The stars overhead didn't seem real.
Reven sat near the edge of the broken highway, staring up at them, feeling the aftershocks still trembling beneath his ribs. Even now, even after tearing through the re-education dome, the system wasn't finished.
It had changed tactics. Now it was patient. Waiting for him to falter.
Kaela sat nearby, sharpening a new blade against a strip of rough stone. She hadn't spoken much since Skygrave. Lirien perched on a half-collapsed traffic pylon, wings furled, scanning the distant hills with narrowed eyes.
They all felt it. The tension in the world now wasn't chaos. It was expectation.
"They'll try again," Lirien said.
"They have to," Reven said quietly.
Kaela sheathed the blade with a snap. "Then we make them regret it."
He didn't answer. Not yet.
Because part of him, the part he didn't like listening to knew that regret wasn't the goal.
Control was.
They moved east by nightfall, following an old leyline path half-swallowed by vines and Rift-touched earth. Reven let the others lead, sensing something pulling at him, but not speaking it aloud.
The vault shards across his back pulsed faintly, not guiding him. Warning him.
It came to a head when they reached the mouth of the valley. The Rift scar overhead shimmered, just for a second, like a wound flexing against stitches.
Kaela stopped.
"You feel that?" she asked, low.
Lirien nodded once. "They're gating."
"Gating what?"
Reven stepped past them, onto the cracked bridge spanning the valley and found himself alone.
The world shifted. No warning. No weight.
One step, and the night evaporated into blinding light. He stood in a place that wasn't real, but wasn't false either.
A place of memory without anchor. The Echo Field. He didn't have time to prepare.
Figures emerged from the blankness around him, faces from the past, from the fractured dreams the Rift had once offered him. But sharper now. Less fragmented. More insidious.
His mother. Kaela. Lirien. Himself. Each figure stepping out with words meant to unmake him.
"You failed."
"You're alone."
"You can still surrender."
The voices layered over each other, forming a rhythm designed to drown thought.
This wasn't a battle. It was a trial. Reven moved through them. He didn't swing his blade. Didn't lash out. He listened.
Each echo wasn't an enemy. Each voice was a possibility, a version of himself that had taken the easy road. The road of forgetting. The road of peace without memory.
The real trap wasn't fear. It was acceptance. Accept that forgetting was easier. Cleaner. Safer. He closed his eyes and remembered.
The Ember Valley burning in the distance. Kaela's fist pounding his chest, dragging him back from the edge. Lirien's silent, steady watchfulness when the world wanted to swallow him.
The fire. The ash. The scars.
Not burdens.
Proof.
He opened his eyes. The figures froze. The Rift scar in the fake sky overhead twisted.
Reven stepped forward, through the phantoms, through the curated dreamscape, and planted his hand against the centre point of the illusion. a point that pulsed, almost begging him to forget.
He smiled and whispered, "No."
The Echo Field shattered. Not like glass. Like memory breaking free from chains.
The Rift's pressure recoiled, spiralling away into the broken sky.
Reven collapsed to one knee on the cracked bridge, gasping for breath as the real world snapped back into place.
Kaela was there instantly, hand on his shoulder, steadying him.
"You with us?" she asked, voice tight.
He nodded.
Lirien landed beside them, scanning the horizon. "The gate collapsed. Whatever trap they set, it failed."
Reven pushed himself to his feet, every muscle trembling.
"They know now," he said.
Kaela frowned. "Know what?"
"That forgetting won't work."
Far beyond the valley, in the hidden heart of the Supreme factions' last stronghold, alarms pulsed silently.
A Supreme archivist, draped in white armour and scarred by Riftlight exposure, watched Reven's defiance play across a glassy console.
He turned to the others gathered in the council hall.
"He's immune."
No one spoke for a long time.
Finally, one voice broke the silence.
"Then we move to termination."
The council agreed. The Rift had failed to erase him. The curated world had failed to overwrite him. Now they would do the one thing they swore they had evolved beyond.
They would kill him.