"The stars didn't just vanish. We stopped remembering they were ever there."
The silence of the void pressed against the hull of the Anamnesis Drift, a once-grand memory archive ship now floating aimlessly near the edge of the Eon Scar. Inside, Oryn Vale sat alone, his workstation cluttered with decaying memory shards—crystalline data capsules, flickering weakly.
Oryn, a thin, sharp-featured man in his late 30s, stared at a glowing memory feed. Again, the same anomaly. A ripple of static. A voice—not human, not machine.
It wasn't the first time he'd heard it.
"Oryn Vale…"
The whisper came again, carried on compressed quantum frequencies.
"I remember you…"
Startled, Oryn activated the ship's firewall. Nothing. The source bypassed every layer like it knew the architecture better than he did.
He leaned in closer, his breath fogging the cold glass.
"Find me, before the silence takes you too."
Suddenly, one of the star charts updated—an impossible act. The system being referenced… no longer existed. The galaxy itself had forgotten it.
But Oryn hadn't.
And that made him dangerous.