The sky was blue again.
For the first time in years, real blue—no ash, no smoke, no violet fire ripping through the stratosphere. Just soft clouds drifting over the new capital rising from the ruins of the old world.
Athan Riven stood at the edge of the cliff overlooking Haven City, the first human settlement rebuilt with the help of the tamed Lythrons. Skyscrapers of stone and steel rose like fingers through green overgrowth. Between them, humans and biomechs worked side by side—hauling materials, planting forests, building homes from the bones of a fractured planet.
Solis would've liked it here.
Athan adjusted the sleeve of his coat, revealing the neural scar that still ran up his forearm like a spiderweb of silver. A permanent reminder of the sync. Of what he'd lost.
Of what they'd gained.
Behind him, the wind rustled the towering flags of the United Reclamation Alliance—a patchwork banner of old nations reborn. But Athan wasn't there for politics. He stepped forward and laid his hand on the black obsidian monument that jutted from the earth like a blade. A single name etched across its face:
SOLIS.
First of the Tamed. Fallen in Light.
His fingers trembled.
"You didn't just save me," Athan whispered. "You changed everything."
A soft tremor echoed through the ground. Heavy footsteps approached from behind, but Athan didn't turn. He recognized the rhythm, the quiet resonance in the dirt. The Lythron's steps were slower now. Gentler.
Rho, the second tamed Lythron, knelt beside him—a towering creature, sleeker than Solis had been, with long, folding wings and sapphire pulses in its chest. Athan had trained Rho after the Queen fell. They had a bond, yes but it wasn't the same.
Solis had been more than an experiment.
He had a family.
Rho tilted its head, emitting a low, harmonic hum—the Python equivalent of a question.
Athan sighed. "No. I'm not okay. But that's part of it, isn't it? Learning to live again."
Rho pressed a clawed limb against the monument. It paused, then projected a faint flicker of light from its core—Solis' final memory: a flash of psychic energy, the Queen's neural palace fracturing, and Athan screaming through the void as Solis threw itself into the fire.
Then silence.
Athan looked away.
The memorial wasn't just for Solis.
All over the world, Tamers like Athan were building similar sites. Some for fallen Lythrons. Others for fallen humans. A new culture was forming—half human, half biomech. The two species were learning from each other, not just to fight, but to exist.
In Haven, Lythrons now helped terraform scorched wastelands, neutralize toxic zones, and reroute weather systems. Their psychic abilities could accelerate plant growth, calm panicked crowds, even lift entire buildings when linked together. They were no longer invaders.
They were reborn.
Athan stepped back from the monument and gazed out at the city again. He spotted Tamer Cadence, a teenager from New Nairobi, directing a team of Lythron scouts near the perimeter wall. Her Lythron, Echo, was smaller than most, fast, all sharp angles and folded energy blades. It bowed when it saw Athan.
He gave a nod in return.
This new generation, they weren't soldiers like him. They were builders. Dreamers. They were the future.
Later, in the underground command center beneath Haven, Athan stood before a massive 3D map of Earth's surface. Blinking nodes marked reclaimed zones in green and contested zones in yellow. Red dots still lingered in the deepest trenches of the sea, the high ice of Antarctica, and strangely one dead zone on the far side of the moon.
"Residuals?" he asked.
A voice crackled over the comms. "Negative. No Lythron signals. But we're picking up strange fluctuations in the Queen's old shipwreck. Like echoes."
Athan frowned. "Psychic?"
"Possibly. Dormant code. A pulse pattern, repeating every 88 hours."
He leaned closer. The Queen had fallen. Her neural core had been rewritten. But alien minds didn't just die, they fractured.
What if fragments remained?
He opened a private channel. "Cadence. I need you and Echo ready for a moon run in 48 hours."
"Copy that," she replied, confident. "You think there's something left?"
"I think there's something waiting," Athan said. "And we need to know what."
That night, Athan returned to his quarters. The room was small, carved into the side of a mountain bunker, but familiar. He slid off his coat, sat on the cot, and pulled a worn data drive from his pocket.
He plugged it into the projector on the wall.
A holo-image bloomed to life: Solis, standing in the corridor of the Queen's ship, eyes glowing with sorrow and resolve. It was the last message he'd sent, encoded psychically into Athan's mind during their final sync.
Solis' voice echoed, calm, measured, more human than machine.
"If I do not return, tell them I was not born to destroy. I was taught to. And someone showed me how to choose differently."
Athan closed his eyes.
The words repeated like a prayer.
The next morning, before dawn, Athan returned to the memorial. Cadence was already there, Echo beside her. Other Tamers joined one by one, each with their bonded Lythrons, some fierce, some graceful, all alive with quiet purpose.
They stood together in silence.
As the first rays of sunlight touched the black stone, the monument shimmered faintly.
A pulse echoed through every Lythron present.
They felt it too.
Somewhere, across space, Solis' echo still lived.
And the stars were calling again.