An unknown Null Shepherd once said;
"You were not born into the countdown. You were
forged from it."
This was the moment before the moment happening somewhere
deeper. It was occurring in Eric's mind.
To be precise, not on the mind but beneath it. It is in a place
called the Pre-Selection Void.
Here Eric is floating. He is formless, thoughtless; a soul
without direction.
In this void, only whispers fill the space.
"Subject 13… still unstable."
"Emotional range too high. Reduce memory load."
"No. Keep the pain. It builds resilience. He must ache."
Eric is watching. He is watching himself.
Except it's not him.
It's a younger boy in a white room, surrounded by monitors.
A boy with hollow eyes and wires feeding into his spine.
Every screen shows apocalyptic weather simulations: tsunami
storms, inverted tornados, deserts birthing lightning.
Then a voice asks:
"If you had 72 hours left, what would you do?"
The boy stares. Then writes on the wall in blood:
"I'd remember everything."
Now the scene shifts again.
A figure in black robes—face hidden behind a melted mirror
mask—steps into the white room. He is not a Null Shepherd. He is worse.
He's called the Forger.
"You are the thirteenth," he says. "Not the last.
Merely the latest."
He places a glowing sphere above the boy's head. A System
Seed.
"You will not remember this until
Hour 66. But by then, you'll already be hunted by yourself."
The Forger raises a hand.
"We needed a Seeker with contradiction. Despair but drive.
Kindness yet rage. A shattered identity is perfect… because it can never be
predicted."
"We chose you… because you do not exist."
Lightning cracks through the room—inside the facility.
Time loops. The boy screams.
Back in the present—
Eric gasps awake, a nosebleed seeping from both nostrils.
Tano shouts something but it's distant and distorted.
Eric's System flashes:
"[ARCHIVE FRAGMENT RECOVERED]
Memory Origin: Pre-System Induction Trial
Key Phrase Unlocked: "I'd remember everything."
A second later, the terrain around Eric subtly shifts—as
though reality responded to that phrase. The trees bend toward him. The clouds
above form a spiral.
Then a whisper not from his System… but from the echoes of
Vault Echo-0:
"Welcome back… Forgeborne."
Eric stares into the light filtering through diseased
clouds.
"I wasn't chosen," he whispers.
"I was made."
He has come to a deeper realisation. He has just witnessed
his unknown past inside the Pre-Selection Void, a testing chamber for potential
Seekers. His new designation is whispered by a forgotten Vault: Forgeborne.
Eric recalls his sister's last words, directing him to the
next course of action.
"You need to find the Pulse Point. It's buried in the Vault
under the first Seeker's Sanctuary."
"But," he hesitates. "Before I get to the Sanctuary, who are
these other Seekers?"
He opens the stats from the information file in the System.
The first one the list is named Lance Vale. He was the Prototype.
His main trait is identified as the Architect's Mind.
Lance's failure Point was at Hour 11. What he records as his
final words referenced the Countdown. He had said;
"It's not a
countdown. It's a test of belief."
As his legacy, Lance Vale is credited with Designing the
first Safe Loop Sanctuary.
This Sanctuary is thought to be abandoned and now haunted by
storm-echoes.
Seeker two was referred to as The Empath, or Naila Yussef in reality.
Traits that characterizes this seeker include Emotion
Mapping. It means the seeker could hear grief as music.
Yussef's failure Point was at Hour 28 and records these
final words:
"I felt the scream of the planet. It didn't want us to
survive."
Legacy credited to this seeker is of burying a truth scroll
beneath frozen sand dunes.
The Seeker could be located in a place referred to as unstable
dimension.
Then came The Oracle or Father Dunem.
He is known for Dream Prophecy and failed at Hour 67. This
is same as Eric's anomaly. His final words gripped Eric. He had said;
"I saw the boy with blood in his eyes. He ends it all."
The third Seeker's legacy is quite something too. His corpse
still speaks in one Rift Vault but only to those who have died twice.
The Liar, codenamed Mira makes the fourth Seeker. Everything
about her is along this, from the Trait which is System overriding. She could
fake quests and rewrite hourly objectives.
Failure Point came at Hour 44 with final words: "It's not
cheating if the System is lying first."
Her legacy is that she Created the False Hour, a hidden
13-minute window between Hour 59 and 60. No one has re-entered it.
Seeker number five is
known as The Believer or Tomo of the Ashes.
He spoke only in riddles. He claimed to have seen the end
and chosen to fail.
Failure Point was Hour 6. He ended by remarking that, "You
must fail first to even see the map."
Legacy; he left no body; only a stone handprint in a Vault
wall that bleeds at sunrise.
The Archivist or Verena Kane makes the sixth Seeker. She is
characterized by a having Perfect memory recall, even across timelines.
She failed at Hour 50. "I remembered too much and became a
Shepherd." This were her last words.
One Null Shepherd speaks in her voice. She may be the first
ever to transform mid-countdown.
Kalu Uroko or The Voice could command weather through spoken
word. He was the seventh Seeker.
Failure Point, Hour 38, With Final Words:
"It only listens if it believes you're one of its children."
His Legacy is that he wrote a single word in a Vault:
"ΩHALT." No one knows what happens if it is spoken aloud.
Seeker Eight was only known as The Burned because the rest
of the identity is unknown, to date.
His main trait is that his body was permanently in phase
with flame. He was therefore, Immune to natural heat.
His Failure Point; Hour 12.
"She's not in the Vault. She's in the scream."
These are Final words he uttered. The legacy goes that his
remains were scattered by the System to "cool" zones—now erupting in firestorms
when approached.
Eva Marrows as Seekers number 9 witnessed all her deaths,
none going past Hour 73. She failed at Hour 61 but successfully buried 9
messages in mirrors across different time-states.
It is said that if all the 9 messages are found, it would trigger
a System Archive Reroll.
The tenth Seeker has no recorded
name. The Split was a codename because he self-multiplied every 7 hours.
The Split failure Point is also
unknown because all versions vanished after Hour 70.
Which of me is real?"
His Legacy could not be found.
The System blacklisted his ID. It now
warns Eric:
"If you see yourself acting without memory, do not follow."
The Ghost, Adwin Chepkorir could possess objects, people, and
even storms. She was the eleventh Seeker, and failed at Hour 3.
"Being a ghost before death is a curse." She remarked last.
Some Null Shepherds fear her name. She may still exist in
fragments of sound.
Seeker 12 is Nico Razel or The Lover. He had a love-based
System resonance. He could bond to another and share progress.
Failure Point came at Hour 60 with the Final Words:
"She was supposed to be the second Seeker."
His Vow was shattered. The System has been searching ever
since for the intended pair.
Eric scrolled to the last piece of the information he was
accessing from The System.
It said that the thirteenth Seeker may be able to access the
shards left by the previous 12 Seekers. He may locate their artefacts which
included tape recordings, blood-signed scrolls, body imprints, and words etched
into Rift Vaults.
The Seeker could also inherit their traits temporarily
during storm surges or Null Shepherd influence.
He may also experience echoes of their deaths when reliving
certain hours.
Eric felt jitters reading that some Seekers left behind
memory traps. These are gifts that will kill Eric if opened without the proper
System level or Vow alignment.
He also noted that among the 12, at least one, may still be
alive.
Eric takes a deep breath and calls out to Tano.