The silence after the battle felt wrong. Too hollow, as though even the void itself held its breath.
Kaelen leaned against the shattered console, his Cortex dimmed and smoldering. Every breath rattled in his chest. Seris stayed close, one hand steadying him as if he might vanish at any second.
"Rest," she whispered. "You won. You beat him."
Kaelen shook his head.
"No… not won. Not yet. He's not gone."
At first, it was faint. A flicker of thought at the edge of his own. But then it sharpened, a voice like his own, only colder.
You think this is victory? I am still here. I am the blade in your hesitation, the logic in your doubt.
Kaelen's hand pressed to his temple, pain lancing through his skull. Seris frowned, alarmed.
"What is it? Talk to me."
He swallowed hard.
"He left something behind. An echo. In me."
Before Seris could answer, alarms shrieked across the Spire. Ryn's implants flared with harmonic resonance, his voice almost drowned by static.
"The Forge is shifting… no longer focused on us alone. It's… rewriting the space around us."
Lyra's console flashed crimson, her voice taut.
"It's turning the whole sector into a revision field. Stars, planets, debris, everything is being folded into new drafts."
On the viewscreen, nearby suns twisted into impossible geometries, their light refracted into spirals of broken probability.
The crew murmured in terror.
"If it can rewrite whole systems..."
"Where do we even run?"
Kaelen forced himself upright, though his vision blurred.
"You don't run. You out-think it. That's all we've ever done."
But even as he said it, the echo in his mind laughed.
And what happens when the only way to win is to become me?
Seris caught the shadow in his eyes, the hesitation in his voice. She grabbed his arm, forcing him to face her.
"You listen to me, Verris. You're not him. You're not the splinter. You don't have to fight like him to win."
Kaelen's voice cracked.
"What if that's the only way we survive?"
Her grip tightened.
"Then I'd rather lose with you than win with what he was."
Kaelen stared at her, the one voice anchoring him against the echo clawing in his skull. He exhaled, slow and sharp.
"Then I'll find another path," he whispered.
"And if the Forge wants me to fracture again, I'll make sure it regrets every shard."
The Spire surged forward, engines straining as Kaelen fed new calculations into its systems, not clean or efficient, but human. Imperfect, adaptive, defiant.
Far ahead, the Forge's revision field thickened, a storm of broken stars and collapsing probabilities.
And deep in Kaelen's mind, the splinter's voice purred like a blade being sharpened:
You can't deny me forever. Every choice you make… I'm still part of it.
The Eidolon Spire plunged into the revision field. Space bent like glass under heat, stars warping into impossible geometries. The hull groaned as though dragged through a thousand different drafts at once.
Ryn's implants screamed.
"Warning… temporal harmonics fracturing. We are entering possibility bleed."
Kaelen gritted his teeth. His Cortex sparked, barely stable.
"Stay tight. No deviations. If we slip too far off-anchor, the Forge will..."
And then the bridge went dark.
When the lights returned, someone else stood there.
Kaelen froze. It was him, but broken, scarred, older. His left eye burned with Forge glyphs, his hands stained with Titan ichor.
The phantom's voice was gravel.
"You failed them, Verris. You tried to save everyone, and lost everything. This is what you become."
The crew recoiled. Seris whispered, horrified,
"Kaelen… it's you."
Another appeared on the opposite side of the bridge. This one was colder, his uniform pristine, his face devoid of emotion. He looked at Seris, then at Lyra, and said with flat certainty:
"I chose efficiency. Sacrificed the weak. Survived. Alone."
And then more came. Dozens. Kaelens in different uniforms, different wounds, different silences. Some haunted. Some monstrous. All possible outcomes of choices he could have made.
The bridge filled with them, every one whispering a different failure, a different path.
The gunners backed away, their voices shaking.
"How do we know which one's ours?"
"They all look like him..."
"What if ours is the wrong one?"
Lyra's eyes gleamed with dangerous fascination.
"Look at them. Proof the splinter wasn't an error. It was inevitability. He can't escape himself."
The voices pressed in.
"You hesitated, and billions died."
"You were ruthless, and the crew abandoned you."
"You sacrificed Seris."
"You sacrificed Ryn."
"You survived… but you never won."
Kaelen staggered, his hands pressed to his temples. The echo of the splinter in his mind laughed softly.
