The sunrise over the derelict outskirts was less a promise of light and more a bruised, yellow-orange warning. I moved toward Sector 0, the Citadel's subterranean stronghold, under a sky that still trembled with the echoes of last night's Surge. The air was strangely quiet now—the world always seemed to take a deep, frightened breath after a chaotic event—but my mind was anything but silent.
My internal vault was noisy, crowded with the voices and impressions from the red Echo. It wasn't content to be filed away; it was demanding attention, a spoiled tyrant in the corner of my consciousness. The fragments of its strange rage, its military formations, and its emotional residue blurred with my Perfect Memory, creating impossible, agonizing overlays.
I was walking past the skeletal remains of what had once been the city's primary financial district, but my vision kept trying to betray me. I saw not broken concrete, but immaculate glass towers reflecting a sun that burned white, not orange.
(Informational Hallucination: Citadel Command Tower, Year 0 A.S. Location: Unfamiliar. Memory Source: Red Echo, Section 12, Data Block: Hubris.)
I forced myself to stop, pressing my palms against the cold metal of a rusted traffic barrier. The Echo was fighting to overwrite my chronology, to replace Kael's painful present with its glorious, hateful past.
I anchored myself the only way I knew how: with precise, undeniable data.
Date: October 21, 2045. Time: 05:30. Temperature: 12°C. Coordinates: 40.7128°N, 74.0060°W (approximate, post-Shattering shift). I am Kael, son of the Scoured Earth, and I remember because I must.
I didn't fight the memories; I categorized them. I filed the red Echo's rage under "Transient Emotional Imprint: Threat Level 8." It was a trick I'd learned: if I couldn't forget the ghost, I would treat it like another data entry.
But the psychological cost was immediate. A sudden, sharp spike of pain lanced through my sinuses. Blood—hot and sticky—dripped from my nose onto the metal barrier. It wasn't a fatal wound, just a sign of the Echo's invasive persistence, proof that my mind was working too hard to contain the new tenant.
I wiped the blood on my sleeve—more filth added to the grime—and continued.
Sector 0 wasn't a building; it was a scar in the earth, concealed beneath an array of signal jammers and armored plating. As I approached the main blast door, the Citadel guards—men and women dressed in clean, white composite armor—raised their rifles. The psychic static rolling off me was the alarm.
A thin, perpetually irritated technician scurried out from the guard post, holding a specialized scanner. He scanned me, and his eyes widened behind his visor.
"Flaw Intensity Rating: Yellow-Six. Unstable threshold. You shouldn't have survived that Surge, Vault. Your resonance spike was off the charts."
I simply stared at the man. "Neither should any of you, eventually."
My answer earned a silent, visceral wave of hatred from the surrounding guards, but no one opened fire. My curse was inconvenient, not yet dangerous to them.
I was stripped of my knives and escorted through security. The corridors were sterile, bleached white, and humming with filtered air—an unsettling contrast to the dirty reality outside. Along the walls were holographic memorials: hundreds of faces of fallen Hunters, frozen in moments of idealized heroism.
My Perfect Memory registered every face, every name, every death sequence. Seeing the entire reel of humanity's failed protectors scrolling past felt like a forced rewatch of the species' collective mistakes. (Perfect Memory: Hunter Marcus 'Steel-Jaw' Vance. Cause of death: Abomination Type Gamma-4, internal hemorrhage, 18:03, Day 401. Hunter Jenna 'Phoenix' Song. Cause of death: Echo corruption, executed by Citadel directive, 04:22, Day 711.)
I didn't let the horror show stop my pace.
Commander Valerius was waiting in a small, windowless debrief chamber. He was exactly as I remembered him from the brief, carved from old steel: polished armor, pale, stern eyes, a relic of the old order's military precision.
He didn't offer a seat. "You're lucky, Kael. We didn't have time to clean the floor."
I ignored the jibe. On the table between us, a holo-map pulsed like a fresh, festering wound. It depicted Rift Zone Omega, a newly discovered sector shimmering with dangerous volatility. The terrain shifted and flowed, the digital representation struggling to keep up.
"The Rift will open fully in seventy-two hours," Valerius began, his voice flat. "Its architecture is unstable—the terrain shifts like consciousness itself. The last team we sent in for preliminary scans reported topographical data that changes every hour."
He didn't need to elaborate. Memory, fear, obsession… all become geography in the deepest Rift Zones. A moment of panic can turn a flat path into a kilometer-deep chasm.
"We need a constant navigational anchor," Valerius continued, pointing a gloved finger at a shifting contour on the map. "Something immune to the Rift's psychological blurring. Something that won't forget the layout the moment it turns its back."
He looked at me, his meaning brutally clear. "We need Kael because he won't forget the topological shifts. Your memory ensures a stable navigational pattern. Your mind is the map."
