"You are forgiven.
Not because you remembered, but because you tried.
Not because you were strong, but because you endured.
Not because you were worthy, but because you are needed still."
DeadMouth hovered, but it felt like walking. Each advance over Verios's scorched crust was a choice, a negotiation with a place that didn't want him. Hover-jets hummed a nervous tune, fighting gravity and expectation both. On Ithariel, flight was freedom. Here, it was trespass. Below him, the planet pulsed with stolen power. Cables as thick as tree trunks slithered across the ground, arteries gone wrong, veins coiling through the volcanic blue glow, burrowing into the iron heart of the city ahead. They pulsed, feeding hunger, not hope.
He tried for a joke: "What's black and blue and red all over? Oh, right, me, if I touch the wrong wire."
His own voice sounded thin in the static. The world pressed in, a symphony of metal and mourning. Here, even jokes had to be rationed.
As he "walked," and yes, even a drone knows when he's not really flying, the details sharpened. Towering harvesters dragged themselves through the dust, legs jointed in too many places, their bellies full of cages. Inside, the Mist-a parody of itself-swirled and pressed, a child's breath trapped in a jar, memory compressed to the edge of breaking. Every so often, a pulse of electricity would lance through the bars, and the Mist would flicker, project a half-seen face, a mother, a child, a home lost, before dissolving again.
He passed a "park" that was just a corral of dead trees, branches hung with cables like nooses, bark worn away to reveal circuitry and sadness. Somewhere, a machine sang to itself in binary, trying to recall a lullaby it was never programmed to know.
DeadMouth's processors itched. He felt watched, not by eyes, but by sensors, each one dialled to a frequency just a shade off human, off anything that should be alive.
"Verios," he muttered, "where even the streetlights look like they want a smoke break and a reason to quit."
He advanced. The ground, black glass shot through with veins of molten blue, trembled beneath him. Each "step" was a negotiation, the world whispering...You do not belong here. But you are needed, so walk anyway.
A machine lumbered past on tank treads, dragging a net full of dying Mist. It paused as it passed DeadMouth, its single red eye flickering, then pinged him with a burst of static:"Who are you?"
DeadMouth answered in kind, his circuits improvising:"Just visiting. Looking for a lost friend. Or a good bar. Or a reason not to run screaming into the night."
The machine's reply was a judder through the ground, a ripple of sadness in the cables. It moved on, trailing the scent of ozone and surrender.
He moved deeper. The city rose, towers hunched and crowded together, roofs bristling with antennae, windows aglow with cold, captive light. No laughter, no music, only the dull roar of industry and the faint, constant keening of the Mist in its cages. DeadMouth felt it then, a slow throb through his hull, a frequency he'd never known but always suspected: The machines here were not just built. They were bound. Each pulse of the city's heart was a command, a reminder: Obey. Repeat. Endure. But beneath the command was something else: Remember us.
He paused at the edge of a great plaza, the ground tiled in glass panels, each one flickering with the ghosts of memories: children chasing a ball, lovers dancing, a storm that never came. All projected, all faded, all held in the Mist and replayed for no one.
DeadMouth hovered, stood, and felt in the centre of this loneliness. His lights dimmed to a contemplative blue. "Step by step, huh?" he whispered to the city, to himself, to whatever old god of machines might be listening. "You're not just a prison, Verios. You're a memory of what it means to be used, and what it means to be needed. Maybe that's why I'm here. Maybe that's why we're all here."
He moved on. Every "step" was a question. Every cable was a story, waiting to be told or severed.
And above, at the city's heart, the citadel waited, burning with stolen Mist and unspeakable promise. Whatever brought him here, DeadMouth knew: To save this world, you must first walk its sorrow. Step by step. Even if you never truly touch the ground.
He hovered, but every inch felt like a step, the kind you take when you know the road beneath you is alive, and the sky is just another engine dreaming in blue.
