The return to Arc-4 was not announced.
Riven stood in silence as the transport skimmed low through the smoke-tinted clouds, the city ruins emerging from below like the exposed bones of some colossal corpse. The sky hung heavy with bronze light, the haze too thick for the sun to pass through.
The ship made no sound.
Inside the vessel, it was only him and silence. No escort. No questions. Just a silent return.
They hadn't told him why they were sending him back.
Only that he would know when the time came.
Riven tightened the strap across his chest. The armorweave fits better now. He moved differently in it. The Traceform had changed something—his balance, his reaction time, and the way he processed light. It wasn't dramatic. Not yet.
But it was beginning.
The ship broke through the last cloud layer, descending toward the outer edge of the ruined arcology. Craters stretched for kilometers in all directions, interwoven with the collapsed infrastructure of forgotten civilizations.
This was where it had started.
This was where he would return.
The vessel slowed, hovering above a rusted skybridge that jutted out over a half-sunken district. No one was there to greet him. No signals. No escort.
The hatch hissed open.
Riven stepped out into the wind.
… [Scene Break]
The walk down into the ruins was slow.
He passed through old checkpoints—scav stations now overgrown with metal rot and melted streetlights. The Corestorm had passed, but the afterburn still lingered in the air. Every breath tasted faintly of copper and static.
His boots crunched over glass.
The route he took wasn't marked. But he remembered it.
Back through the breach.
Back to the place where he'd first touched the Traceform.
But it wasn't the same.
The ground had shifted. The elevator shaft was collapsed, and the air buzzed with sensor pulses. He crouched near the edge and placed his palm against the dirt.
The Traceform pulsed.
Faint, but there.
Something deeper was calling.
He moved toward the west quadrant of the sector. Past the scorched remains of transport tracks, under the arched ribs of a destroyed highway loop. The noise of drones echoed somewhere far behind—but they weren't watching him.
Not yet.
He reached the Veiled Gate just before sunset.
It wasn't a structure. Not exactly.
It was a point in space—an absence where something should have been. A section of the ruins where vision bent slightly, like heat distortion. He wouldn't have noticed it before.
But now?
Now, he felt it.
A breath in reverse.
The Traceform pulsed again.
Riven stepped forward, hand out.
The air rippled.
And something opened.
Not a doorway. Not a portal.
A veil.
He stepped through.
… [Scene Break]
The world on the other side was quiet.
Dark walls stretched up around him, not made of metal, but some obsidian-like substance that shimmered when he moved. Gravity was lighter here. The air is colder.
The hallway curved gently downward.
He walked.
No lights. No torches. But the walls pulsed faintly with bioluminescent veins. Not plant. Not machine. Something in between.
He passed murals carved into the surface—symbols in a language he didn't know yet felt like he'd forgotten. Fragments of a dream too old to recall, etched in geometric spirals and fractured orbits.
At the bottom of the hallway, the chamber opened.
Massive.
Silent.
At its center stood a spire of black crystal, wrapped in coils of transparent metal. The shape pulsed like a heartbeat.
Around it, machines floated in the air—motionless, their surfaces smooth and untouched by dust.
The Traceform inside him screamed.
He stepped forward—and the chamber reacted.
Lights ignited overhead in silent flares. Symbols bloomed in midair, scrolling through the air like projections, yet cast no shadows. Something beneath the spire began to shift—mechanical limbs folding outward like petals.
And then the voice returned.
This time, not inside his head.
It came from the spire.
Low, ancient, echoing through the walls themselves.
"You carry the wound."
Riven flinched.
"You carry the thread. You carry the gate."
The voice pulsed with static. Emotionless. Inhuman.
"You are the fracture."
He tried to speak—but the words caught in his throat.
"You have entered the Vault of the Forgotten Core."
The phrase struck him like thunder. His chest tightened.
The spire pulsed again.
"You may leave now. Or remain. But if you remain, you cannot turn back."
Riven stared at the spire.
The Traceform inside him was vibrating violently now.
A second heartbeat. A second mind.
But not separate.
Entangled.
He took a breath.
And stepped forward.
The moment he crossed the threshold, the world broke apart.
Light poured from the walls. The chamber twisted. Gravity reversed.
And a flood of memory not his own surged through him—
A sky collapsing.
A war lost before it began.
A child with no name stared into a mirror that reflected a world long dead.
Then—
Silence.
He dropped to his knees.
His breath came ragged.
He was still himself.
But something had changed.
A shift behind his eyes. A new weight in his bones.
The Traceform had grown.
He looked up.
The spire was quiet again.
But the veil behind him was gone.
And he knew—
There would be no going back.
Would you like me to begin Chapter Six: The Pulse Remains next?