White swallowed everything.
Not the white of sunlight or snow or flame…
This was memory-white. A blankness so vast and dense it swallowed sensation, like falling into a silence so profound it thundered in the bones. There was no breath here, no thought—only the raw hum of something ancient and waiting.
Lucan floated, his limbs slack, weightless. The pedestal and chamber were gone. So was the air. So was time. Even fear couldn't find a foothold.
Then—light. Color. Shape.
Not abruptly, but with hesitation. As though reality was remembering how to exist.
It began slowly, coalescing from the silence like an echo chasing its own origin.
Above him stretched a sky ignited by twin suns, bleeding molten orange and bruised violet through clouds that churned like the surface of a storm-wracked ocean. The light refracted off the haze, casting fractured rainbows that bent at impossible angles. The air shimmered with heat—and something else. A vibration. A pulse. Like the heartbeat of a dying god.
Below, a golden city clung to the edge of a jagged cliff. Towering spires rose in impossible curves, draped in thick flowering vines that throbbed with bioluminescent life, their petals twitching to an unseen rhythm. Bridges arched in defiance of gravity, made of woven light and bone, swaying gently despite the still air.
Lucan drifted down, drawn toward a structure at the city's center—no, beneath it. A hidden heart.
A colossal chamber unfurled below him, carved not by tools, but by will and force. Its walls were a fusion of polished obsidian and calcified bone, ribbed and spiraled like the inner shell of some titanic beast. Every surface glimmered faintly with glyphs etched by time itself.
And upon a throne, raised above it all—it.
The being sat in silence, yet its presence filled the space like poison in still water. The throne, once a seat of dominion, was cracked and half-consumed by creeping tendrils of decay. What clung to the throne was no longer flesh and no longer machine. The figure's form was skeletal, wrapped in corroded armor that bore the faded sigils of a forgotten age. Faint pulses of dying light still moved beneath its plating, as though something inside still fought not to be extinguished.
Its joints moved with unsettling precision—fluid yet unnatural. A perfection that only something utterly divorced from life could possess. Its face… or what was left of it… was a patchwork of fractured plates and ruinous bone, a mosaic of what once was. Its eyes were voids—black pits through which leaked strands of molten silver, drifting like dying starlight.
Lucan didn't feel its gaze.
He felt its awareness.
Not as presence, but pressure. A weightless force that pressed against his soul, against his identity. It was as if the very idea of Lucan was being studied, unmade, and rebuilt simultaneously.
A hunger without emotion. A void without voice.
But then—words.
Not spoken. Injected. Like memory, like instinct. As if the thoughts had always been there, waiting for the right moment to awaken.
"I listened to the silence beyond the Fold."
"I answered its call."
"I saw what no one else dared see."
"They called it madness."
"But it was truth."
The words came not in sound, but in feeling—cold and absolute. They buried themselves in Lucan's mind like roots, dragging pain and understanding behind them.
The scene around him twisted—flashes.
Faces. Some radiant, aglow with inner brilliance. Others monstrous, shadows barely holding shape. An ancient council, gathered in judgment. Lucan didn't recognize them, but some deep, instinctual fragment of him did. These were not mortals. These were pillars of the old ways.
And all of them… turned away.
"So I became what they feared."
"A vessel for what comes next."
The figure—it—lifted one hand. The movement was delicate, almost reverent.
In the distance, through the chamber's fractured window of bone and crystal, a planet shimmered—blue, green, alive.
Then—
It folded inward.
No sound. No explosion. Just collapse.
Like a breath taken in reverse. Like reality being unstitched. The world crumbled into dust and that dust scattered like ash in a breathless wind.
Lucan recoiled, his gut twisting. But the memory had him now. It yanked him forward.
Deeper.
The chamber cracked. The sky warped. The city vanished.
And now—
A home. Familiar.
He stood in a room. Familiar and unfamiliar. A rustic apartment, with shelves covered in dusty books, faded photographs, and toys scattered across a stained carpet. A cracked window let in dim evening light from a sickly orange sun. The air smelled of rain and burnt metal.
A voice spoke — not out loud, but into him.
"Observe. Remember. This is not dream nor illusion. This is truth encoded in grief."
Lucan turned.
Two figures moved in the room.
The first was a woman with long dark hair pulled into a tight braid. Her posture was tense, yet protective. The second was a tall man with sharp, tired features, his coat singed at the hem. Their bodies shimmered faintly, like projections barely held together.
The woman knelt beside a small child sleeping in a handwoven cradle.
Lucan staggered.
It was him.
A version of him, just months old. Innocent, untouched by Foldlight or pain. His eyes blinked in a slow rhythm, unaware of the storm curling around him.
"Is it close?" the woman asked, her voice hushed but fierce.
The man nodded. "Yes. We don't have much time. It's pressing through layers faster than we expected. Earth's veil is thin now."
The woman's hands clenched into fists. "I shouldn't have brought him here. He should have stayed beyond the fractures. Safer."
