The light from the data slate was a sterile, unforgiving blue, painting the spartan confines of storage bay C-4 in the colours of a ghost. It wasn't a screen. The words hovered in the air, formed from the light itself, shimmering with an energy that felt impossibly ancient. Kael read them again. And again. The letters didn't change.
Subject: CH-07, 'Lyra.'Base genome… a canis lupus……potential for sentience.
The words were a key turning in a lock he never knew existed. The world didn't just shift; it fractured. The floor fell away, leaving him adrift in a cold, starless void.
Canis lupus. The old name. The pre-Fall name for the wolf.
He thought of the Shard Hound. Not the swirling cloud of its Echo, but the beast itself. The liquid grace. The pack instincts he'd felt as a phantom limb. The memory—that beautiful, agonizingly peaceful memory of a sky he'd never seen, with two pale moons hanging over a silent, crystalline forest.
It wasn't his memory. It was hers.
Lyra.
The name was a physical blow. It landed in his chest, right where the cold, parasitic energy of the Echo had taken root. It wasn't a parasite. Not anymore. It was a tomb. The beast he had been fighting, the rage he had been caging, the power he had been trying to tame… it had a name. It had been a living thing. A wolf, twisted and broken and weaponized by the very Ancients he'd once admired.
The official history was a lie. The Fall wasn't just hubris. It was an atrocity. The Chimeras weren't a plague that had crawled from the wastes. They were a scream that had never ended.
He looked at his hands, bathed in the slate's ghostly light. He could feel the thrumming in his bones, the familiar signature of the Hound's Echo. Only it wasn't the Hound's anymore. It was Lyra's. He had absorbed the soul of a science experiment. The price of their ambition, the cost of their failure—it was living inside him. He was the ruins of the receipt.
The thought made him sick. He scrambled off the cot, the data slate falling to the concrete with a soft thud, its light winking out. He retched, but nothing came up. Just dry, shuddering heaves that wracked his body. He wasn't a Frame User. He was a graverobber who had swallowed the ghost.
The cool metal of the infirmary pass Jax had given him felt heavy in his pocket. He needed to see something real. Something that wasn't two hundred years old and steeped in sin. He needed to see Lina.
The walk through the enclave was a journey through a different kind of tomb. The hum of the emergency power was a low moan of grief. The faces of the work crews patching the walls were hollowed-out masks of exhaustion. This was the fresh wound. The horror he had just uncovered was the septic, festering infection deep beneath the scar tissue of their world. He felt like a man from another time, walking among people who had no idea how deep the rot truly went.
Lina was awake, propped against a stack of pillows. The complex medical brace on her leg looked like a piece of salvaged, brutalist art. She was pale, tired, but the spark in her eyes was a steady flame. It was the most beautiful thing Kael had seen all day.
"Kae," she said, her voice a little stronger than he remembered. "You look... different."
He pulled up a stool, the metal legs scraping against the floor. He didn't know what to say. The last time he was here, he was a boy playing with fire, focused on his own survival. Now, that felt like a selfish, childish preoccupation.
"Training's hard," he mumbled, the lie tasting like ash.
She watched him, her gaze sharp and analytical. She was a technician too, just a better one with people. "It's not that," she said softly. "You were… frantic before. Like you were trying not to fly apart. Now…" She trailed off, searching for the word. "Now you're just still. It's scarier, actually."
He managed a weak smile. It didn't reach his eyes. "Sorry."
He wanted to tell her. He wanted to unload the impossible weight of it, to show her the glowing words on the slate and watch her pragmatic mind make sense of them. But he couldn't. What would he say? The monsters are our fault. The one that nearly killed you used to be a wolf. Its ghost lives in me now. It wasn't a truth you could share. It was a burden you carried alone.
So he just listened. He listened to her talk about the rebuilding efforts, the quiet courage of the civilians, the names of the friends they'd lost. Each word was a brick, rebuilding a small, fragile wall of normalcy around him. And as he sat there, holding her hand, he felt his own internal chaos begin to settle. His motivation, which had been a panicked scramble for survival, was being reforged.
It wasn't for him. None of this was. It was for this. For this quiet room. For the steady beep of the medical monitor. For the warmth of Lina's hand. For a world where people could worry about cracked conduits and not the sins of their ancestors.
His purpose used to be to not die. Now, it was to find out why they had.
He left the infirmary with a new, quiet determination that felt heavier and colder than the fear it replaced. It settled in his bones, a core of cold iron around which his Aethel Frame now spun. Lina was right. He was still. He was a man who had just found his true north, and it pointed directly into the heart of a graveyard.
He didn't go back to the barracks. He went to the Forge.
It was empty, the cavernous space silent and waiting. The air was thick with the lingering scent of his own sweat and failure. He walked to the center of the scarred concrete floor and stood there, the kinetic spear feeling different in his hand. It wasn't just a stick anymore. It was a tool for a job he was just beginning to understand.
He closed his eyes. He didn't build the firewall. He didn't try to cage the beast. He reached inward, past the snarling, predatory instincts, and whispered her name into the silence of his own soul.
Lyra.
He opened the door. Not a crack. All the way.
The surge of the Echo came, but he wasn't listening for the rage. He was listening for the ghost. He moved. It wasn't the clumsy practice of a boy. It was an exploration. A question. He flowed through the familiar motions of the pounce, the strike, the dodge. But he wasn't attacking phantom drones. He was tracing a memory. He was trying to feel the cool earth under paws he didn't have, to smell the scent of a pine forest that had died centuries ago.
He was no longer just trying to survive the monster. He was trying to understand it. To know its story. The Scar wasn't just a place of danger anymore; it was a library of whispers, a crime scene two centuries cold. And he… he was the only one who could hear the victim.
Kael stopped, his chest heaving, his body slick with sweat. He stood alone in the vast, echoing silence of the Forge, his eyes open and clear. His grip tightened on the spear. His hunt had begun. Not for glory, not for strength, but for a terrible and necessary truth. He was a hunter, and his prey was the past.