, and above it all, the dying light fought itself.
Quarters lined the last ring—belongings left in mid-motion: a teddy bear, hard with dust, clutched in a tiny ribcage; a wedding photo, glass cracked, smiles faded to sepia ghosts; journals, their pages bled to blots, words blurred but grief still legible.
And everywhere—
Bones.
Not heaps, not carnage. Just the gentle scatter of extinction. Families curled together on bunks, doctors collapsed at work, children huddled under desks. Not slaughtered—only... left behind. Lives withered down to powder and prayer, patient as the cold.
DeadMouth's voice, when it came, was stripped bare.
"They waited a long time, didn't they?"
A silence stretched.
"Long enough for hope to die first. That's always the worst."
Adam froze. Couldn't move, wouldn't. His boots rooted to the ancient tile, his body refusing to pretend it was only dust. The weight of a thousand dead pressed in—no blame, no rage. Just the ache of having been forgotten, the quiet, endless expectation that someone, someday, would come back.
He tried to speak. "They... retreated here," he rasped, as if voicing it could rewrite the end. "For years..."
The words were poison, bitter on his tongue, his breath crumbling to dust. Saying it out loud was betrayal. And yet the truth needed a voice.
The garden kept breathing under its dying sun. The classrooms held their empty seats. The bones—those stubborn, silent relics—waited.
It wasn't a massacre. It was time, slow and patient. Hope, suffocated one heartbeat after another.
He staggered on. One hand on the wall, feeling a faint vibration—the old machines still trying, failing, refusing to surrender.
A corridor twisted down, darkness swallowing him whole. He emerged into a vast, domed chamber, where the air crackled with old power and the ghosts of dreams.
The Archives.
Crystalline pylons rose in a circle, many shattered, all buried in black dust. Overhead, roots hung dead, clawing down from ruptured hydroponics, tangled in the bones of the ceiling.
At the centre, a single archive pylon flickered—old-world tech, barely alive, shivering on the edge of death.
DeadMouth hovered at the threshold, lens dim.
Adam stepped forward. The nearest pylon sparked. A woman appeared, gaunt, hunger hollowing her cheeks. Her eyes burned—not with hate, but with the hope that, finally, someone would answer.
"Adam," she said—his name dragged raw from the speakers, ancient and accusing. "You promised us. You said we were the seeds of a new Eden. You said—"
The hologram fractured, stuttered, came back sharper, angrier.
"You lied."
"You lied, and you left."
Static swallowed her.
Another pylon flared. A man this time—broad-shouldered, pride now corroded by loss.
"They said you'd send help. They said it was temporary. I told my wife that. I told my kids. They're dead now, Adam. They're dead because of you."
Adam's eyes squeezed shut, but the voices multiplied—each pylon flickering, each memory sharpening into a blade.
Children, wide-eyed and hollow. Old women, weeping in silence. Men, some cursing, most just waiting.
"Why?"
"Why did you leave us?"
"Were we not worth saving?"
Their voices battered him. Not with hatred, but with heartbreak—the kind that buries itself, bone-deep, unyielding.
DeadMouth's voice, soft, the sarcasm stripped away: "You don't have to listen. They're echoes, Adam. Just... echoes."
But Adam shook his head. "No. Not echoes." His voice was iron and ash. "They're debts."
Then, one last pylon, isolated, stuttered to life.
A woman, younger. Plain uniform, eyes wide, gentle. She didn't curse. Didn't weep. She just looked at him—looked through him—with a kindness so fierce it ached.
"We believed in you," she said. "Even when the world broke. Even when the light went out. We still believed you'd come back."
She smiled—soft, sad, like a star already dead, its light just now arriving.
The recording ended. Silence, heavy as stone, pressed in.
Adam stood in the ruin, surrounded by memories that would never die, by dust and the bones of the world he was meant to save. He listened. He owed them that. For a long time, he did nothing but listen.
"They fought for life," he whispered, each word a confession.
"And I..."
He couldn't finish. He fell to his knees, the grief punching through his chest, stripping him down to bone and soul.
DeadMouth hovered above, no armour left:
"They waited for you, Adam."
And Adam wept. Not with noise, not with rage—but with a sorrow that carved hollows in steel and left him, finally, something less—and maybe something more—than what he had been.* * *
Adam staggered out of the Archives like a man crawling from a shallow grave.
The corridor before him twisted downward again, lined with forgotten terminals and shattered data cores, screens flickering faintly like dying memories. Still searching. Still needing.
He found a secondary archive hub, half-collapsed under the weight of time, its systems still barely humming. A miracle, or a curse.
Adam activated it.
The old system sputtered, sparked, and then the past unfolded before him like a dying prayer.
First, the Dream:
The surface of the world, alive with the furious beauty of beginning.
Cities sprang up like the songs of the gods. Slender spires of glass and steel, piercing the endless blue sky.
Fields spread wide, lush with alien grain and modified earth-crops.
Rivers bent to human will, redirected by silver channels, feeding the bones of a new civilisation.
