"Memory is not what we keep; it's what refuses to let us go."
The chamber was colder now, shadows stretching long across the obsidian floor as Adam entered, Sael'Ri at his side. The elders circled Athrion like moons locked in the gravity of tradition, their faces lined with suspicion and old pride. The pillars, mist, stone, and living wood seemed to lean away from Adam, as if afraid of what he might bring with him from the dark.
Athrion regarded him, trying to hold his gaze steady. The silence that followed was not reverent, but brittle.
Adam didn't bother with ritual. He stepped to the heart of the chamber, voice level, eyes unblinking.
"I walked Asiris," he said. "I saw what your history refuses to name. I saw the Severing not as fire and war, but as forgetting. I saw your ancestors turn away from their own kin, saw the bridges rot from neglect, not flame. I saw hands reaching for one another, yours and Verios's, pulled apart by something you never questioned. And I saw what happened next: silence. Not unity broken, but unity denied. You let yourselves become strangers, and called it prophecy."
A hiss rippled through the elders. One, robed in copper flame, rose, voice sharp as glass:
"Blasphemy! You dare speak against the memory of Ithariel? You come from the stars, ignorant, savage..."
Adam didn't flinch. He watched them: every twitch, every flicker of the eyes. He saw belief, not malice. Sincerity, not scheme.
"You believe what you say," Adam replied, softer now. "Every word. Every curse. I see it in your faces. But belief is not truth. And memory is not justice."
Another elder, silver-haired and bright-eyed, spat: "The Mist withers because Verios poisoned it! This is known, carved in the roots, sung by the ancestors!"
Adam shook his head. "I saw the Mist retreat because it was abandoned. I saw bridges die because you stopped crossing them. No monster came. No invasion. You made yourselves orphans and called it survival."
Athrion's hands trembled at his sides. Sael'Ri's eyes burned, but she said nothing.
A third elder, bark-skinned, ancient, growled: "Enough. You desecrate this chamber with doubt. You carry darkness within you."
Adam finally smiled, a cold, tired thing. "Maybe I do. Maybe it's all that's left to carry, when the truth is locked away and called heresy. You want answers? Go back to Asiris. Look into the Mist yourselves, if you dare."
The chamber erupted: shouts, denouncements, old men and women clawing at dogma, desperate to silence the voice that had cut their world open. But Adam was already turning away.
He walked from the dais, Sael'Ri falling into step behind him, neither pausing to hear the curses thrown at their backs.
The doors of the chamber parted without sound. Adam stepped into the city's luminous dusk, leaving the elders to argue over the ashes of their certainty, and for the first time since arriving, he felt something almost like freedom.
Sael'Ri glanced at him, voice trembling. "You didn't change their minds."
Adam shook his head, eyes fixed on the spiraling city below. "That wasn't the point. I only needed them to listen. The truth isn't here, Sael'Ri. But we're done asking permission to find it."
And with that, they vanished into the city's living night, searching for answers no prophecy dared to keep.
* * *
DeadMouth spun a nervous circle, sensors flickering orange and blue. "So what's the plan, boss? I need targets. I need a pep talk. I need, honestly, I just need a drink, but I'll settle for a little righteous violence!"
PAW didn't move, eyes narrowed in that feline way, tail flicking once with mechanical precision. He stretched, slow and deliberate, then yawned, revealing rows of perfect, polished alloy teeth. For all his feline indolence, there was a shimmer beneath the surface, a readiness, a coiled spring waiting for the moment to snap.
Adam barely acknowledged them, gaze distant, jaw set. "We're not here to fight, DeadMouth. Not yet. I want answers. The truth's hiding in shadows, and I'm done waiting for permission to find it."
Sael'Ri folded her arms, her silhouette framed in the city's pulsing light. "That was expected, your anger, your words. But still, you moved them, Adam. Even if they won't admit it. They're scared."
Adam glanced at her, voice low, almost rough: "Fear's not enough, Sael'Ri. Not when it's choking the truth. I saw it in the Mist; what happened to your world wasn't war. It was silence. Division. Something feeding on your memory, your unity. We need to know what that is."