I noted the patterns on the holo-map in silence. The layout, at its deepest levels, didn't look like any natural structure. It resembled the intricate, convoluted patterns of a brain cortex. Valerius, noticing my focus, didn't comment, but his pale eyes narrowed slightly. He already knew.
"You'll get your sister's clearance when the Echo is secured," he concluded, his tone leaving no room for negotiation. "Now, meet your team."
___
I was led into a massive hangar. The air was colder here, filled with the sharp smell of oil and high-grade metal. The expedition members were gathered around a massive transport crawler—a mix of elite Hunters chosen for pure power and political convenience. Each one carried distinct Echo imprints visible to my cursed mind, shimmering faintly in their aura.
The first was the reason I was truly wary: Serin "The Zenith."
Serin possessed a commanding presence, his aura radiating a golden, perfectly balanced energy. He was the media darling, the symbol of hope, his Echo harmonies impossibly flawless. He turned, offered a brilliant, charming smile, and strode toward me.
"Kael! It's been too long, my friend," Serin exclaimed, his voice ringing with false warmth. He clapped my shoulder with a strength that was both friendly and proprietary.
My Perfect Memory, however, saw the subtle, almost undetectable flicker behind the golden aura: instability, craving, and an overwhelming volume of conflicting data. I recognized the signs immediately. Serin wasn't just powerful; he was an Echo Addict, his perfection bought at the cost of his own identity, a slave to forgetting his true self. He was the anti-Kael. The tension between us—one man cursed by memory, the other enslaved to oblivion—sparked like a short circuit.
Next to him stood Lieutenant Mira Vance—the squad's tactical head. Her aura was a cold, hard silver, completely devoid of conflicting Echoes. She was logic to a fault, and her resentment of my reputation as a chaotic "Flawed" Hunter was palpable.
She didn't speak, but my mind played her internal voice perfectly. (Recall: Mira Vance, Status: High-Grade Awakened. Priority: Mission Success. Opinion of Kael: 'Unstable risk. Should have been terminated.')
The final member was Dr. Elric Reya, a Specialist in Echo Psychodynamics. He wore thick, specialized glasses and a look of scholarly fascination. His aura was a complex weave of theoretical data and ancient, forgotten languages.
He approached me quietly, his eyes focused entirely on my bleeding nose. "Do you remember the taste of your first nightmare, Kael? The primal fear, the sheer information rush?"
My lips barely moved. "Every flavor. The taste of failure. The smell of burning bone."
He nodded, visibly intrigued, and then, mercifully, left me alone.
Valerius began the final psych-brief over the hangar's comms system. "The last expedition into a Rift of this scale was a total loss. The terrain adapts to a Hunter's mental patterns. Memory, fear, obsession… all become geography. We need Kael because he won't forget the topological shifts. His memory ensures a stable navigational pattern."
The confirmation was chilling. They weren't trusting my skills; they were using my curse as a computational anchor—my mind, the vault of humanity's failures, was now their living map. It was brilliant and horrifying.
Meanwhile, the red Echo stirred again, feeding me unsolicited flashes of previous Rift catastrophes. I saw ruins swallowing soldiers, corridors replaying deaths in endless, frantic loops. The visions were so real they made the metallic walls shimmer.
I didn't tell Valerius what I was seeing.
______
After the meeting, I isolated myself in the equipment bay, checking my minimal gear. The hangar lights hummed, and the reflections of half-assembled exo-suits scuttled across the metallic walls.
My vision suddenly glitched, a blinding, terrifying double exposure between the mundane bay and something impossible. For a split second, I saw a massive, ancient silhouette—a being of immense, chained power, watching me from behind the veil of memory, its shadow cast across the real world.
The First Guardian.
I wondered if the legendary Echo truly existed, or if Lyra's salvation hid within a shared delusion—a terrifying metaphysical construct crafted by the combined minds of the Rift.
A comms notice broke the moment, snapping the hallucination back into a mundane reflection.
[Mission Deployment: 0600]
[Subject: The Vault | Risk Assessment: Unstable]
I wiped the last trace of blood from under my nose, studied the echo of my tired reflection in the polished floor, and whispered, "You remember everything long enough, and you start seeing ghosts."
Mira passed by on her way to the transport bay, her silver aura sharp with contempt. She muttered just loud enough for me to hear, "Try not to melt down in the Rift, Vault. We don't have enough bullets to put you down twice."
I gave no reaction outwardly—no snarl, no flinch. But my Perfect Memory recorded her tone, her microexpression, every flicker of contempt, cataloging it forever.
As the sound of the transport engines filled the hangar, a deep, resonant, and unfamiliar pulse thrummed through my chest. The red Echo pulsed once in my mind—a heart that wasn't my own—in anticipation. I looked out over the cold, metallic landscape and thought, The world forgets its monsters. I get to be the one who remembers them.
The Rift awaits.