Chapter Twenty: Dust and Echoes

The archive came alive slowly, as if waking from centuries of sleep.

Light from the activated shard spilled across the dust-laced chamber in waves of pale violet, casting runes and fractured glyphs onto the metal walls. It wasn’t just text—it was movement. Ghosts of moments long past flickered through the room: a procession of robes; a war council under banners lost to time; a child lighting an aetherlamp in a ruined corridor.

Leona stood near the console, arms crossed loosely, watching. Atlus sat beside the device, hunched over the glyph-reader, lips moving silently as he translated the fragmentary script.

“It’s not just a log,” he muttered. “It’s a memory composite. Someone preserved their experience directly into this shard. You don’t see many of these anymore. Too risky. Too expensive.”

“Too personal,” Leona added.

He nodded. “Exactly.”

The voice of the shard, layered and genderless, began narrating: “Cycle 2071. Kavessra stands on a precipice. Trade routes destabilized. Houses turning inward. Silence becoming strategy.”

Leona looked over. “Sounds familiar.”

Atlus didn’t answer immediately. He was reading something only he could see—some sublayer in the glyphs. His brow furrowed. “They weren’t just chronicling. They were planning. There are notes here… city schematics. Vault coordinates. Power flow maps.”

“Why store it here?”

“Because it wasn’t meant to be found,” Atlus said. “Not unless someone needed it.”

He tapped a sequence and the projection shifted—lines of Kavessra’s infrastructure pulsing under their feet. Glyph-roots connecting House enclaves, forgotten tunnels, severed ley channels.

Leona frowned. “These aren’t just utilities. These are weak points. Pressure valves. Disrupt one and—”

“You can collapse half a tier,” Atlus finished. He leaned back, a shadow crossing his features. “This isn’t just history. It’s sabotage. Or maybe a failsafe.”

The projection dimmed and flickered.

Leona turned toward the crates. “You said your sister was blinded in an accident?”

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He looked up, startled by the shift in topic. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

He was quiet for a beat. Then: “House attack. Political maneuver gone wrong. My mother and sister were caught in the crossfire. I was ten. She was six.”

“I’m sorry,” Leona said again, and this time the words held more weight.

Atlus’s expression didn’t change, but he reached into a pouch and withdrew a small case. Inside, nestled in soft felt, was a sigil fragment—tarnished, but still faintly glowing.

“This was hers. She wore it on a charm.”

Leona knelt beside him, studying the fragment. “You keep it close.”

“It’s not about grief anymore,” he said. “It’s about purpose. She survived. And she still pushes me. Every day.”

A moment passed.

“I used to sneak out of the spire,” Leona offered quietly. “Late at night. Just to walk the perimeter. Not to escape. Just to hear something besides trees.”

Atlus smiled faintly. “I thought you said you loved the forest.”

“I do. But loving something doesn’t mean you want to be trapped by it.”

“Maybe that’s why we’re both down here,” he said. “We love where we came from. But we want to shape something else.”

They shared a look, a quiet understanding forming in the low light.

Atlus returned to the console. “These vault coordinates could lead somewhere important. I want to check them out.”

Leona straightened. “Then I’ll go with you.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’m not doing it for you,” she said, but there was no bite to it. “I want to know what the city buried. I want to know why.”

He nodded, accepting. “Then we start decoding the rest of these shards. With luck, they’ll map a trail.”

As he began working again, Leona pulled over a crate and sat beside him. Time blurred. They didn’t talk much, not about plans or politics, but about little things—shared frustrations, odd childhood memories, the strange food names in the Upper Ring.

“I once got thrown out of a summit banquet for kicking a foreign envoy under the table,” Leona said with a grin.

Atlus laughed. “Let me guess. He insulted your cloak.”

“He said Sylvaen customs were primitive. So I proved we weren’t tame.”

Atlus shook his head. “Remind me not to sit across from you at dinner.”

The console pinged. Another shard unlocked. Atlus squinted. “This one’s corrupted, but—wait.”

“What is it?”

“Encrypted ledger. But it references something called ‘Project Ephemera.’”

Leona leaned in. “That doesn’t sound archival.”

“It isn’t.”

Atlus stared at the screen. “It’s a cross-House operation. Veneral, Calthera, and one of the extinct ones—Korrin. This predates the last purge cycle.”

“Does it say what it was?”

“Only one line is intact. ‘If Kavessra forgets, the city dies clean.’”

Leona blinked. “That sounds like a purge protocol.”

Atlus nodded. “Wipe the records. Burn the vaults. Cleanse the memory.”

A long silence followed.

Leona finally said, “Then maybe remembering isn’t just noble. Maybe it’s dangerous.”

Atlus looked at her, and for once, he didn’t try to deflect. “Yes. It is.”

The shard dimmed again. Outside, Kavessra rumbled like something far below had shifted.

They didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

Together, in that flickering light, they sat—two heirs of broken legacies, watching the past whisper secrets neither of them could unhear.

Not allies. Not yet.

But something was growing in the silence.

Something that remembered.