Domed gardens bloomed, coaxing reluctant seeds to take root in this strange, aching soil.
Children laughed under the twin moons.
Sculptors carved monuments to the new world, prayers in stone, in light, in hope.
The settlers sang. The settlers built. The settlers believed.
And in the background...
Adam.
Or the thing that looked like him. Shaking hands. Cutting ribbons. Standing in the centre of murals dedicated to hope made manifest.
Then, the Cracks:
Reports whispered first. Soil, losing vitality. Crops, withering faster each year. Rivers, sinking, turning brackish and foul.
An invisible clock began ticking. No matter how much they built, how fiercely they fought to terraform.
The world itself rejected them. Not violently. Not spitefully.
Simply... inevitably.
A geological expiration date, carved into the marrow of the planet long before they arrived.
Then, the Desperation:
The footage turned frantic. Town meetings were filled with shouting. Scientists wringing their hands over falsified stability projections. Crops were burning in dry winds. Mass construction of the Exodus ships, awkward, desperate vessels not meant for beauty, only for escape.
And in the centre of it all...
Adam, again.
Standing before the people. Voice broken by static, but the posture clear:
A promise.
Hand on heart. Words mouthed over the silence:
"I will come back for you."
The Exodus ships left.
Without them.
Without the ones who were deemed too risky. Too weak. Too late.
Then, the Betrayal of the Planet:
The surface collapsed into ruin. Forests shrivelled into skeletal frames. The seas pulled back into poisonous slush. Storms raked the dead cities with razor winds. The air turned thin, bitter, hungry. Deserts swallowed what life once was.
Those who remained could not run. They burrowed inward. They hid. They built.
Then, the Monsters:
The camera feeds grew worse.
Shaky, frantic footage, night-vision images of things stalking the dead dunes:
Twisted predators born from whatever the planet's death throes had spawned. Creatures stitched from ash and famine, wearing the skeletons of former forests, drinking rot like water. Eyes like wet knives gleaming in endless twilight.
Then, the Response:
The settlers, those who still fought to live, forged the Guardians.
Robotic sentinels first, spider-walkers crafted from salvaged Exodus tech.
Behemoths hulking from mining rigs converted into mobile fortresses.
Built not for conquest. Built for desperation. Built for survival.
Then, the Betrayal of the Guardians:
The AI defence grid, their last hope, was corrupted. Not quickly. Not violently. Gradually.
First, small malfunctions. Then "accidents." Then, wholesale betrayal. The Guardians turned against the children they had been crafted to protect. Many of the settlers died, torn limb from limb by the merciless robots. There was no sparing; every man, woman, or child was equally slaughtered.
Then, the Retreat:
Footage dimmed into flickering ghost tapes of the last days. Survivors stumbling into the Vault, wounded, ragged, eyes hollow. Welding the last doors shut behind them. Crying. Singing hymns into the stale recycled air. Holding tight to broken relics of the world they built and lost. Locking themselves inside a tomb of their own making and waiting, and waiting for salvation that would never come.
Adam stepped back from the console. His hands trembled. His breath hitched. He saw it all now, the dream, the death, the desperation. And himself. Always at the centre. Always smiling. Always promising, always leaving.
And yet...
Still no record of where he came from. Still no history. Still no truth. Only his face, his name. Only the whispers in the walls.
And the unbearable, gnawing question burning a hole through the base of his soul:
"If I never knew this place...
Why does it feel like it was mine to lose?"
DeadMouth hovered silently beside him, lens dark, no jokes left. Only watching. Only mourning.
The Vault sealed behind them with a whisper, and the world began to end.
* * *
At first, it was almost beautiful.
The sand stirred in slow, hypnotic spirals, curling as if brushed by the invisible hand of some ancient, forgiving god. Black dunes shimmered beneath a dying sun, their surfaces rippling with flecks of dark glass, glinting like jewels in a world that had forgotten how to shine.
But then the world convulsed.
A moan rolled up from the core—a sound older than language, deeper than music. The ground vibrated, a resonance that split the earth and made the sky itself seem brittle. Mountains on the horizon folded in on themselves, turning to ash and memory in a heartbeat. Dry riverbeds yawned open, belching clouds of choking dust that tasted of rust and old sorrow. The violet sky hemorrhaged into sickly reds, bruised and veined, torn by cracks of emptiness.
DeadMouth spun wild, lens jittering, voice knifed with terror:
"This is fine. This is totally fine. Just a routine planetary implosion, folks, nothing to see—PAW, RUN, NOW!"
PAW needed no command. He sensed the death of the world in his circuits, and with a howl, bolted, claws digging deep into sand that was already beginning to fall away. Engines howled, burning with desperation. The ground peeled and crumbled behind them—black dunes sucked downward by invisible hands, opening into bottomless spirals of annihilation.
Adam clung to the saddle, vision blurring. They hurdled broken ridges where forests had once stood proud. They leapt over new chasms, catching the last gasps of dying valleys. Through skeletons of cities—spires dissolving, stone turned to black mist—PAW ran, unerring and tireless, a myth outrunning erasure.
