There was no up or down in the memorystream—only movement without direction, sensation without form. Rin fell through it, if "falling" could even describe the feeling of being peeled open. Every moment he'd ever lived shimmered around him like broken glass suspended in water, bending and shifting as he moved.
Memories didn't play in order here. They bled into each other. His mother's last words fused with Sera's laughter. The first time he held a pencil. The last time he saw his village's lantern festival—gone now, erased, but alive in this place. And then other memories, ones that weren't his: a child dragged from her mother's arms, a soldier forced to forget the face of the man he killed, a girl whispering her name over and over so the world wouldn't let go.
And in the center of it all—Sera.
She drifted toward him slowly, tethered by strands of light connecting her to fragmented echoes. Her form shimmered—sometimes solid, sometimes translucent. When she spoke, her voice cracked through dimensions.
"I'm not whole."
Rin moved closer, breath catching in his throat. "You're real."
Her eyes shimmered with pain. "Only because you remembered me."
He reached out, but his hand passed through her.
"I can't come back yet," she said. "Not fully. Not while my name is still missing from the Archive."
"Then I'll find it," Rin swore. "I'll burn their records and rewrite every one of them. You'll exist again."
She flinched, not at the words, but at the promise. "That's not how memory works. It's not about force. It's about truth."
"What's the truth?" Rin asked.
"That I never left," she said. "I was just… unanchored."
They stood in the current of memories, and Rin felt something swell within him. The Echo—the raw energy he'd stolen, inherited, survived—was activating.
It responded to proximity. To purpose.
To her.
The pulse began in his chest, traveled to his fingers, and burst outward in a wave of golden static. The memorystream rippled. Some memories stabilized. Others shattered like ice under heat.
And in that rupture—he saw it.
The entire network. The fractures in the Archive's dominion. The points where false narratives had been stitched together, where real people had been patched out like typos in a god's manuscript. He saw the lie for what it was.
He opened his mouth to scream, to tell her, to fight—
But light consumed him.
And he woke. Gasping. On the rooftop.
Alone.
Wind curled around him like breath from a forgotten soul. The world looked the same—but it felt different. Quieter. Like something had noticed him now.
The pendant at his chest pulsed once. Then settled.
And in the hush between gusts, he heard her voice.
Not a memory.
A promise.
"I'm still here."