The air was no longer cold.
It wasn't warm either.
It was… thick, like trying to breathe through a memory that didn't want to be remembered. The sky above wasn't the sky anymore—it was a canvas. Wide and pulsing with faded color, like old film burning to life. Across it played a scene that shouldn't exist, one that had been sealed, erased, unspoken.
And yet, here it was—visible to everyone.
The battlefield looked real. Not perfect like an illusion. Real. Muddy, torn up, filled with broken metal and broken bodies. Not fantasy corpses, either. They were Crown units. Fused armor. Pale skin. Some still sparking with dying commands that didn't know how to shut down. Others looked too human to be machines.
A girl knelt beside one of them, shaking. Her face shifted with every blink, like the memory didn't know what she used to look like.
And in the middle of it all—a man.
Young. But not naive.
