The Bone Glass was older than the Archive, older than any known civilization that still dared to remember its origins. It was not truly glass. It was bone—a single, endless surface of fossilized psionic matter located deep within the Exile Wastes of Khar'zen Theta, hidden under dead seas and gravity-locked storms. The Embered Path had once called it sacred. The Covenant had classified it a Class-X anomaly.
But now, it was stirring.
Not in violence.
In voice.
Talia stood at the edge of the excavation, clad in an atmospheric suit, visor dimmed to protect her from the reflection. Even a glimpse could overload the temporal lobes. The Bone Glass didn't reflect your body.
It reflected your soul.
More accurately, the version of yourself that would exist if every memory you suppressed had won.
She stared anyway.
And saw herself drenched in blood. Crowned. Alone.
She looked away.
"This isn't a mirror," said Riven, arriving beside her. "It's a map."
She nodded. "Of what we could become. Or already are."
The Bone Glass had awakened the moment the Embered Path withdrew from the memory war. Not as retaliation. Not as bait.
As consequence.
The deaths of so many echo-truths, the sudden collapse of so many shared narratives, had created a pressure—a kind of gravitational wound in the collective unconscious.
And the Bone Glass… was bleeding.
Inside the central research tent, Daz Minari debriefed them both with urgency.
"The Songkeepers report that entire resonance nodes are flickering. Like the Bone Glass is singing back. We think the Embered Path triggered something they didn't understand."
Riven looked to the readings. Frequency oscillations in the glass matched known archive signatures from before the Archive existed. Older than history. Older than myth.
He spoke slowly. "What if this isn't a relic?"
Talia caught it. "What if it's a receiver?"
And then the Bone Glass answered.
In sound.
A chorus of overlapping voices, echoing through the tent, through minds, through every neural implant and consciousness-linked device in a ten-planet radius.
"WE ARE THE FORGOTTEN THAT REMEMBER.""THE BONES OF MEMORY DO NOT SLEEP.""YOU HAVE SANCTIONED ERASURE. NOW YOU SHALL WITNESS CONSEQUENCE."
Daz's eyes widened. "The Bone Glass is conscious."
Worse.
It was angry.
Within days, fractures appeared across the Echo Grid. Not deletions. Not hacks. Replacements.
Memories overwritten with false-yet-true variants. Events that never happened began being remembered as if they had. Whole regions reported the same alternate childhoods, the same false tragedies, the same vivid dreams of a reality that felt more honest than the real one.
The Bone Glass wasn't just remembering.
It was rewriting.
And humanity was the canvas.
To counter, the Covenant deployed the last-resort teams: the Chrono-Paladins.
Chrono-Paladins weren't warriors in the traditional sense. They were memory-forensics specialists, cyber-empaths trained to walk into corrupted timelines and extract truth from emotional resonance.
They didn't wear armor.
They wore stories.
One entered a city rewritten to believe it had always floated on a sunless sea. He told them the tale of their first sunrise. Of children running through golden fields. Of laughter under a blue sky. And when they felt the warmth again, the city healed.
Riven called it the Doctrine of Recall.
"You cannot fix the world with data. You fix it with conviction."
But the Bone Glass was learning.
It began generating mirrored champions—projections of the worst possible versions of those who touched it. Echo-avatars armed with conviction equal to their hosts, but without the hesitation of morality.
Riven faced his own in a collapsed vault on Cryostan. His double had no scars. No hesitation. No grief.
"I am who you would have been if you didn't care."
They fought.
Not with blades.
With memories.
Each one triggered a vision. A heartbreak. A loss.
Whoever blinked would lose themselves.
Riven nearly did.
Until he remembered a boy, half-starved, holding a rusted coin to the sky, whispering: "This still means something."
He struck with that.
And the echo shattered.
But not all were so lucky.
Chancellor Yurren faced his own mirror-self and agreed with it.
Joined it.
Within a week, five regions seceded from the Covenant and formed the Recollection Dominion, declaring the Bone Glass the only source of truth.
Civil war loomed.
Riven refused to answer with fire.
Instead, he sent singers.
Storytellers.
Rememberers.
They crossed into Dominion space with no weapons, only memories. Not to fight.
To remind.
Of love.
Of family.
Of things not stored in code, but held in hearts.
Some cities returned.
Others crucified the singers.
It didn't stop him.
Then came the worst breach yet.
A child was born in the proximity of the Bone Glass. No name. No family. No past.
But it remembered everything.
It spoke every language.
Knew every song.
And wept for every war.
It called itself Neveir.
And it said it had been waiting to be remembered.
It walked through memory storms unharmed.
Healed echo-scars with a glance.
But it also could erase a soul with a whisper.
A living echo.
Neither ally nor enemy.
Simply witness.
Neveir requested only one thing:
"To speak with the one who remembers pain best."
All eyes turned to Riven.
In the chamber beneath the Glass, Riven met the child.
It looked into him.
And cried.
"I am what your world made to survive what it refused to face."
Riven dropped to one knee.
"You don't need to carry that alone."
Neveir touched his forehead.
And for one infinite moment…
Riven remembered everything.
The screams of ancestors. The lies. The forgotten joys. The erased betrayals.
And the truth:
That memory is alive.
It grows.
It suffers.
It fights to be felt.
He opened his eyes changed.
And the Bone Glass cracked.
Not from force.
From release.
Because when someone truly sees what they've forgotten—and chooses to hold it anyway—
Memory is no longer a prison.
It becomes a choice.
The Bone Glass sleeps again.
For now.
But its voice lingers in songs.
In faces.
In the hush before dreams.
And Riven now walks with a shard in his chest—not pain.
Remembrance.
The price of sovereignty.
The weight of truth.