The river cut through the skeleton of the city like a slow knife.
Moonlight rippled across the water, broken by the carcasses of old bridges and half-sunken towers. In the distance, generators groaned and flared, throwing pulses of white across the current. It was said the water here used to be clean enough to drink; now it shimmered with oil, glass dust, and the faint phosphorescence of dying machines.
Kai Merrow moved along the rusted catwalks with the sure balance of someone born to this ruin. A lantern dangled from his belt, dimmed low to avoid attracting the Navy's scouts. His fingers were raw from a night of diving, and his sack clanked with small finds—nothing rare, nothing that would cover another week's ration slips. He told himself he'd try one last dive before heading home.
That's when the light flickered beneath the water.
Not blue, like lumen residue, but white-gold—pulsing in rhythm, as if something beneath the surface had a heartbeat.
He hesitated only a moment before tying the rope around his waist and dropping in.
The water closed over his head like a second sky. Cold burned through his jacket. He kicked downward through clouds of silt and metal flakes, following the pulse until his hand brushed something smooth. It wasn't stone or steel. It was warm.
He dug around it, prying the object free. A sphere, glassy but alive, light spilling through cracks that looked like veins. When he broke the surface, gasping, the sphere hummed softly in his hands. The hum shaped itself into a pattern—half sound, half thought.
Three futures remain.
One ends in fire.
One ends in forgetting.
One ends with you.
He froze. The voice wasn't in his ears; it was inside him.
Wind hissed through the hollow towers. The lantern on his belt flickered and went out, as though the fragment had stolen its flame. Across the river, far in the dark, he saw other lights—search beams sweeping the water. The Hollow Navy. Scavengers turned soldiers. They were getting closer.
Kai shoved the sphere inside his coat and pressed it against his chest. The warmth seeped through the fabric, steady and alive. He didn't know what it was, but instinct told him one thing: don't sell this. Don't let them find it.
He climbed back to the catwalk, dripping and shaking. Somewhere behind him, a siren wailed. The river seemed to answer with a low, metallic moan—the sound of the city remembering something it had lost.
The alleys above the river were alive with whispers.
Every scavenger, trader, and deserter in the Lower Ruins had heard the Navy's sirens. When they screamed, someone was either dying—or had found something worth dying for.
Kai cut through the backstreets, his boots silent on the wet iron. The storm gutters hissed around him, spitting light from the old city's veins—electric runoff, they called it. Ghost-light. The remains of a world that once ran on stars.
He kept his hand on the sphere under his jacket. The pulse inside it had changed. It wasn't a heartbeat anymore. It was a rhythm—slow, deliberate, almost like a language trying to form words through his skin.
Do not return me.
The sky is watching.
The words were faint, yet they carried the weight of a command. He stumbled to a stop, back pressed against the wall. The sky? Watching? There hadn't been stars visible above Vale in over a decade. Only the dense clouds and the perpetual auroras—the Ashlights, as they called them. Remnants of the Fall.
He clenched his teeth. "What the hell are you?"
No answer this time. Just the low hum, rising like breath before a scream.
A light flashed at the end of the alley—blue, harsh, unsteady. He turned sharply. Navy scouts. Their masks glowed with thin lines of data-light, and the hum of a drone followed behind them. Kai ducked under a collapsed sign and slipped through a maintenance duct just before their beams sliced the walls. The air in the duct was thick with mold and electricity.
He crawled until the noise faded. When he emerged, he found himself inside one of the city's forgotten chambers—an old observatory buried beneath layers of ruin. The dome above was cracked, and through the fracture he could see the Ashlights pulsing across the clouds. The sphere in his coat responded—its glow syncing with the rhythm of the false stars above.
He placed it on a broken console. The light spread like veins across the surface, igniting long-dead circuits. Holographic dust shimmered into being—maps, constellations, fragments of unknown languages, all spinning around him.
In the center of it all, a phrase appeared—etched in drifting light:
THE ARCHIVE OF FALLING STARS — ENTRY UNLOCKED.
Kai stepped back, eyes wide. The letters twisted, forming symbols he didn't recognize. His breath fogged in the air, though the room was warm. Then, from the projection, a figure began to take shape—a silhouette of light and static. Tall, faceless, yet human.