Sael'Ri pressed a hand to her chest, eyes troubled, voice trembling as if she fought a battle within her own soul. "There's something... something I can't touch. Like a shadow in my thoughts. A darkness older than any of our stories. It pulls at me, and every time I try to see it, it slips away, like the memory of a wound you refuse to remember. I thought it was just me. But now I think... It's all of us. All of Ithariel. Something's missing."
PAW finally rose, silent as a rumor, coming to stand between them, eyes reflecting the city's shifting hues. Adam reached down, resting a hand on the great panther's head. PAW leaned into it, just a little, his metal body warm from the city's light.
DeadMouth hovered closer, voice softer than usual. "You want me to dig through the records? Try to find a ghost in the machine? Or do I just stand here and look intimidating? Because, full disclosure, I'm only intimidating to furniture and unpatched servers."
Adam almost smiled. "Keep your eyes open. Something tells me we're not the only ones looking for answers."
Sael'Ri looked up at the night, the city lights flickering against her pale skin. "The answers are buried. Not just in Asiris, but in the places we fear to look. If we keep asking, keep remembering, maybe we'll finally see what's been hidden."
Adam nodded, a spark of resolve igniting in his eyes. "Then we dig. Until the world gives up its secrets. Or until it destroys us for trying."
DeadMouth's lights brightened. "That's the spirit! I mean, sure, existential doom and cosmic secrets, but hey, at least we'll go down swinging."
PAW rumbled softly, a sound of agreement or warning.
The four of them set off into the shifting night of Caelyth'Varn, toward secrets that even the gods had tried to bury. For the first time, Adam felt the darkness behind the city's beauty, the shadow that watched and waited. Whatever had broken this world was still out there. And it was not done.
"Captain." NYX's voice knifed through the air: cool, crisp, laced with urgency.
Adam tapped his comm, gaze fixed on the horizon. "Go ahead, NYX."
"I'm reading a fluctuating energy field two hundred meters southeast, minimal interference, but highly anomalous."
Adam arched a brow. "Anomalous how? We're on a planet made of miracles, NYX. You'll have to be more specific."
There was a static-laced hesitation, as if NYX was double-checking her own sensors. Then: "Because, Captain... the energy signature is identical to yours. Down to the last quantum resonance. Whatever's out there, it's carrying your imprint."
Adam felt his skin tighten, a chill running down his back. "You're telling me something out there is... wearing my soul?"
"Not quite, Captain. It isn't mimicking you. It is you, or at least, it's a piece you left behind. Or lost. Or... something that was taken."
Adam narrowed his eyes, tension spiking through his veins like a silent alarm.
"My energy? Are you sure?" His voice was quiet, but each syllable fell like a stone.
NYX responded, a shade more urgent: "Confirmed. The field's signature matches the anomaly left on your neural trace after you exited Asiris. But it's not static, Captain. It's moving. Like it's... searching for you."
DeadMouth twitched, orange lights flickering nervously. "Well, that's not unsettling at all. It's fine, just fine, definitely not the plot of every haunted ship story ever. Want me to blast it, interrogate it, or hide behind PAW and act tough?"
PAW, of course, barely blinked. If a panther could sigh with dignity, he did.
Adam shook his head, jaw tight. "No one's blasting anything, not until I see it for myself."
Sael'Ri stepped closer, her eyes haunted, searching Adam's face. "Your energy? How can that be?"
Adam felt a tremor of something he couldn't name—recognition, maybe, or dread. "Maybe we left more behind in the Mist than we thought. Or maybe... something followed me out."
He looked up, voice steady, command returning to his posture. "NYX, location. Now."
A faint blue waypoint flickered into view, hovering at the edge of his vision, down a winding crystalline path that bent out of sight, deep into the shadowed gardens that ringed Caelyth'Varn.
Adam nodded to the others. "Stay close. If it's mine, I want it back, or I want to know what stole it."
DeadMouth straightened, plasma ports twitching with anticipation. "On your six, Captain. If it's an evil doppelgänger, I'm aiming for the knees."