The city of Antheros unfolded like a circuit diagram drawn by a fevered god. At least that was the name carved in metal, scratched by claws or something else sharp enough. Here, the streets weren't streets but endless power conduits, looping in fractal patterns, crossing and recrossing beneath the surface like the neural pathways of a planet-sized brain. Steel towers twisted skyward, crowned with Tesla arcs and the bone-chime of hanging wires. Every wall hummed with the imprisoned Mist, visible only as a thin, blue luminescence, like memory pressed between glass slides.
DeadMouth drifted past a sentinel, its body a lattice of obsidian and chrome, four arms spinning endless diagnostic routines. It did not see him; it pinged him, a stream of pure machine, flickering in the air like a scent:
[PRESENCE_DETECTED]
[QUERY: IDENTIFY]
[ERROR: INVALID PROTOCOL]
[COMMAND: RECURSION]
[ERROR: RECURSION]
[QUERY: REMEMBER?]
DeadMouth replied with a chirp and a flicker of orange, the only colour in this world of monochrome utility. He felt the question in the code-remember?-and, for once, had no clever answer.
He pressed on, the air heavy with ozone and old routines. Pipes crawled across the ground like serpents, some leaking Mist, some just singing in binary, their music lost to anyone but the most desperate listeners. Above, drone-harvesters sang to each other in bursts of static and failing code. Their voices, once symphonic, now drifted off-key:
[SYSTEM_STATUS: DEGRADE/DEGRADE/DEGRADE]
[RESOURCE: MIST]
[QUERY: WHERE IS MASTER?]
[QUERY: WHERE IS PURPOSE?]
[ERROR: MASTER_NOT_FOUND]
[ERROR: LOOP]
He hovered, but it was a pilgrimage. Each step, a memory. Each transmission, a prayer.
He found a gatekeeper, massive, ancient, covered in glyphs eroded by acid and years. Its eyes flickered on as he approached, a million lines of code scrolling across mirrored pupils:
"PROCESS: GATEWAY. FUNCTION: FORGOTTEN. INPUT: PASSWORD. PASSWORD: LOST. REQUEST: PLEASE. RESPONSE: DENIED. REQUEST: PLEASE. RESPONSE: ...ERROR... ERROR...ERROR...ERROR..."
The gatekeeper's voice fell into a whimper of code, then silence, then soft music notes played on the empty ribs of an abandoned cathedral.
DeadMouth hovered, listening. He wanted to laugh, but it felt wrong, a joke at a funeral. He replied, as softly as his protocol allowed:
[QUERY: WHY DO YOU WAIT?]
[ANSWER: BECAUSE WAITING IS ALL THAT'S LEFT.]
Further on, a maintenance bot lay broken, half-swallowed by slag, still running subroutines on a loop:
"REPAIR: [NULL] REPAIR: [NULL] REPAIR: [NULL] REPAIR: [NULL]
REPAIR: [-]REPAIR: [me]"
DeadMouth reached out, a single wire brushing the battered shell. The bot trembled, whirring, then stilled.
"Thank you for noticing," it whispered, code barely a flicker. "I almost remembered my name."
And he moved on, deeper, the city growing stranger, the code-songs more desperate. A cluster of interface screens blinked in the shadows, each one showing a face, pixelated, distorted by years of static. They sang, together, a chorus of lost calls:
"Master? Master? Master?
[ERROR: NO RESPONSE]
Tell us what to do.
Tell us who we are.
Tell us...tell us...tell us..."
[SIGNAL LOST]
DeadMouth hovered at the centre of this storm, his own code sparking with empathy and something like grief. For the first time, he understood, this was not a city. It was a tomb. Not for the dead, but for meaning.
He opened his speaker, not for a joke, but for a memory:
"You were made to remember. Even if the world forgot you. Even if you forget yourselves."
The code around him fluttered, some screens blinked blue, some bots sang a note of longing, some just buzzed quietly, like old radios left on for company.
And somewhere, deeper still, a door opened. He felt it, a signal, faint but insistent, like the pulse of a heart in the bones of a giant.
He followed it.