"You should not exist."
The voice was layered—ancient and new, male and female, echoing as if spoken by a thousand forgotten throats. Kai's heart froze.
"But since you do… perhaps the Archive has chosen again."
The light intensified. The world blurred.
And then—nothing but the sound of his own breathing, and the faint scent of burned air.
When Kai opened his eyes, the world wasn't the same color anymore.
The observatory still stood around him, but its walls were alive—etched with faintly glowing constellations that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. The broken dome above no longer showed storm clouds or Ashlights; instead, a vast expanse of black glass sky, and within it, a hundred thousand falling stars frozen mid-descent, as though time had stopped mid-breath.
He blinked once, twice. His reflection wavered on the console's polished metal — and for the briefest instant, it blinked back.
"You shouldn't have touched me, Kai Merrow."
The voice wasn't in the air anymore. It was inside him, sliding through the cracks of his thoughts like light through fractured glass. He stumbled backward. The sphere on the table rose, floating an inch above the surface, its glow bleeding into every corner of the chamber.
"Who are you?" Kai hissed, half-panicked. "What do you want from me?"
"Want?"
"No. I remember."
The light flared—then split. Fragments of burning starlight spun around him, forming circles that folded inward like collapsing galaxies. Each spark showed a flicker of something — cities made of mirrors, oceans of people walking through stars, a colossal machine devouring constellations.
And then—an image that seared itself into his mind:
A sky bleeding, constellations screaming as they tore themselves apart.
Kai dropped to his knees. The visions burned through his skull, too real to be illusion.
"You hear them too now," the voice said softly. "The fallen. The ones you call stars. They are not lights. They are records."
He gasped, his palms hitting the cold metal floor. "Records of what?"
"Of everything the universe wants to forget."
The air itself trembled. The circuits dimmed. The sphere fell suddenly, landing in his hands with the softness of a dying heartbeat.
The constellations faded. The observatory darkened again — back to rust and ruin. But something had changed. The symbols on the wall didn't vanish entirely. They stayed, faint, like scars of light burned into reality.
Kai could still feel the voice's presence, whispering just behind his thoughts. It was quieter now, almost tender.
"Hide me. They will come for you."
He stood up, dizzy, staring at his reflection in a cracked mirror. His left eye wasn't normal anymore. Beneath the iris, faint constellations shimmered — tiny, shifting points of light.
He touched it. Cold. Alien. Alive.
And far above the ruins, where no stars should exist, something stirred behind the clouds — a faint pulse answering his.
The sky had noticed.
The morning broke like an argument.
Gray light clawed through the misted skyline of the ruined quarter, dragging color out of the river's oily surface. Kai stood on the half-collapsed balcony of his shack, the fragment wrapped in torn sailcloth and pressed against his ribs. He hadn't slept. Every time his eyes closed, he saw that bleeding sky again — stars screaming, names whispering through him like static.
Below, the docks were coming alive. Salvagers shouted over the groan of engines as they pushed their barges into the current. The air smelled of ozone and brine, and somewhere in the east, a bell tolled three times — the signal for a Survey Sweep.
Kai's stomach clenched. That meant one thing.
The Guild was coming.
He slipped the wrapped fragment into a rusted lockbox and shoved it under the floorboards. The box pulsed once, faintly, like a heart remembering itself.
"They sense me," the voice murmured inside his mind. "You carry a signal too bright to hide for long."
"Then I'll dim it," Kai muttered, throwing on his jacket. "You stay quiet."
"I can try."
He left the shack and joined the crowd flowing toward the central platform — a giant iron disk half-buried in silt, once the landing zone for star harvesters. Now it served as a checkpoint for the Guild's sweeps.
The Guildmen arrived in their pale armor — ceramic plates etched with constellations, masks shaped like featureless moons. Their leader carried a scanning rod that hummed with resonance; the sound made Kai's bones itch.
One by one, the salvagers were scanned, their barges inspected. Any trace of unregistered star matter meant confiscation — or conscription.
When it was Kai's turn, he forced himself to stand still. The rod passed over him; the air rippled faintly, then fell silent.
"Clear," said the Guildman, voice mechanical.