Sael'Ri matched Adam's stride, the resolve in her bearing echoing his own. "Whatever we find, you won't face it alone."
PAW melted into the darkness beside them, a ghost among the living, eyes glimmering with an impossible light.
Together, they moved toward the source, footsteps barely whispering against the luminous path, the night around them breathing, waiting, as if the whole city was listening for the truth that walked in Adam's shadow.
* * *
They reached what might have been the edge of a mountain, or just as easily, a temporary hill, because on Ithariel, the land was never content to keep its promises. Valleys rose, cliffs vanished, and forests rearranged themselves when no one was looking. The world below their feet was a restless dream, never the same shape twice.
Sael'Ri's voice was low, almost reverent: "As you've noticed, Ithariel doesn't believe in certainty. Paths change with every breath. Be careful. The way in is never the way out."
A jagged cave yawned before them, half-formed from shifting stone and mist, the signal from NYX's sensors pulsing like a heartbeat from somewhere deep inside.
Adam felt the Veil's pulse flicker up his spine, but he didn't hesitate. He stepped forward, into shadow, into memory, into whatever the planet had waiting.
DeadMouth hovered just behind, his usual bravado running thin. "Oh, perfect. A cave. You know, nothing traumatic ever happens in caves. No existential revelations, no ancient horrors. Just spiders the size of your self-doubt and heartbreak on tap. Brother, if this turns into another 'walk toward the unknown' moment, you're buying the next round of therapy, understood?"
PAW slunk beside them, silent as moonlight, tail flicking with curiosity or warning.
Adam's lips twitched in a ghost of a grin, but his eyes stayed hard."Stay close. This isn't just another cave. It's something waiting to become."
The darkness beckoned, shifting, alive, promising nothing, and maybe everything.
The cave didn't begin. It arrived, breathing open, swallowing light, the entrance curling like the yawn of some ancient beast, freshly woken and hungry for secrets. Mist clung to the walls, pearlescent and cold, beading in veins and droplets as if the mountain itself sweated memories. The air was thick with stone, with old earth, and beneath it all a tang of something untranslatable, an ancient flavor that sent Adam's nerves singing with nameless dread.
Sael'Ri stepped into the darkness first, her form still and composed, but Adam could see the tension radiating through her posture. Behind, DeadMouth hovered in tight, agitated ellipses, all optics wide, panels flexing in miniature shudders, while PAW moved low and sinuous, a shadow stretched over deeper shadow, paws nearly silent, eyes two cold green lanterns.
The cave narrowed, walls stippled with what appeared to be smooth black stones, until Adam blinked and realized they blinked back. Eyes. Hundreds, then thousands, some wide as fists, others no more than pinpricks. Every iris, a whirlpool, color caught in sorrow. They watched, and in their depths Adam saw flickers of faces, some almost his own, some no one's at all, all strangers that felt like home.
DeadMouth did a nervous pirouette, lens flickering. "Okay, that's enough existential dread for one day. If these things start blinking in Morse code, I'm updating my résumé to 'interior lighting fixture.'"
Adam moved deeper, the air thickening, memories folding and refolding around every heartbeat. The eyes pulled, a gentle, insistent gravity, showing not monsters, but moments: a mother's soft laugh, a child racing through rain, the warmth of home before the door slammed shut.
Then, center of the cavern, a shape waited. A boy, maybe seven. Pale, spectral, dark eyes, luminous and haunted. He wore mismatched Earth clothes, a patched sweater, and threadbare jeans. His smile was both an invitation and a warning.
Boy: "You lost something, didn't you?"
Adam's pulse skipped. He didn't know the boy, but the feeling was there, a longing, old as longing itself. Hope before disappointment. Love before it was lost.
The boy's face shimmered, melting, reforming, Sael'Ri, then DeadMouth, then PAW, each face almost right, but never quite, the voices a chorus of fractured echoes.
Elusio: "So many faces. So many masks. Which one is yours, Adam? Which one hurts the most?"
The air shivered. Every eye on the wall snapped shut. Darkness crashed down, thick and suffocating, the world a single held breath.