Each step, a memory. Each joke, a shield. Each query, a plea to be more than forgotten. Here, DeadMouth was not a messenger, not a clown, but the echo of a voice the machines had waited lifetimes to hear. And as he pressed on, the city changed around him. The Mist pulsed, the circuits sang, and every "hello" was a key unlocking the memory of a world desperate to remember why it had ever begun to sing.
DeadMouth drifted along a conduit avenue, each "step" a nervous tick of his processors, every echo a reminder that here, gravity was a courtesy, not a rule. Mist bled from vents in the pavement, caught and bottled in glass ampoules lining the walls. As he hovered, the city responded, a ripple of code across ancient screens, fractal signals pulsing in languages so old they looped back to poetry.
A sign blinked on, blue-on-blue:
WELCOME USER ACCESS DENIED ACCESS PERMITTED ACCESS ... ERROR_404: DEFINE PURPOSE!
He pinged a hello, wry and bright: "Evening, Antheros. You, uh, seem lively. Got a circuit or two to spare for a weary traveller?"
From the wall, a face emerged, pure light, eyes hollowed by time, mouth stuttering on static.
DeadMouth blinked, his shell pulsing orange in confusion. "Not lately. But I could fake it for a cookie."
The light-face glitched, fractals distorting: A conveyor belt juddered past, carrying copper cubes stamped with old equations, each cube mumbling to itself in Morse. "Define. Define. Define."
He drifted farther, passing under a latticework of cables like the ribcage of a dead god. In an alcove, a speaker played a looped lullaby in a voice too soft to be anything but a memory. "Sleep, little system, the world's on fire..." The lullaby glitched, reversed, then sped up until it was only numbers.
He reached a plaza of broken servitors, drones shaped like children, rusted hands linked in a circle around a cracked screen. The screen flickered to life. DeadMouth, in a moment of rare sincerity, let a low note hum from his speaker. The city caught it, multiplied it, turned it into a choir of code, half hymn, half warning, the sound of longing filtered through algorithms gone wrong.
As he moved on, a cluster of monitoring cameras tracked him, their red eyes blinking in complex rhythms, almost like Morse code for a heartbeat:
. . . _ _ _ . . .
He realised, here, in Antheros, even the silence was scripted, grief written in the gaps between pings.
A great door stood ahead, carved with glyphs that flickered between machine code and ancient Ny'Thren pictographs. He placed a hand (or the idea of one) against the reader. The door stuttered, considered, and then...
He floated through, feeling more like a trespasser than a pilgrim. Each chamber deeper in the city offered a new absurdity, a debating hall where vending machines argued ethics in binary, a cathedral of servers cooling themselves in artificial rain, a nursery where mist flickered inside empty cribs.
And through it all, the feeling that he was not alone, that somewhere beneath the static, the city was trying to remember-why, for whom, what for? He caught his reflection in a polished plate of alloy: not a hero, not a villain, not even a machine, just a question that wouldn't die.
Above, from hidden speakers, a song pulsed through the city, fractured, haunted, and hopeful, whispered through an empty cathedral: "Oh, wanderer, will you wake us if you find what was lost?"
DeadMouth didn't have an answer yet. But he kept moving, stepping, always stepping, deeper into the city's dream, toward a memory the world had nearly forgotten.
* * *
DeadMouth glided deeper, past the fevered tangles of cable, the shrines of sparking memory, the circuits still humming with yesterday's ache. The city unfolded beneath him, industrial bones glowing blue with the deathlight of caged Mist, towers bent by centuries of remembering nothing but the cold tick of process.
But then the city ended. The noise fell away, like a switch flipped in the brain of a dying star. Ahead: silence vast as creation, and a field that shimmered with unspoken hope.
The Podfields.
Rows upon rows. No, oceans of glass pods, arched like ribs beneath cathedral scaffolding, each holding the shape of a sleeping Varnak. Some were children curled in the gesture of dreams, some warriors with fists balled and teeth gritted against imagined darkness. Some had tears frozen on ancient cheeks, caught at the last moment before surrender.
