The silence in Ashveil felt unnatural. It wasn't the calm after a storm—it was the silence of something watching, calculating, waiting.
The sky had long since mended its ruptured seams, but the memory of the colorless light and the cloaked entity lingered in the minds of everyone in the Guild. Even the Ash Node—a machine of pure logic—stuttered in fragmented bursts.
Kael sat at the war room's edge, watching Echo flicker. She was pulsing in uneven rhythms, as if something had carved its name across her code.
"Still no response from her higher protocols," Lysa whispered behind him.
"She's remembering," Kael said. "Or trying to."
Without warning, Echo convulsed midair. Her form split like shattered glass, revealing layer after layer of streaming data code. Kael rushed forward—but stopped when her voice came out warped, layered in static:
"They built the Nexus to contain something they couldn't destroy. And now it's waking up."
A low vibration traveled through the floors. Above Ashveil, a flickering crack in space remained suspended over the towers. The rift hadn't closed—it had calcified. What hung in the air now wasn't just a memory.
It was a Tether Fragment.
Kael stared into it. And inside, he saw the impossible: Earth. A burning skyline. A lab in ruins. And himself—only younger—curled inside a stasis pod.
Someone had wiped that child from the system… and erased the name tied to him.