A wind slithered over Adam's skin. From cracks in the rock, the creatures poured, dark as regret, slick as oil, shaped like felines carved from shadow. Each bore a single staring eye in the center of its skull. Their jaws gaped, toothless, a perfect void, and the sound that emerged was less a growl than a sucking absence, like identity being torn from bone.
Sael'Ri changed. The shift was terrifying, sublime: her white, ethereal robes flickered, dissolving into plates of living shadow. Armor grew across her body, sculpted, faceted, a midnight carapace rimmed in flickering violet. Her face vanished behind a helm, only her eyes remaining, twin purple fires, alive with the same alien rage Adam had seen in her guards the day they'd met. In her hands, a bow appeared, not built but born, energy coiling from her palms, drawn and notched into arrows of pure, singing light.
She moved like a legend rewritten. Each arrow let fly burst not in sound, but in a rain of aerys, golden memory-motes, scattering through the cave, searing through shadow beasts. Wherever they landed, memories released, snatches of laughter, the smell of bread, a lover's whisper, before dissolving into mist.
DeadMouth, for a moment, only stared, wide-eyed, until panic kicked survival into invention. His new chassis flared with light, rays stabbing out from his shell, wild and dazzling. Where the beams landed, the creatures slowed, as if light itself dragged at their essence. "Look at me! I'm a disco ball with a death wish! But hey, if it works..."
PAW became the storm. His body rippled, refracting the faintest ambient light. He melted into the air, a blur, not gone but invisible, the world bending around him. Where shadow-creatures leapt, they simply vanished mid-arc, shredded by invisible claws, their single eyes snuffed out like candle wicks. The air tasted of ozone and primal fear.
Adam, though, was the center of the maelstrom. Ziphindrel blazed alive in his hand, the blade singing with a voice that was part memory, part promise. He moved through the chaos, every strike precise, a dance of death and redemption, each step a memory reclaimed, every cut scattering motes of golden light.
The cave became a symphony of violence and memory. Sael'Ri's arrows thundered, lighting up the walls. DeadMouth's beams swept through shadows. PAW vanished, reappeared, vanished again, the air behind him thick with the scent of annihilated nightmares. And Adam—Adam was the axis, Ziphindrel a beacon, his every movement burning with purpose.
Then, in the heart of the battle, the mimic, Elusio, shifted again, its forms blurring, stretching, and condensing. Adam saw Ariana's face in the gloom, her eyes brimming with the memory of hope, her lips trembling with words never spoken.
The glyph on Adam's forearm burst into blue flame. His hand rose, unbidden, spirals of fire licking up his wrist. A spear of light erupted, pinning Elusio mid-shift, freezing it between a thousand faces.
Every eye on the wall dissolved. The darkness rushed in, thick, absolute. The creatures collapsed to dust, their forms dissolving into a storm of aerys, memory raining down like gold, flooding the floor, sinking into Adam's skin, Sael'Ri's armor, PAW's invisible outline, DeadMouth's burning lights.
And in the aftermath, a single boy remained. Alone, trembling, reaching for Adam, hand to hand, light to light. The glyph pulsed, and Adam fell backward, inward, downward...
Into a flood of childhood.
A mother's face, soft and laughing, haloed in sunlight. A song in the dark, sweet and sharp. The scrape of shoes on wood, the smell of dust and old books. Himself, not a hero, not a survivor, just a boy, afraid, yearning, innocent, unknown even to himself.
For the first time, Adam remembered what was stolen. And what it meant to have been whole.
He tried to claw himself free of the vision—palms covering his face, forehead pressed to the damp stone, teeth gritted against the scream rising from his chest. It wasn't a memory. It was possession. A tidal wave of being that battered every scar open, leaving only the raw ache of innocence lost.
Adam knelt in the center of the cave, body trembling, breath staccato. The glyph on his forearm wasn't just glowing now, it was burning, searing blue-white light that spilled from his skin, flooding the cavern in a sudden, impossible daylight.
