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> Two decades ago, beneath the sector labs now buried under ash, a hidden project pulsed with forbidden light. Even memory recoils from what was done there. But some truths linger like radiation—dormant until touched.
The lab pulsed in silence, saturated in soft violet runelight. Humming engines cast long shadows across the cold rune-steel walls. Stacks of myth-tablets, fractured bone relics, and resonance charts lay scattered across a vast holotable.
Selene Veyla stood at its edge, arms folded, face grim. She stared at the centerpiece: a crystalline construct shaped like a fetal heart, suspended in a tri-layered stasis rune.
"This isn't replication, Kaelen. It's manipulation. You're twisting life before it's even born."
Kaelen Thorne didn't look up. He was hunched over a cracked tablet fragment recovered from the ruins of the Lorn Dimension, his fingers trailing over the etched glyphs like a man communing with a god. His eyes were fever-bright.
"Twinsouls weren't myths. They were anchors—gate-stabilizers, soul conduits. We lost their method when Lorn collapsed. But now... I've found how they did it. And my child—"
He stopped, correcting himself.
"Our data, Selene. This project can bring it back."
"You're planning to forge a dual-soul inside your pregnant wife. That's not data, Kaelen. That's desperation."
"Desperation is what we need."
He finally turned. The wear of too many sleepless weeks sat on his face, but it made him no less relentless.
"The fractures are evolving. The First Gate was just a symptom. You saw the readings. Something's coming. Something old. If we don't try—"
"She could die."
"So could the world."
Selene stepped closer to the stasis rune, watching it glow. Somewhere, behind the diagrams, behind the logic and science, was a beating possibility. Two souls. One vessel. A balance not meant to exist.
"This isn't creation, Kaelen. It's interference."
"It's salvation."
She paused. Long. The silence was heavy, the hum of the machines filling the void.
Then she whispered:
"You'll record every detail. Every failure. If we cross this line, we own the consequences. And if anything—anything—goes wrong, I'll shut it all down."
Kaelen nodded once, with the quiet hunger of a man convinced the gods were already watching.
The dream dissolved—light unraveling like threads caught in wind—and Mira woke up gasping.
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───
The light filtering into the sitting chamber of the Veyla estate was warm, diffused through layers of runeglass that shimmered with passive wards. It softened the harsh edges of Sector 7's sky—though nothing could fully hide the scorch-marks left by the latest pulse from the Fractured Gate.
Selene Veyla sat in silence, her posture straight despite the visible exhaustion stitched into her frame. Her hoverchair hissed faintly as it adjusted, rune etchings glowing gently along its spine—each line carved with care, not for aesthetics, but to ease nerve strain and suppress the pain that the old surgeries couldn't.
A small flicker of blue light pulsed on the interface panel near her wrist.
The door parted with a whisper.
"Madam Veyla," came the soft, neutral voice of the house butler drone. A humanoid model, silver-plated and respectful to a fault. "Your daughter has arrived at the south gate. She requested entry clearance under her home code."
Selene didn't look up right away. Her fingers traced the edge of a faded datapad resting in her lap—its screen dark, its history heavier than steel.
"Let her in," she said quietly. Then, more to herself:
"About time."
"Mother."
"You look thinner," Selene replied, sharpness masking warmth. "And tired. Come here."
Mira crossed the room without protest and knelt beside the chair, letting her mother's fingers brush her cheek with surprising gentleness.
"I heard about what happened near the Black Gate. They're saying New Elysium lost contact with one of its deepfield squads."
Mira nodded, the weight of the memory darkening her eyes.
"We tried to stabilize the threshold. We failed. The Gate mutated—shifted before we could anchor it."
Selene's brow furrowed, but she kept her tone even.
"Were you harmed?"
"No. But Cael, Vaelen, and Jin... they were inside when the Gate collapsed."
For the briefest moment, Selene's eyes flickered. A muscle in her jaw tightened.
"And they still haven't come back."
"Not yet."
Silence fell between them.
Then Mira broke it, her voice quieter, almost too careful.
"That project you once worked on—two decades ago. The one you and Kaelen Thorne were part of. I came across fragments. Broken registry logs. Something called... Twinsoul Project?"
Selene's face hardened like glass under pressure.
"That initiative was decommissioned twenty years ago, Mira."
"But why?" Mira leaned forward, her voice tightening. "What happened? Why was it sealed under three suppression seals and wiped from every research network?"
"Because it should never have been started."
Selene's voice was like a gate closing.
Mira flinched but didn't back down.
"Is it connected to the Fractured Gate?"
Selene didn't answer immediately.
"You're asking questions that are dangerous to even know."
She turned the hoverchair slightly, angling away.
"Some truths don't set you free, Mira. They make you targets."
"I'm already one."
Her mother sighed deeply, as if breathing out twenty years of regret.
"Let it go. Please. For your own sake."
But Mira's gaze didn't leave her.
Even as Selene fell silent, the fire in her daughter's eyes had already moved past permission.
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───
The estate quieted after midnight, just as it always had when Mira was young. The old walls hummed faintly with their embedded security wards, tuned to the bio-signatures of the family line. Drones perched in idle stasis mode at the corners, their optics dimmed to orange watchlights.
Mira walked barefoot now—no sound but the hush of her breath and the faint buzz of a distant relay tower bleeding in from outside the reinforced walls.
Selene's study was locked. Of course it was.
