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Chapter 86 – Emberscar Manifest
There were places even memory refused to hold.
The Emberlands were one such place.
North of Vestigial-3, across broken ley lines and collapsed temporal seams, lay a jagged field of red-glass ruins and warped metal. This had once been a Tower testing ground—one of the first to trial memory-extraction protocols on live subjects. The records simply labeled it "Site: Emberscar." No coordinates. No survivors. No mercy.
Until now.
Erevan stepped off the glider skiff, his boots crunching against charred gravel that shimmered like emberglass under the twin moons. He could feel it in the air—the pain hadn't left. It lingered like a heatstroke memory, coiled around the bones of the land. Even Yuren, usually buried in calculations, moved with visible unease.
"Are you sure it's still active?" Serah asked, tightening her scarf against the biting wind.
"No," Erevan said. "But it remembers. And that's enough."
Behind them, the three Children of Cinders stood side by side. They'd said nothing for most of the journey. But when they saw the ridges of burned-out data towers rising like twisted fingers toward the sky, something in their posture shifted—an instinctive kind of dread. Or perhaps recognition.
Lira adjusted her visor. "Scans show latent energy in the ground. Not mechanical. Not magical. More like… lived presence."
"Trauma," Erevan muttered. "Encoded directly into the earth."
The youngest child—whom Serah had begun calling Ash—stepped forward, eyes wide. "There were songs here, too," he said quietly. "But they screamed more than they sang."
Yuren looked up from his scanner. "Localized memory pulses are spiking around that central crater. Whatever happened here—it burned itself into the grid."
Erevan gave a single nod and approached the edge.
At the heart of the crater was a shrine—barely intact, half-sunken into the scorched rock. Around it were fragmented statues of old rebels, half-melted. Names scratched out. Faces blurred. But in the center of it all lay a single console, still humming faintly.
Serah frowned. "That thing's been running since the Reclamation?"
"No," Erevan said. "Since before it. This was a rogue terminal. Rebel tech. Old code, spliced into Tower signals. Probably built by defectors."
Lira glanced at the kids. "Think they'll trigger it again?"
"They don't need to," Erevan said. "I will."
He knelt before the console and reached out slowly, palm open. His fingers brushed the edge—and the world shifted.
Not violently. Not with the blinding light of memory storms. This was gentler. A slow descent into time. The crater rippled around them, the air thickening like breathing through someone else's grief.
Suddenly, they were standing in a different Avareth.
Not fully formed—only pieces. Echoes. The sound of marching boots. Children crying. Screams caught between codewaves.
And a voice.
"…they'll say we burned. But we chose this. We chose to become echoes."
A woman, dressed in tattered rebel colors, stood before a group of children in the center of the crater. Her back was to them. She was holding a thin silver shard, pointing it toward the sky like a blade. One by one, she pressed the shard to each child's temple—and they glowed. Briefly. Like candlewicks catching fire, then vanishing.
Ash gasped. "I know her."
"You do?" Serah asked.
"She was the one who taught us to remember."
Erevan's voice was low. "The shard she used… it's a Manifest Codex. They were used to preserve identity during Tower purges. Illegal tech."
Lira whispered, "She used it to imprint the children?"
"No," Erevan said slowly. "She used it to make them keepers."
The memory flickered. The woman turned, and for a heartbeat, her eyes met Erevan's across the years. Not directly. Not truly. But some trace of her remained—enough for the imprint to recognize him.
"Cosmic Tyrant," she said softly. "If you find this… they lived."
Then the memory collapsed, and they were back in the present.
The crater was silent. The air no longer buzzed with encoded pain—but something else lingered.
Hope.
Yuren looked shaken. "That shard—it must still be here. Somewhere."
They began to search, digging through ash, scanning beneath the rock. It was Ash who finally knelt beside a half-buried rib of glass and pulled it free.
A thin shard. Silver. Faintly glowing. Still warm.
He looked up. "It remembers."
Erevan nodded. "Then we use it. But not to fight. Not to weaponize."
"To rebuild," Serah said quietly. "To write stories no one can erase again."
As they turned back toward the glider, Erevan took one last look at the scorched shrine.
There, carved hastily into its base, were four words:
WE REMEMBER TO SURVIVE.
He whispered them once under his breath.
Then again, louder.
And then, the children joined him. One voice. Then another. Until the whole crew stood beneath the scarred sky, whispering memory like prayer.
We remember to survive.
Not a command.
A truth.
And Emberscar—long buried, long feared—was no longer a wound.
It had become a vow.
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Author's Note:
Chapter 86 takes us to the heart of pain itself—a place even the Tower tried to forget. But Emberscar, like all true memory, survived. The Manifest Codex will become a key to a deeper restoration… but more importantly, it shows us that stories—once lived—can never be completely erased.
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With every voice, we rewrite the Tower's script.
— Dorian Blackthorn
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