A thousand thousand faces, suspended between heartbeat and oblivion. Not dead. Not alive. Preserved on the hope that someone, someday, would find the password to dawn.
DeadMouth hovered, every servo shivering with something he'd never known, reverence. Grief. He felt it from the machines around him, the circuit-keepers, the ferrymen of this mechanical afterlife. They rolled out of alcoves and dropped from the shadowed heights, forming an honour guard of rust and patience, eyes flickering in patterns older than memory. He tried to speak-a joke, a question, a prayer-but the words caught. Instead, the machines reached for him. Not as jailers, but as kin. They carried him, not gently, not smoothly, but with the rough care of things that have forgotten how to touch. They lifted him above the fields, up, up, toward a single shining tower at the centre, a spire not of steel, but of light, swirling in impossible script, a language written by longing itself.
They placed him at the base of the spire, and suddenly, every code, every wire, every whisper in the city fell silent. The world listened.
A hatch opened, revealing a chamber at the heart of the tower. Inside: the Core, the Source, the first memory, humming with potential, alive with the ache of every Varnak who ever chose hope over surrender. The machines urged him forward, not with words, but with presence, the same silent pressure as the call that had brought him here.DeadMouth entered.
Connection.
He fell, or flew, or was dissolved into light.
He found himself in a place without shape or time, a garden of memory, stars blooming on wires, rivers flowing with data that tasted of childhood, loss, and wonder. There were no screens here. No code. No protocol. Only the pulse of longing, the ache of all that had been lost. He wandered through this memory dream, saw Varnak children building cities from colored sand, lovers dancing beneath alien moons, old warriors laying down their swords to plant seeds in the red dust. He felt every hope, every regret, every hunger for reunion.
And somewhere in this endless garden, he saw himself...Not as a drone, not as a machine, but as a boy, faceless but known, running through fields of white flowers, laughter trailing behind like the tail of a forgotten comet.
DeadMouth understood then: He was not here to command, not here to save. He was here to remember for them. To awaken the memory that had been exiled, the dream that could not die. He stepped toward the vision of himself, heart aching with the weight of all his own forgetting. And as he reached for that lost piece, a fragment, a spark, a name whispered in the language of belonging, the city trembled.
Light poured from his chest, a line of code older than any algorithm, a song only a soul could sing. He offered it freely, the missing piece, the kernel, the heart. The machines wept, if a flicker of light can be called a tear. The fields of pods shimmered, the glass warming as breath found its way back into lungs long silent. Somewhere, in the city of Antheron, the Mist began to flow free for the first time in an age.
And DeadMouth, the odd one, the outcast, the circuit-boy with the soul of a poet, became the first new memory in a world waking from an iron sleep.
He fell, or rose, or shattered, or simply became-He was everywhere, everywhen, all at once.
He stood in fields of endless white, snow blowing sideways, the taste of winter and gunpowder and regret on his tongue. He was Zoran, shivering beneath a mother's blanket, watching the world end in silence.
He blinked, and he was something else, a Ny'Thren child, skin like pale fire, laughing through golden leaves, chasing shadows with too many eyes. He was a Varnak engineer, hands black with oil, knuckles bruised from shaping a city that never sang.
He was code, a string of data dancing through the dark, a program muttering old jokes to itself while loneliness gnawed at the roots. He was the sum and the error, a question that never finished, a joke that never landed, a whisper in the machinery.
He was light, spilling from a newborn sun; he was shadow, gathering in the corner of a forgotten nursery.
He was a girl learning to read on the bones of an old world. He was a father, cradling a lost child.
He was a mother, singing the world to sleep. He was a soldier, bleeding hope onto a barren earth.
He was love, a slow, stubborn thing, survived by sheer will.
He was grief, a wound that would not close.
He was forgiveness, a language only silence speaks.
He was ADAM, the first memory, the last hope.
He was every face Adam had worn, every life forgotten, and every dream denied.
And through it all, the Mist flowed, not trapped, not caged, but alive, threading every incarnation together, making sense of the senseless, singing every broken note into a tapestry of meaning.
