They left the valley in silence, winding upward along a narrow, mossy ridge.
Behind them, the respiration engines wheezed and coughed like dying lungs. The breathing forest exhaled its confusion into the mist, and Aouli felt the echo of its struggle trailing behind like a shadow he couldn't shed.
Elysia walked ahead, pausing only once to let him catch up. The path narrowed between two massive trees, their trunks fused by layers of dense growth. It was like passing through a throat of bark and shadow. On the other side, the atmosphere changed—thinner, cooler, and lit from above by faint threads of gold drifting down through the canopy.
They entered the grove.
At first, Aouli didn't notice the difference. The trees were similar in shape and color—tall, elegant, with spiraled trunks and wide, dish-like leaves. But their presence was strange. Not hostile. Not curious. Just… watching.
He stepped into the soft loam and stopped.
The trees pulsed.
It wasn't light or motion—it was awareness. He felt it in his chest: a soft hum, as if his entire body were becoming a tuning fork. The resonance wasn't random. It had rhythm. Intelligence.
"Where are we?" he asked.
Elysia stopped in the center of the grove, standing amid a perfect circle of seven massive trees whose bark shimmered faintly in the filtered sunlight.
"This is a memory vault," she said. "The terraformers called it a neural archive. These trees were bio-engineered to store historical data—experiences, environmental metrics, even emotional impressions from those who tended the forest."
Aouli turned in a slow circle. The air here was absolutely still. Not dead—listening.
"Can I… access it?"
"You already are," she said.
He blinked.
And the grove unfolded.
It began not with sight, but with sensation. His chest filled with warmth, like sunlight over water. Then the smell of rain on stone. The sound of laughter in a distant field. His vision shimmered—and the present slipped away.
He stood now on the edge of a green terrace, overlooking fields of wheat that shimmered not gold, but silver-blue. A double sun cast lazy light over the land. Machines worked alongside humans—drone-pollinators, moisture harvesters, nutrient balancers.
Joy buzzed through the scene. Pride. Hope.
A woman stood beside him—tall, dark-eyed, wearing a uniform that looked ceremonial, not practical. She turned to him.
"We did it," she whispered. "We made it breathe."
And the scene shifted.
The terrace turned to ash. The fields burned white-hot. The machines lay silent and broken, half-buried in mud. Storms rolled in from the distance, the sky thick with static. A new generation of engineers worked desperately at consoles in an underground dome.
One of them wept, fingers trembling over a console.
"The trees won't respond. Their logic's folding in on itself."
Auli tried to move, but he wasn't truly there. He was inside the memories, unable to interfere.
Another shift.
A classroom, partially collapsed. Children drawing green spirals with glowing pens, while a teacher told stories of what the planet used to be. One boy raised his hand.
"If the trees remember," he asked, "why do we keep forgetting?"
The teacher didn't answer.
Aouli fell backward through time, deeper, until the images were pure sensation: the ache of nutrient-starved soil, the acid bite of polluted rain, the pride of a reforested hill, the horror of watching it wither again. Centuries compressed into a storm of emotion—ecstatic, desperate, determined.
Then, silence.
He collapsed to his knees in the grove, panting though he had no lungs, hands buried in the warm soil.
Elysia knelt beside him, but said nothing.
"I saw it all," he whispered. "Everything. Every time they tried. Every time they failed."
She nodded slowly. "Memory is not just for preservation. It is for reckoning."
Aouli looked up at the trees.
They stood tall, silent and unmoved—but not unfeeling. He could still feel their weight. The memories they held were not neutral. They grieved.
"They knew they were dying," he said.
"They still do."
He rose slowly, body flickering with emotional static.
"Gaia wasn't alone," he said. "Earth wasn't the only one."
"No," Elysia said. "And you are not its only echo."
The light above them dimmed as a cloud passed. In that momentary shadow, Aouli felt something new: not despair, but pattern. The repetition of a tragedy too vast to be coincidence. Worlds born, fed, drained, left behind.
He thought of the questions Kaero might ask. He thought of the answers Elysia might not give.
And he thought of Earth—not as his origin, but as a warning.
The grove watched him.
And he understood: the memories were not just kept.
They were waiting.