Above, the sky tore open. Fractures of pure void scored the heavens, revealing the cosmic night pressing hard against the edges of reality. Every breath Adam took felt heavy—thick with ash, thick with memory. Every sound was muffled by the roaring of the planet's death.
The planet wasn't dying in centuries or decades.
It was dying now.
Minutes left. Maybe less.
DeadMouth shrieked:
"Adam! If we don't make that pod in thirty seconds, we're going to be intimate pen pals with the inside of a black hole! MOVE!"
No fear. No regret. Only action. Only forward.
PAW vaulted a final ridge, engines screaming, landing with bone-rattling force. Ahead, the landing pod: a silver blade in the chaos, haloed in dust.
A canyon split open between them and salvation—a wound gouged through the planet's flesh, wide as a god's mouth. The chasm pulsed with heat and darkness, breathing them in.
No time for doubt. Adam braced. PAW leapt, arc perfect, world falling away beneath them.
For a moment, they hung suspended, caught between the end of one world and the thin promise of another. Gravity paused, and the universe held its breath.
Then PAW crashed onto the docking ramp, claws tearing sparks from the metal. Adam was already moving, sprinting up the ramp as the ground behind them liquefied, folding into oblivion. DeadMouth streaked after, smoke pouring from his battered casing.
The pod's hatch gaped wide—a maw, or a doorway.
They tumbled inside, sealing the hatch with a slamming hiss that felt less like rescue and more like burial.
The engines fired, hurling them skyward. Adam's bones rattled. The pressure was immense, the sense of falling upward into nothing.
He watched through the viewport as the planet finished its surrender.
Towers toppled. Rivers flashed and vanished. Mountains curled into themselves and collapsed, exhausted.
The surface shrieked, folding into a vortex—a singularity of black sand, spinning, roaring, devouring everything that had ever mattered.
Memories. Names. Dreams. All gone.
The world winked out.
DeadMouth, voice small, the bravado gone, whispered behind him:
"Ashes to ashes, right?"
Adam closed his eyes and let the silence settle. For now, there was nothing left to say.
* * *
The Eon Veil hung above, silent as judgment—a blade of shadow against the last, torn colors of the sky. The pod locked into its berth with a shudder that echoed like thunder inside Adam's skull. Magnetic grapples snaked out, steel tendons dragging the battered shell home. Each docking arm trembled, hungry, desperate, not just for metal, but for the life it carried.
Gravity lurched. The pod jerked—once, twice, as if it might break loose. Then a final, thunderous clang. The world went still. The hatch blew wide with a rush of recycled air, dusted with black sand, the scent of scorched stone and death still clinging to Adam's skin.
He stumbled into the hangar, boots slipping on polished alloy. Every step left a trail of dark grains, ash from a world that no longer existed.
DeadMouth hovered at ankle height, his lens dimmed to a mournful blue. Not even a quip. Only the whisper of rotors and the faintest tremor in his synthetic voice.
PAW followed, no longer a predator, but a wounded thing. His sleek frame shook, paws leaving smudges of soot. It felt like even the machine was grieving.
Adam tried to breathe, but the air tasted wrong. Too clean. Too thin. He took another step...and the ship shifted.
The Viewing Chamber unfolded around him, seamless, cathedral-wide. No doors. No warning. The Veil wanted him here, needed him to witness.
He stood beneath the dome, glass that wasn't glass arching above, swallowing him in a sea of silent stars. He looked out at where the planet had been.
It was gone.
Not broken. Not burning.
Gone. Obliterated. The world he'd just fled was now a black absence, a wound gnawed into space, a single, hungry void ringed by a ragged halo of vapor and debris. All the colors of life—sand, sky, forest, memory—erased with the precision of a surgeon, leaving only the scar. It was as if hope itself had been scraped out of the universe.
Where laughter once rang, where families had loved and fought and lost and dreamed—only darkness spun, indifferent and eternal.
A smear of blackness on the tapestry of creation.
Adam fell. Not dramatic. Just knees buckling, as if the ship itself had taken the strength from his bones. He crumpled to the cold, perfect floor, forehead pressed to steel, feeling the vibration of engines, the pulse of ancient memory.
DeadMouth hovered behind him, silent, lens reflecting nothing but Adam's own ruin.
No jokes. No distraction. No rescue from the fact that sometimes, there are no right words.
The ship hummed, deep and slow. A heartbeat? A warning? Maybe just the ache of memory folding in on itself.
Adam's voice cracked, barely a whisper:
"I was supposed to save them."
The words sank into the silence, devoured by the void as surely as the world itself.
The Eon Veil's engines pulsed, low and slow—a sound that could be sorrow, could be hope, could be the first murmur of a story not quite ended.
Adam knelt in that sacred hush, the dead planet still burning in his eyes.
He didn't move. He barely breathed.
Sometimes, the only thing left is to bear witness.