Prologue: What Remains Between Stars
The Verge was no longer a storm.
It had become a sea.
Waves of unshaped resonance lapped at the edges of known space, no longer devouring, no longer blind. For the first time in recorded memory, it responded. But it did not obey.
The world had changed.
The Seal Age was over.
What came next had no name yet.
Somewhere deep beyond the Vergefront, a pulse rippled through the Verge Sea—a disturbance quiet, but not accidental. It traveled far, bending through old breach-zones and harmonic tunnels now sealed by the Chorusspire.
And it reached something.
A listening mind.
An eye.
Dormant since the first Collapse.
"Connection restored.""Waking submemory cluster: 0-Nyx."
A chamber of glass and void bloomed to life in a forgotten vault far beyond even the Vault Kael had unlocked.
Inside: a body.
Female frame, suspended in flux-gel, her skin etched with silent glyphs that glowed black-blue. Her hair floated like ink in water, and behind her closed lids, her eyes rolled once, then stilled.
A voice—artificial, soft, but scarred by age—whispered:
"Nyx. Final Vergeborn. Memory seal fracture at 9%.""Awaken."
Her eyes snapped open.
Black irises. No whites. No pupils. Just void.
And knowledge.
She exhaled once.
The fluid evaporated into resonance mist around her.
"The Song has changed," she murmured.
"They sang without us."
Her fingers clenched.
A harmonic scar ignited on her chest—shaped almost like Kael's Seal, but darker. Incomplete.
She stepped from the chamber, barefoot onto metal that had not been touched by time, and looked upward—through memoryglass, through layers of silence.
Toward the Chorusspire.
"Then let us teach them the second verse."