The man crouched beside her, his voice softening. "You saved him by doing this. If we had stayed near the Spiral Bastion, it would've sensed him from the start. Here… we had time. Five years of time."
"Not enough."
Silence stretched.
The woman's eyes filled with pain, her gaze lingering on the child.
"Have you felt it lately?" she whispered. "That... wrongness? Like the world's turning to ash from the inside out?"
The man nodded. "It's not just perception. It's how it hunts. It infects time, decays belief. When people forget what came before — the songs, the stars, the guardians — it wins."
The woman looked up. "Do you still think he's the one?"
The man hesitated, then reached out and touched the child's forehead.
Light pulsed beneath Lucan's baby skin — a faint spiral of cosmic threads winding under his flesh.
"I don't think it matters what I believe." the man said, voice cracked.
The woman shook her head, half in awe, half in dread.
"I saw what it did to our people. I watched entire worlds become screaming holes in the universe. I won't let that thing touch him."
Lucan felt himself trembling. Not physically — not in this place — but something in him was recoiling. Recognizing the weight of what was unfolding.
The man rose, walking to a small metallic box tucked beneath the floorboards. He opened it and retrieved a crystal device etched with golden script.
"This is all we have left of the Bastion's codes." he said. "We've hidden guardians in deep orbit, in the Sunken Systems. If anything remains, it's there. If he survives long enough…"
The woman looked up sharply. "Don't say it like that."
"He will survive. But we may not."
Lucan wanted to shout, to reach them — but he had no voice here. Just breathless watching.
The man moved to the window, peering outside. His face darkened. "It's already here."
A tremor rippled through the walls. The light in the room flickered. A low hum built in the distance — not sound, but pressure, like the atmosphere was being peeled open.
The woman grabbed a small bag from beneath the crib. Inside were notes, a photograph — Lucan's first birthday. The three of them smiling. Happy.
She pressed the photo to the child's chest, then kissed his forehead.
"You won't remember this." she whispered. "You'll grow up hating the quiet. Wondering why your dreams burn. But listen to them. They'll guide you."
She placed a hand over his tiny heart.
"Never trust your memories. Trust your instincts."
The man returned, his eyes grim.
"I bought us two minutes. Less, if it senses the distortion we created. We have to leave now."
"But what about—"
"We stay, it finds him. We leave, he might have a future."
The woman turned away, arms trembling, as she whispered something ancient in a language Lucan didn't recognize. Runes flashed along the crib's edges, symbols woven with shielding light.
"He won't remember us, will he?" she asked.
The man's eyes were haunted. "Not unless something wakes the seed."
She brushed the child's cheek one last time.
Lucan saw tears stream down her cheeks — not silently, but in defiant grief.
Then she rose and walked to the man.
For a moment, they simply held each other.
Then the white void screamed.
Not in sound — but in pressure, light, vibration. Something impossible breached the scene, a silhouette of endless limbs and hollowed light at the edges of the memory. The air bent, the walls cracked, time stuttered.
"It found us—!"
The man flared with golden light, hurling a barrier around the child. The woman vanished into a swirl of smoke and sparks, teleporting with her husband through a spiraling gate that tore through the ceiling.
And Lucan was left alone with… it.
A towering absence. A void in the shape of a predator. Endless arms folded into each other, fractal faces opening and closing with eyes that screamed.
It reached toward the crib.
Then the world snapped.
The vision shattered into pieces — fragments of stars, voices, timelines all collapsing around Lucan.
He fell.
Tumbled.
Screamed—
And landed hard, gasping, back in the circular chamber of the enclave.
His body jolted. He lurched forward, clutching his chest, the heat still burning beneath his skin.
Lyra caught him before he fell again.
"Lucan! What happened?!"
He couldn't answer at first. His breath came in ragged gasps, tears in his eyes he didn't remember crying.
Thal'ryn stood beside the memory seed, his face unreadable.
"It responded to you." he said simply.
Lucan slowly stood, swaying. "That wasn't… just a message. That was like a memory. My parents. They were there. On Earth. For years."
He looked up at Lyra, his voice breaking. "They didn't abandon me. They hid me."
She froze, stunned.
Thal'ryn stepped closer. "Then the seed has done its work."
Lucan's voice cracked. "It was hunting me even then. That thing… it nearly broke through the veil."
Lucan gritted his teeth, struggling to steady himself.
He remembered the way his mother's voice cracked. The look in his father's eyes—shadows behind fire. The desperation. The hope. The terror they never spoke aloud.
His fists clenched, trembling not with fear, but with purpose.
"I'm going to uncover everything." he said, voice low. "Why they vanished. What they were running from. What they died to protect… what I really am."
Lyra stepped closer, her voice soft, wary. "And when you do?"
Lucan met her gaze, unflinching. The fire in his chest felt older than he was—ancient, waiting.
"Then I'll drag it into the light and bury it with my own hands."
And for the first time, the memory of that cosmic predator didn't freeze him in place.
It lit a match.
And something inside him began to burn.
[End of Chapter 13]