The moment the shard sealed to his coreplate, Nahr fell.
Not physically.
The ground remained. His posture held.
But something inside him had slipped free — or maybe sunk deeper.
His memory stilled.
His weight doubled.
And then the world remade itself.
He now stood in open ruins.
Crushed stone beneath his feet.
Collapsed segments of a vault wall rose around him, angled like blades pointing at a sky that didn't flicker.
He exhaled instinctively — and paused.
There was air.
Not the filtered, recycled compression of the Hall.
Not the sour-silt drag of the Glooming trenches.
This air was weightless, wide.
Clean.
Almost artificial.
He inhaled again.
There was no purpose in it.
Cores did not need breath.
But this was part of the trial.
And so the world gave him air.
Fresh.
Unnaturally so.
It made the silence more noticeable.
More eerie.
No buzz.
No wind.
No hum of machineflow.
Only that perfect, still weight pressing down.
Nahr stepped forward.
His Galieya remained locked to his back, but it vibrated faintly — as if acknowledging the shift.
He was on a plateau of fractured architecture.
A dead trench stretched forward.
Cracks ran through its sides like dried veins.
Ancient stone.
Bleached bone-metal.
No motion.
Yet.
To his left, another Core was slumped near the edge of a fractured column.
No signal.
No sound.
No mark.
Its chassis had collapsed inward, its plating peeled open like a flower.
Dead?
No.
Not dead.
Just abandoned.
One of the trial projections — a construct fixed in place to feed the setting.
He walked past it.
Kept his weight low.
Step by step.
Each movement echoing slightly wrong.
Like the trench couldn't remember what sound was supposed to feel like.
A shimmer appeared across the corner of his vision.
He turned.
Another Core.
Smaller.
Frame scratched.
It was crawling across the edge of a flattened causeway.
Dragging something behind it.
Its Galieya.
Snapped halfway through.
Nahr blinked — or whatever Cores did when perception narrowed.
The figure was gone.
No trace.
Only scrape lines in the dust where it had dragged itself moments earlier.
A memory flicker.
Not real.
But not false.
Not entirely.
Nahr stepped forward and opened his internal prompt.
He hadn't checked since the shard merged.
Now was the time.
[CORE IDENT: NAHR]
[STATUS: ACTIVE]
[CONFIGURATION: STATION-BEARER]
[GALIEYA: BOUND – CLASS STANDARD]
[ATTRIBUTES:]
• [Weight-Tied]
• [False Echo Residue]
• [Latent Input – Unknown]
He paused.
Three attributes.
No description assigned.
No color data.
Just identifiers.
And names that didn't explain anything.
But the first one —
[Weight-Tied]
— he felt it.
Already.
His movements were cleaner.
Sharper.
But they took more out of him.
As if every step demanded intention.
No wasted motion.
No accident.
Only burden, refined.
Another step.
A flicker.
Ahead now, five Cores marched single-file through the trench channel.
Uniform.
Unbroken.
None turned.
None looked.
Each bore a Galieya — some dented, one wrapped in cloth.
Nahr followed at a distance.
No chain.
But it felt like one.
The silence stretched.
Time passed.
Or didn't.
The trench darkened.
Though there was no sun to fall.
Only tone.
Only color.
Only memory.
One of the Cores ahead stopped.
Its shoulders slouched.
Another paused beside it.
Reached.
Supported.
Neither moved for a long while.
Then both collapsed into static, disintegrating to light fragments that scattered upward like dust caught in a shaft of false sun.
Nahr said nothing.
Did nothing.
Only walked.
He was used to silence.
But this silence had volume.
A density.
It pressed against his outer shell like pressure from water too deep to rise through.
He wondered, faintly, if this was why his Latent Input had triggered.
Some passive detection?
He would not know.
Not yet.
He began to descend again — a sloped path leading down from the trench into a bowl-shaped ruin.
Scorched stone lined its outer lip.
Ash pooled near the center.
Shapes lingered at the edge.
Figures.
Cores?
Not moving.
Not exactly.
They shimmered in and out — sometimes tall, sometimes wide, sometimes collapsed.
None made a sound.
He passed them.
They did not react.
Perhaps they weren't meant to.
Perhaps they were echoes of something not yet repeated.
A glint of motion caught his focus.
Far above the trench line, at the ridge of a crumbled column, something moved.
Not a Core.
Not in form.
But not anything else either.
Too far to see clearly.
Too quiet to hear.
But it moved with rhythm.
Deliberate.
And then it disappeared behind the broken wall.
The air changed.
The ash stirred.
The ruin exhaled — faint, slow.
Something had arrived.
Or had been watching.
Or had simply decided to exist.
Nahr stepped to the side of the path.
Pressed one palm to the Galieya.
Let the connection sync.
The lance vibrated.
Awaiting command.
Awaiting purpose.
The silence had ended.
What came next would not be trial.
It would be confirmation.
Of the mark.
Of the burden.
Of whether the silence he carried could stand up to something older than noise.
And in the distance, the tremor came again.
One footfall.
Then another.
And the ruin remembered movement.