Eclipsed Horizon — Chapter 3: "Echoes in the Glass"
The infirmary lights dimmed one by one, fading into sterile twilight.
Cael Drayen sat upright on the cot, heartbeat monitor still ticking in the corner. His Pulseband glowed faintly around his wrist, its circuits flickering like something unsure if it still belonged to him.
Mireen Solis was still there—arms folded, eyes fixed on the diagnostics. She hadn't left since the collapse.
"You're lucky," she said quietly. "Neural feedback that high usually fries the cortex. The system's still recalibrating your sync."
Cael flexed his hand. The afterglow of the Pulseblade session shimmered briefly beneath his veins—blue light pulsing with his heartbeat. "It didn't feel like feedback," he said. "It felt… aware."
Mireen looked up. "Aware?"
He hesitated. "Like the system was watching me back."
She studied him for a long moment, the medic's caution giving way to curiosity. "You think the simulation responded to you?"
"I saw someone in there," Cael said. "A girl. She wasn't part of the code."
Mireen froze mid-movement. "…The system can't render an independent avatar without an uplink."
"Then it wasn't a render."
He met her eyes—steady, certain. "She knew my name."
---
Zephyr Base loomed over the lower cloud belt, suspended by seven magnetic pylons that shimmered in Aether light. Its towers glowed against the endless storm below.
Inside the central command hall, the senior staff gathered before a projection sphere pulsing with static.
Commander Arden Lyss stood at the forefront—silver hair cropped short, coat lined with insignia of the First Eclipser. Her gaze could have cut through armor.
"Play it again," she ordered.
The technician replayed the footage from the simulation dome. Static consumed most of it, but for a brief second the room filled with the ghostly image of a girl of light—face indistinct, form half-rendered before collapsing the feed.
Then the footage ended in white noise.
"Pulse data confirms a Class-Three Resonance Breach," the tech said. "Origin trace: Cadet Drayen's neural sync stream. But the interference signature—doesn't match his pattern. It's… dual."
Arden's eyes narrowed. "Dual resonance? Within a closed simulation?"
"Yes, ma'am. Almost as if another consciousness piggybacked on his link."
The room fell silent.
Finally, Arden spoke. "Purge the visual records. Restrict access to Level-Black. The last thing we need is the council sniffing anomalies in our cadet grid."
She turned toward the glass wall overlooking the storm.
The scar across the sky—the one that had appeared after the collapse—still lingered faintly beyond the clouds, a luminous seam cutting through the horizon.
Her voice dropped to a whisper.
"So it begins again."
---
Later that night, Cael walked the empty observation deck of Zephyr. The stormline shimmered below like a second ocean.
He could still hear her voice—the sky remembers everything we try to forget.
Every time he blinked, he saw fragments: her hand reaching out, the sea of glass, the fracture beneath their feet.
Footsteps echoed behind him.
"Still brooding, cadet?"
He turned. Jax Torren leaned against the railing, grin as casual as ever but eyes more serious than usual.
"Figured you'd be grounded for weeks after short-circuiting the dome," Jax said. "Instead they just gave you med duty and silence."
"They're hiding something," Cael replied. "You saw it too—before everything went white."
Jax scratched the back of his neck. "I saw something. Looked like a glitch made of gold."
Cael said nothing.
After a long pause, Jax's tone softened. "Mireen told me you flatlined. For twenty seconds. People don't come back from that, Cael. Maybe whatever you saw wasn't supposed to be seen."
Cael's gaze drifted back to the scar in the sky.
"Then why does it feel like it saw me first?"
---
In the operations bay, Sena Korr was tearing apart her console. Tools and holograms littered the floor.
"Come on, come on," she muttered, bypassing safety locks. "Where's the ghost in the code?"
A projection of the collapsed simulation flickered above her desk. She zoomed in on a single data spike—an energy pattern pulsing in the exact rhythm of a human heartbeat.
"Impossible…" she whispered.
The pulse signature wasn't Cael's.
It belonged to no registered identity in the system.
And yet, at its center, the waveform formed two interlocking rings of light—an eclipse symbol.
Sena's eyes widened. "You're not just a glitch, are you?"
The console flickered again. For an instant, words scrolled across the hologram in a voice not her own.
> "The sky never forgets."
Then the feed died.
---
That night, as Zephyr floated above the endless storm, a low hum reverberated through the pylons.
Aether lights flickered across every corridor, one by one, until the entire base glowed faintly gold—just for a heartbeat—then went dark again.
No one saw the figure standing on the outer hull, hair flowing in artificial wind, eyes reflecting both suns at once.
Lyra Vance, or what was left of her, watched the scar in the sky.
And smiled faintly.
> "So you remember too."