Chapter 1 - Fragments

🕳️ Present —Emric

I wake to darkness so thick it presses into my skin. My wrists are raw, my lips are split and I taste rust and silence. The chains rattle whenever I breathe too loud, which is every breath. I'm not sure how long it's been. Time doesn't move here, only pain does.

Then the voice comes.

"Name."

Dry. Precise. No emotion. No cruelty. Cruelty would be human.

I don't answer. I don't know how.

I don't know my name and that terrifies me.

I raise my head weakly, trying to look up—trying to glimpse the source of the voice—but it's still pitch dark. I can barely make out the silhouette of the man standing over me. Before my eyes can adjust, a hand slams across my face.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

The pain is immediate, but dulled. Like it's hitting someone else.

Why? Is it to wake me up from my slumber? Jog my memory? or perhaps its simply to amuse himself.

Still, it doesn't help. The question hangs in the air like a loaded gun. 

Disoriented, I press my forehead against the cold stone wall, trying to access a memory that might as well be blank. The voice drills in again.

"Name"

And this time… something cracks.

A pressure behind my eyes. A shiver in my spine. The sound of a voice — not his. Hers.

⚠️ System Event — Anchor Point Found

> Neural Trauma Detected 

> Memory Anchor Acquired... 

> Ability Awakening: *Fragments of a Forgotten Man* 

> Anchor Point: "She called him by a name he didn't recognize."

💭 Past — Memory Fragment 01

He stood in the soft light of a dying afternoon.

Dust floated through the air like slow-motion ash. Around him, tall grass shifted with the wind. An old transport rail curved behind him like a broken spine. He had no idea how he got there.

Then she called to him.

"Lucas!"

The name struck like a bell—sharp, wrong, and yet… familiar.He turned.

She was standing in the field barefoot, her long coat flaring like a banner in the breeze. Her eyes were fierce and shining. There was a smile on her lips, the kind meant only for someone you've missed for far too long.

He opened his mouth to respond, to tell her she had the wrong person. But the words never came.

Because deep down, in the parts of him no one had touched in years, something echoed.

Lucas.

He had never heard that name before.

But he knew it was his.

Or had been.

Once.

The memory flickered—glitched—then vanished like smoke in water.

🕳️ Present — Emric

I gasp, choking on the darkness, lungs flaring like I'd just come up from drowning.

Her voice is gone. The name is gone.

But the feeling remains—burned into my chest like a scar.

I still don't know who I am.

But now, I know this:

Someone once called me Lucas.And I answered.

So why, then...why does that name feel like someone else's life?

The question swells in my chest like a bruise. I clutch at the memory—try to hold it, study it, own it—but it slips through my fingers like light through smoke.

Pain spikes behind my eyes. Not from the slaps. From something older. Something deeper.

A feeling I don't have a name for.

Longing.Displacement.A love I never remember falling into—but still ache from having lost.

⚠️ System Event — Emotional Sync Detected

>Memory Thread Alignment Complete.

>Cross-life Continuity Achieved.

>Accessing: Current Life — Subject: Emric (Age: 17)

>Anchor Point: "He awoke not knowing which name belonged to him."

🧷 Present Memory — Younger Emric (Age 17)

It was raining.

Cold, oily droplets tapped against metal sheets above his head. Somewhere behind him, machinery groaned like a dying animal. Steam hissed through fractured pipes. The world smelled like rust and ash.

He woke with blood in his mouth and a name he didn't recognize on his lips.

"...Lucas?"

No one answered.

He tried again. "Emric?"

Still no response. But that one felt… less wrong.

He sat up slowly, arms trembling beneath him. His body ached like it had been dropped from the sky. His clothes were scorched, the badge on his jacket half-melted—its insignia unrecognizable.

He touched the back of his head and winced. Dried blood. Burned hair.

Above him, the blinking blue light of a maintenance drone passed overhead, scanning, indifferent.

He was alone.

He didn't know what city this was. Or why he was bleeding. Or why the first name he spoke wasn't the one he eventually chose.

But in that moment, staring at the horizon of collapsed buildings and half-buried neon, he remembered.

His name.

"Emric" he whispered—this time not as a question.

It landed solid in his chest, anchoring him.

And with it came the rest...

He was a student of Velis-Acaedra, the academy built to represent the ancient orbital launch city of the same name. Their motto was burned into every corridor wall:

"To reclaim the lost, we must first survive what remains."

This had been his first live field assignment. A controlled dig and scan operation on the edge of the Diszone—neutral ground between megacities and unsalvageable wild sectors. A routine training mission.

It wasn't supposed to go this wrong.

He remembered the brief. The terrain. His squad. The sudden blackout. Screams through the comms.

He looked at his hands now, still shaking, still blackened with soot. His left glove was missing. His wrist pad was cracked, its display flickering static.

"...Kara," he breathed next. His sister. Safe, back home. Twelve years old, always doodling in the margins of his notes. Always asking if the stars they saw were real or left behind by old satellites.

And then, his parents—ordinary, kind. Factory-grade lives, third-generation survivors. His father a structural tech. His mother a logistics handler. Neither heroic nor hardened. Just tired people trying to give their kids a better world than most.

They didn't know the mission had failed.

They didn't know he might've died out here.

Emric dragged himself to his feet. Each breath hurt, but it was his. His identity clicked into place—like a blade sheathed, finally whole.

He was Emric

A son

A brother

A student of Velis-Acaedra

And something had gone terribly wrong.

He turned toward the east, where smoke curled up from where the transport ship should have landed.

Behind him, unseen by his waking mind, a red glyph pulsed faintly on the back of his neck —the first sign that something older had awakened in him.

Something forgotten.