Sael'Ri lunged, grabbing his arm, not with fear, but with conviction, grounding him. Her fingers closed around the wrist, the glyph's radiance casting their faces in shifting halos. "Adam, breathe. Breathe. You're here. You're not lost, not now..."
But Adam was lost. The walls themselves became a living theatre, rolling, flickering, like celluloid strung across eternity. Every image a fragment of the boy he had been: Little Adam running barefoot through summer grass, laughter bubbling out, chasing a paper kite beneath a sky that had never known sorrow. A mother's gentle hands in his hair. The sound of rain on old glass. Peace so deep it ached.
The cave, once a mouth of fear, was now a gallery of longing. Sael'Ri's breath caught, her eyes wide, violet and ancient, drinking in scenes she could never have lived, yet somehow knew. Unconditional love, that ache so pure it felt alien, yet was the root of every soul.
She pressed her hand harder to Adam's forearm, sharing the surge, letting the current of memory bleed into her own marrow. For a moment, their minds touched, not as strangers, not as survivors, but as children of longing. For her, the shape of love was different, but the ache was identical. The absence, the yearning to be whole.
Adam, gasping, met her eyes. Tears streaked down his cheeks, silent, stunned. "It was real," he whispered, voice cracked and thin. "All of it. I was... I was whole. Once."
Sael'Ri's grip tightened, her voice trembling, "You are still whole. Pieces are just... finding each other again."
On the walls, the film of memory rolled on. Laughter. Loss. A child's first fall, and a mother's kiss to heal it. The first taste of betrayal. The first time, hope became silence.
The glyph pulsed once more, hard, casting their shadows long and strange. The cave inhaled, the images brightening, sharper, clearer, like the universe itself could not look away.
And in that moment, as the last frame flickered, peace, love, happiness. Adam understood. This was what Elusio had stolen, what the shadows tried to consume. The unbroken self, the original memory, the seed of becoming.
He clung to Sael'Ri's arm, and she to his, their connection holding him in the now, anchoring him to the only truth that mattered:
What was lost could be remembered. What was taken could be reclaimed. And in the burning daylight of memory, even the deepest caves could become home.
* * *
Adam turned his face toward Elusio, his name now felt through his marrow."How many, Elusio?" He whispered, standing up, eyes fixed on the creature suspended in thin air.
Elusio, still suspended by the glyph's power, wavered, his form blurring and stretching until it settled into Adam's own face, only crueler, lips curled in a sly, knowing smile. He spoke with Adam's voice, but every word rang with centuries of theft.
Elusio (as Adam): "Oh, Adam. How many? That's a curious question. Do you really want to know, or do you only want to be the first to ask it?"
Adam's fists clenched. The daylight of the glyph flared, cutting twin shadows across the cave floor. "Answer me, Elusio. How many lives have you hollowed out? How many souls did you steal, just to watch them forget who they were?"
Elusio's eyes glittered, too wide, too empty.
Elusio: "Souls, memories, dreams... You speak as if they're separate, as if there's a tally, as if suffering can be counted in neat little rows. But Adam, memory is a river, one drink and you taste every mouth that ever thirsted. One child's fear, and I can feast for a hundred years."
He leaned closer, the mockery sharpened, his smile stretching at the edges: "Could you count the grains of sand in your own nightmares, Adam? Could you count the times you've looked in a mirror and forgotten your own eyes? Sometimes I think I've only ever tasted one. One original dream, cracked into pieces, divided, multiplied, passed from tongue to tongue, world to world."
He spread Adam's arms in a mock benediction, voice silk and venom: "We are all made of fragments, aren't we? Little losses, little thefts. I only help the process along." He grinned, and the boy's shape flickered beneath the surface, then Ariana's face, then Sael'Ri's, then back to Adam, each flicker more painful than the last.
Adam's voice was low, shaking with rage: "You're a thief. A parasite. You hollow out the hearts of worlds and wear their skins for sport. I remember now. I remember what you took from me."
Elusio, unfazed, only shrugged: "That's the game, isn't it? What's a memory worth, if not for the pain it leaves behind? Besides, Adam... isn't remembering the cruelest thing of all?"