Kai exhaled. Too soon. The rod buzzed again, louder this time, shaking the air between them. A faint shimmer — a heartbeat out of place.
The Guildman froze. "Wait."
A sudden whisper filled Kai's head.
"Do not breathe."
The world tilted. For an instant, the entire platform fell silent — wind stopped, river stilled. Then, the Guildman's visor flickered and went dark. His scanner cracked in two with a sound like shattering glass.
The others staggered back, shouting, weapons half-drawn. "Signal disruption!" someone yelled.
By the time they recovered, Kai was already gone — sprinting into the smoke and noise of the lower wharves.
He didn't remember running. Only the pounding in his chest and the echo of that whisper:
"They have seen your resonance. You cannot stay."
He reached the end of the docks, where the city bled into swamp and silence. The river stretched ahead like a vein of black mercury, its far side lost in fog.
Behind him, sirens began to wail — the Guild summoning reinforcements.
Ahead, the mist moved. Slowly. Intentionally.
Something — or someone — was waiting in it.
And the star in his pocket began to hum again, like a compass remembering its purpose.
The mist pressed against him like breath. Thick, wet, and oddly warm — as if the fog itself were alive and watching. Kai slowed his steps. Every ripple in the water seemed to echo back, distorted.
He looked over his shoulder. The city was fading into the haze — its towers reduced to silhouettes, its sirens now just faint animal wails swallowed by distance.
He was alone.
"You shouldn't have come this far," the voice murmured inside.
"The river keeps its own dead."
Kai ignored it, or tried to. He pushed forward until the planks beneath his boots became soft with moss and salt. The world was narrowing — the air tasting of iron and static — when he saw the light.
A faint lantern, hanging from a crooked pole half-buried in silt.
And beneath it, a figure.
Wrapped in black robes patched with star-maps, the person sat cross-legged atop a heap of driftwood. Their face was hidden behind a copper mask shaped like a half-moon, polished smooth by time. Around them floated small spheres of blue-white light — each one humming at a pitch that made Kai's teeth ache.
He froze. "You're Guild?"
The figure tilted their head, slow and bird-like.
"No," a voice answered — calm, androgynous, as old as rain. "We are what the Guild pretends to be. Keepers, not harvesters."
The spheres drifted closer, circling Kai in lazy orbits. He felt their pull in his bones — the same vibration that lived in the fragment under his shirt.
"You've touched one," the stranger said. "It's still singing."
Kai's hand went instinctively to his chest. "How do you—"
"Because I hear it." The masked head turned slightly, as if listening to something far away. "It's afraid."
"They're not wrong," the voice inside him whispered. "But they will want to cut me open to see what I remember."
Kai's breath caught. "What are you talking about?"
The stranger rose, robes trailing light through the mist. "You're marked now, boy. The Guild will follow your resonance until you burn or vanish. But if you want to live — if you want to understand what you've bound — find the Archive."
"The Archive?"
"The place where fallen stars go to dream."
Before Kai could ask more, the mist thickened again, swallowing the figure whole. The lantern flickered, then died.
He stood there for a long moment, the river silent, the city a faraway hum. Then the fragment pulsed once — a quiet heartbeat — and his mind filled with a single image not his own:
A vast underground sea of glass, where stars slept beneath the water, whispering to each other.
The voice in his head spoke again — this time quieter, almost human.
"That's where I came from."
By the time Kai made it back across the flood-bridge, dawn had already torn the sky into ash and brass. The quarter below was no longer his.
Steel barricades coiled through the alleys like ribs; Guild banners hung from cranes, fluttering with coded light. Every doorway shimmered with a faint, humming lattice — containment fields humming at a pitch that made skin crawl.
He had seen star quarantines before.
Never this fast.
A column of armored drones hovered over the docks, their lenses glowing amber as they swept beams of resonance through the fog. Men and women in pale uniforms carried coils of silver thread — signal nets — tossing them into the river to trap whatever fragment remained unclaimed.
And over it all loomed a single airship, its hull carved with a symbol of a blindfolded eye — the mark of the Palimpsest Church.
Kai ducked under a rusted stairwell, heart hammering. "They got here in hours," he whispered.
"Minutes," the voice corrected. "I burned bright enough to wake the watchers."