But Mira had watched the old patterns. Her mother might be a cripple in body, but her mind still danced in layers. The code hadn't changed since Mira was fourteen.
She pressed her palm to the etched obsidian panel. A faint warmth pulsed beneath her skin. Runes shimmered, then flickered uncertainly, hesitating between access and denial.
She whispered:
"Override pattern. Voice key: Mira Veyla. Secondary clause—Caretaker's Protocol."
A long pause.
The door clicked open.
The study was a monolith of quiet obsession.
No soft furniture, no nostalgic bookshelves. Just clean edges, alloy surfaces, and a terminal arch braced into the wall—streamlined tech woven with rune conduits pulsing low blue. Holograms hovered in hibernation, and a single metal table stood center stage, carved with binding marks Mira didn't recognize.
She wasn't sure what she expected. Maybe hidden files. A locked safe. Something overt.
But nothing responded to her presence.
No alerts. No flickering secrets.
Frustrated, she stepped backward—and her heel caught something.
Click.
A slight depression in the floor panel she hadn't noticed. Her body shifted, and suddenly—
Whirrrk—THNK.
A section of the far wall silently decompressed. A seam Mira hadn't seen before lit up in a dull spiral of golden light, and the panel slid away without a sound.
Her heart froze.
"That... wasn't supposed to happen."
Cautiously, she stepped forward.
Behind the opening was a narrow passage, steeped in darkness, the walls traced with minimal maintenance runes and archaic pipework from a much older time. This part of the house hadn't been touched in years.
The air smelled like stone, metal, and forgotten things.
At the end of the corridor was a reinforced containment chamber. The kind used in unstable archive facilities—shielded to prevent magical bleed or psychic echo.
Inside, it was silent. Sterile.
Drawers lined the walls like morgue units. Each labeled. Sealed.
She passed over them—until she saw one partially ajar. Dust on the floor showed where it had slid, recently enough that the marks were clear.
Mira pulled it open.
Inside, nestled between static-locked containment foam, was a hexagonal data core. Old design. Rune-laced, not digital. Arcane logic weaved directly into the crystal memory strands.
Carved into its casing were three words, burned by laser etch:
"TWINSOUL PROJECT – DECOMMISSIONED"
And just beneath it:
"Archive Entry: Lorn Dimension | Myth Trial 07 – Soul Synchronization Protocol"
Lead Signatories: Kaelen Thorne, Selene Veyla, Rho Emeric
Mira's fingers trembled as she reached for it.
She had no idea yet what she'd found.
But the answers no one would give her... were finally starting to whisper.
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───
The chamber was silent, save for the gentle thrum of mana coils embedded in the walls. The air smelled faintly of ozone and old dust, untouched for decades. Mira stood still, half-shadowed by the flickering light of the drive, her breath slow but uneven.
The memory archive floated in the center of the room, rune-locked but already unlocked by the key glyph she'd found embedded behind the old bookshelf—an accident, a shift of weight, a misstep, and the hidden panel had clicked open like it had been waiting for her all these years.
The title on the hovering projection flickered to life:
[TWIN SOUL PROJECT — DECOMMISSIONED / LEVEL RED / RHO EMERIC ACCESS OVERRIDE]
She swallowed. Her thumb hovered over the initiate glyph. Her hand shook.
"Just data," she whispered to herself. "Just old data..."
She pressed it.
The room dimmed.
The projection expanded outward in quiet layers, first blueprints, then handwritten field notes, then fragmented footage patched together from scattered feeds. One voice cut through the static like a knife through memory.
Kaelen Veyre: "It's not just theory anymore. The Lorn fragments confirm it—twin souls exist. And if we reconstruct the anchor while the host is still in development... we may not have to wait for convergence at all."
His face appeared. Younger. Obsessive. Gaunt from sleepless nights, his irises flickering with rune-scripting fatigue.
Another voice, weary but resolute, joined from off-screen.
Selene Veyla: "We are not playing gods, Kaelen. She's pregnant. It's—this is not consent. You're talking about rewriting a child's soul before it's even born."
Kaelen: "We're talking about saving worlds, Selene. Don't you see? The myth isn't a myth. It's a roadmap. Two souls—one vessel. If we can forge the cycle... we control the fracture."
Selene: "You're breaking a law older than any of us. Older than this world. If you're wrong—"
Kaelen (softly): "If I'm right... then we won't just survive. We'll reshape fate."
Static tore through the feed. The image fragmented.
Then, another file auto-queued—labeled only:
[ADDENDUM: FRACTURE POINT – UNKNOWN SOUL PRESENCE DETECTED]
Mira leaned closer.
The footage was corrupted. Only parts of Emeric's notes came through.
Rho Emeric (log fragment): "We failed to isolate the incoming signature. It's not local. Not from this world. The soul pattern doesn't match the twin we created. There's... there's another one. One that didn't belong. One that came through."
Emeric's voice drops to a whisper: "It's watching. Even now. From the other side of the Gate."
Mira's legs gave slightly, and she sank into the chair bolted to the corner console, heart pounding in her chest like a locked box trying to open.
The archive ended.
Silence returned.
The chamber was still. Mira's eyes reflected the flickering glyphs on the screen, now dimming one by one.
"Two souls… one not from here…"
She didn't feel the tear that slipped down her cheek.
"What are you, Cael?"
A long pause.
She reached for the archive drive, sliding it into her coat with trembling fingers.
The last glyph blinked out.
Fade to black.