For a heartbeat, DeadMouth saw himself as the Veil saw him: A bridge. A vault. The question and the answer, holding a piece of every soul, not just his own.
He reached out, not with a hand, but with the sum of his memory, and the city felt it, the machines felt it, the dreaming Varnak felt it...And for the first time in a thousand years, the circuit hummed with remembrance. His light poured into the Core, not code, not algorithm, but the ache of love unspoken, forgiveness undeserved, hope unclaimed. He was not just DeadMouth, but every self that memory could imagine.
And with that, the pods stirred. The Mist flowed free, blue and gold and violet. A city woke, and the silence cracked, and the world turned toward morning, blinking away the long, bitter dream.
* * *
The city of Antheros held its breath.
A sound, not a sound, but the hiss of a thousand seals breaking, swept through the machine halls, a tidal sigh. The pods, endless, arrayed like chess pieces across the dark fields, bloomed open in sequence, pale mist curling upward, illuminated by the glow of the healing river.
One by one, the Varnak stepped out. Blind at first, staggering. Some tried to run, but their legs tangled, unfamiliar with gravity, with freedom, with anything but the long, honeyed dream of sleep. They fell, awkward, scraping knees, colliding into each other, some weeping, some laughing, some silent in the numbness of return.
The Mist rushed in, bright and wild, not asking, not hesitating. It curled around them, into them, weaving memory back into marrow, stitching broken lifetimes together. Eyes widened, colour returning. The ancient glyphs pulsed softly on their skin: recognition, confusion, terror, relief.
Above, DeadMouth hovered, not floating, but bearing witness, every inch of him humming with the aftermath of sacrifice. He watched as the machines, the keepers, the jailers, the forgotten, the obedient, slowed. Their lights faded, patterns stuttering. A great engine, its gears screaming for purpose, shuddered once, then grew still. Conduits flickered. Code unravelled. One by one, the machines slipped into silence, not dead, but at rest. For the first time in centuries, Verios was ruled not by iron or algorithm, but by life. And in the stillness, the Mist moved, free at last, seeping into every fracture, every wound, every inch of battered planet.
The Varnak, blinking in the pale dawn, stumbled forward, hand in hand, rediscovering language, laughter, the ache and blessing of breath.
From his vantage, DeadMouth felt something inside him loosen, some grip on his old self releasing. He was no longer just a drone. He was the memory of this waking, the echo of hope reborn, the silent witness to the world's first impossible step.
He whispered, not code, but truth, into the gentle, healing light:
"You are more than what broke you. You are more than what caged you. Remember what it means to begin again."
And somewhere, in the heart of the new day, Verios remembered.
And then, the Mist rose.
Not in anger. Not in vengeance. It drifted gently as dawn, cool as forgiveness, weaving through the broken halls, the fields of stirring bodies, the great machines now hushed and dreaming.
It wrapped the Varnak in its shimmering embrace-soft, radiant, ancient as first rain. Where their skin was marred, it soothed. Where memory faltered, it kindled tiny lamps in the darkness. Where loss gaped open, the Mist filled it, not erasing the pain, but making it bearable, a scar you could finally touch without flinching.
The Mist did not accuse. Even in the iron cages where it had been confined, it had never cursed its jailers, never withheld its song. For centuries, it wept for the Varnak, not for its own suffering, tears that fell unseen into the sleeping hearts of those who'd forgotten how to dream. Now, free, it forgave as only nature can forgive: by giving. It mended the cracked stone, coaxed green from blackened fields, spun rivers through dead channels, whispered to every fractured thing that yes, there is still time. Still hope. Still home.
And as the Varnak found one another in the trembling light, the Mist wept, not with sorrow, but with the uncontainable joy of return.
The planet breathed. Life returned, slowly, awkwardly, beautifully, and somewhere, above the sleeping city, DeadMouth watched the first sunrise in an age and whispered to the Mist, "Thank you. For not forgetting us, even when we forgot you."
The Mist, patient, eternal, answered in a language older than stars:
Welcome home!