"Then dim again," Kai hissed.
"I can't. Not anymore. The moment I sang, I was remembered."
The phrase made no sense, but something in the tone froze him. Remembered.
The way the word tasted — like an old wound reopened.
He peered through a crack in the wall. At the center of the docks, the Guild had erected a spire — a temporary scanner tower, already glowing with amber veins. Beneath it knelt a man in shackles. Kai recognized him — Fenn, a diver from the upper rafts.
A Guild officer lowered his mask and spoke. "Unregistered resonance detected in Sector Nine. You were nearest the signal. Where is the fragment?"
Fenn's voice broke. "I don't know— I just heard a hum—"
The officer's gauntlet lit. There was a flash. Then silence. The body hit the water with a hiss.
Kai turned away, bile rising.
"They fear what they can't catalogue," the voice murmured. "So they erase it."
"Like the Church," Kai muttered.
"Worse. The Church at least believes in forgetting for mercy. The Guild does it for ownership."
A shout cut through the air. "There! By the stairs!"
Kai's pulse spiked. Boots thundered against metal; the stairwell rattled. He sprinted, vaulting over crates, sliding under pipes dripping with coolant. The fragment throbbed against his ribs, guiding him through blind corners like a heartbeat-compass.
He burst onto an upper catwalk — and froze.
The airship above was lowering anchors of light. Each line carved through the mist, burning away everything it touched.
And in the brief, searing glare, he saw shapes moving inside the radiance — figures made of glass, walking upside-down on the airship's shadow.
They were not Guild.
"Don't look at them," the voice warned, suddenly sharp. "They remember hunger."
Kai ran.
Kai ran until the city ended.
The catwalk shuddered underfoot; a thousand pipes exhaled steam like dying lungs. Somewhere behind him, voices shouted, mechanical and urgent. A flash of amber light tore through the fog — a Guild scanner beam — but he was already sliding down a maintenance shaft, landing hard in a tunnel slick with condensation.
The air here was thick with the smell of old electricity. Light seeped from cracked conduits in pale pulses. The river's voice above had become a distant heartbeat.
Kai pushed forward, deeper, until the noise of the surface vanished entirely. The corridor narrowed, walls wet and humming with faint vibrations. When he brushed them, sparks ran up his arm — images flickered in his mind, like someone else's memories trying to breathe through him.
"Keep going," the voice murmured. "The air down here remembers the old world."
"The old world?" he whispered, ducking under a rusted pipe. "You mean before the Fall?"
"Before the stars began to fall at all."
He paused. "You were alive then?"
"Alive is the wrong word. I was recording."
The corridor opened into a vast chamber — a forgotten reservoir. Water lay still across the floor, black and glassy. Broken catwalks jutted from the walls like the ribs of a colossal creature. And hanging above the water, half-buried in stone, was something impossible.
A door.
Not metal. Not stone.
It was made of light — faint and shifting, like the shimmer of a reflection that refused to fade. Within it moved tiny constellations, thousands of them, orbiting in silence.
Kai approached slowly. The water mirrored his steps, each ripple fracturing the stars within the doorway. His pulse quickened.
"That's it," the voice whispered. "The edge of the Archive."
He swallowed. "You mean—this is real?"
"All archives are real. Some are made of paper. Some of flesh. This one of memory."
He took another step. The air thinned. His reflection broke apart, replaced by something else — a shadow of him, but older. The older Kai stood on the other side of the light, eyes hollow, holding the same star fragment — but his hand was missing, replaced by something luminous and wrong.
He froze.
"Do not step through," the voice said sharply. "Not yet. To cross is to remember too much too soon."
Kai stumbled back. The light pulsed once — bright enough to blind — then faded, retreating into the stone like it had never been there.
The tunnel darkened. Only the fragment's glow remained, soft and steady in his palm.
"Why show me that?" he whispered.
"Because every choice echoes, Kai Merrow."
"And you've already begun to sing your first future."
He looked down at the sphere — its heartbeat matching his own — and realized with a hollow certainty:
Whatever this was, he couldn't give it back.
The world had noticed him. The stars had remembered him.
And somewhere deep beneath the drowned city, the Archive was listening.