See? They're not lies. They're all you. Every mistake you've already written into yourself.
Through the storm of voices, Seris stepped forward. She seized Kaelen's face in her hands, forcing his gaze to hers.
"Listen to me. They're not you. Not our Kaelen. You're here, with us, and that's what matters."
Her voice cut through the chaos like steel.
"You're not defined by drafts. You're defined by the choices you still have left."
For a heartbeat, silence.
Kaelen drew a trembling breath. His eyes flared with Cortex light, defiance burning through exhaustion.
"You're right. They're not me. They're lessons."
He faced the phantoms, his voice steady now.
"You're everything I could be. Everything I fear. But I'm still here, and as long as I am, you're just shadows."
He poured paradox equations into the Disruptor, collapsing the phantoms back into probability. One by one, they dissolved, screaming, until only the real Kaelen remained.
The Forge's voice crackled across the ship, unreadable glyphs searing every screen.
ANCHOR IDENTIFIED.
TEST UNRESOLVED.
FURTHER REVISION REQUIRED.
Kaelen fell back against his chair, drenched in sweat, his body trembling.
But in his skull, the echo of the splinter whispered:
You banished them. But you can't banish me. I'm not a phantom. I'm your truth.
The bridge lights flickered again, but this time it wasn't the Spire convulsing. It was them.
Seris blinked, confusion shadowing her features. For a heartbeat, she looked at Kaelen as if he were a stranger. Then her eyes snapped back, sharp and loyal, but the crack in her certainty lingered.
Across the room, one of the gunners suddenly stood straighter, his voice cold.
"Why are we listening to him? He's already failed a dozen times. I saw it, I remember it."
The crew recoiled.
"What are you talking about?"
"That never happened!"
The gunner's lips twisted in a grim smile.
"Didn't it? Or has the Forge just corrected my memory?"
Ryn staggered, his Titan implants flickering between harmonics. His voice split into two overlapping tones.
"Anchor Verris… no, Splinter Verris… system loyalty… compromised."
He clutched his head, roaring as Titan and human halves warred inside him.
Kaelen's chest tightened. He knew what this was. The Forge was no longer just showing possibilities. It was rewriting people into those drafts.
He stepped forward, voice sharp, commanding.
"Listen to me, whatever memories you're seeing, they're not real. They're drafts, phantoms, fragments. The Forge is testing us, trying to make you doubt."
But then Lyra's laugh cut through him. Cold, sharp, unnerving.
"Or maybe it's showing us the truth. Maybe you already lost, Verris. Maybe we're the ones who've been rewritten to believe in you. How would you know?"
The words landed heavy across the crew. Some flinched, others looked away. Seeds of doubt planted.
Seris suddenly gasped, her eyes wide.
"I saw it, Kaelen, you left me behind. You abandoned me."
Her hand trembled toward her sidearm. For a heartbeat, Kaelen's heart froze.
"Seris… no. That's not this timeline. That's a Forge lie."
Her arm shook, caught between faith and fracture.
"But it felt real."
Kaelen stepped closer, voice steady despite the storm inside him.
"Because it could have been real. That's the Forge's trick, it doesn't lie, it tempts. But you're here now. With me. That's all that matters."
Her breathing steadied, the gun lowering. Tears burned in her eyes.
"You'd better be right."
The Cortex flared as Kaelen rerouted command authority. He linked his neural stream into the Spire itself, binding the crew's minds to his, an anchor tether.
"It's risky," he gritted. "But if the Forge tries to overwrite you, it has to go through me first."
The crew gasped as their thoughts sharpened, tethered to Kaelen's blazing mind. They felt his certainty, his terror, his defiance, and for now, it anchored them.
But the echo of the splinter purred in his skull, amused.
Brave. But reckless. Now their survival is tied to yours. And when I surface again… you'll take them all down with you.
Kaelen clenched his fists, refusing to answer.
The Forge pulsed, its voice scrawling across every display, every wall, every fragment of the Spire's architecture:
ANCHOR STABILIZED.
COUNTERMEASURE REQUIRED.
INITIATING CREW REWRITE SEQUENCE: PHASE TWO.
And the crew screamed as shadows of their rewritten selves began to bleed through, versions of them that had betrayed Kaelen, abandoned him, or turned against one another.
The real battle for loyalty had only just begun.