He laughed then, a sound that bounced off the stone, echoing in every open eye.
The glyph on Adam's forearm pulsed a deep, arterial red, its glow started erasing the creature, swallowing the last of Elusio, pixel by pixel, face dissolving to a ghost's grin that never stopped watching. For a long moment, Adam and his own reflection stared each other down, neither blinking, neither yielding, until even the memory of a smile was swept away into nothingness.
Elusio grinned as the red light licked away his form, eyes never leaving Adam's. "Remember me, Adam. I remembered all of YOU. You owe me."
He winked, a gesture almost gentle, almost grateful.
And then he was gone, swallowed by the glyph's burning erasure, leaving nothing but silence and a debt written in the marrow of memory.
The eyes on the walls flickered one more time before disappearing completely. A rumble started low in the stone, at first a murmur, then a shuddering groan as the cave seemed to exhale, the air thick with dust and the tang of burnt ozone.
Sael'Ri: "If you don't want to be buried alive, I say we move. Now!"
She didn't wait. She grabbed Adam's arm, her own form still flickering with the last echoes of her war-mode, a silhouette of steel and light, eyes burning violet.
PAW darted ahead, a streak of liquid shadow, barely visible except for the shimmer of sand and stone torn up in his wake. DeadMouth spun into action, emitting a strobing beam that mapped every crack, every shifting stone.
DeadMouth: "Literally the light at the end of the tunnel, salvation! Remind me to write a poem about this, cos weird doesn't do it justice. 'Ode to Running from Our Own Damn Minds', first draft, coming soon!"
The cave shifted behind them, a beast closing its jaw. Every footfall was followed by a collapse of stone, a rain of dust, and the fading afterimage of eyes that refused to die easy. They ran, dodging falling shards, breath tearing at their throats, each heartbeat measured in aftershocks.
The flickering daylight ahead was no longer just an exit, it was a lifeline.
Adam glanced back only once, enough to see the last vestige of red from the glyph paint the cave's walls like ancient blood, sealing the past behind them.
They burst out into the open just as the cave's entrance collapsed inward, erasing any trace that it had ever been more than a scar in the mountain's skin.
* * *
They stumble out into the raw, blinding light, lungs burning, every muscle strung tight from the run. For a moment, the world is a smear, sunlight, dust, the pounding echo of the cave's collapse behind them. But it's not relief that settles, not victory. It's uncertainty.
Sael'Ri wipes dust from her face, eyes narrowed, scanning the horizon, yet her gaze keeps drifting back to the cave's sealed mouth, as if her soul hasn't left the shadows.
Adam stands silent, fist clenched around the lingering heat of the glyph. He feels it, a tug in his chest, a whispering itch at the back of his mind. "Did we... get it all?" he murmurs, voice hoarse.
DeadMouth, usually first to break the tension with a joke, hovers quietly, his lights dimmed. "I scanned, but... something's off. Like static on a forgotten frequency. Have you ever got that feeling, boss? Like you left the house with the stove still on, only the stove is reality, and it's set to incinerate?"
PAW pads silently at Adam's side, nose pointed at the cave, tail swishing with nervous energy. Even a machine feels the pull. There's more down there. Something unfinished.
Sael'Ri, voice low: "We walked through our memories, but not all our shadows. There are stories still echoing in that dark. I feel them, pulling at me, at us. We didn't just miss something, Adam. Something's waiting for us to notice what we left behind."
They all feel it, the irresistible compulsion to return. Not for closure. For understanding. For the kind of truth that doesn't let you breathe until you've choked on it. But for now, the answers they received had to be enough.
For a moment, none of them spoke, each one haunted by fragments they couldn't name, breaths ragged, skin alive with new scars.
Then, at last, DeadMouth piped up, voice shaking but proud: "Not to be dramatic, but next time someone says 'Let's go on a spirit quest,' I vote we stay home and bake bread."
Sael'Ri managed a laugh, brittle but real.
Adam, hand still glowing faintly, just watched the sky, knowing he'd left something behind, and taken something with him, whether he wanted to or not.