The night was quiet.
Abnormally quiet.
No rustling wind.
No far-off engines.
Not even the sound of his own breathing.
And yet—Riven heard the screams.
They weren't real.
Not anymore.
But they never really stopped.
Every time he closed his eyes,
they came flooding back—
like a broken record playing over and over in his head.
> Children's screams trapped behind glass.
Test subjects' screams pleading to be let out.
Screams… of his own voice.
He stood alone at the edge of a half-collapsed spire,
up above the devastated city.
The wind pulled at his tattered black coat,
the material spinning like shadows under moonlight.
Down below, the city thrummed with cold light—
vacant, artificial, stuttering like dying stars
on the edge of disappearing forever.
Neon signs flashed slowly in the fog.
Surveillance drones drifted like soundless ghosts through the air.
No one glanced upward.
No one ever did.
But Riven wasn't gazing down at the city for answers.
He was listening—to the past.
And it screamed.
He raised his hand hesitantly.
The sigil on his palm dimly shining through his gloves—
a broken clock emblem, its lines broken and moving.
The accursed present they bestowed upon him.
The cost of their "evolution."
> "Project Echo," they had said.
He flexed his hand, and the shine disappeared.
> Blood on his hands. A vow betrayed. A friend gone.
It never left him.
That last night.
The treachery. The manacles.
The expression in Dante's eyes.
Not rage. Not grief.
Just silence.
As if it was too late already
"You can't escape fate, Riven."
The voice in his mind again—
smooth, cool, with an edge of amusement.
Dante's voice. It had been years since he'd heard it live,
but the memory was seared into his being
like an open wound.
The way Dante had spoken—
as though he knew the conclusion to the tale beforehand.
As though he were the creator. and Riven just a line in the play.
But fate was no longer something Riven dreaded.
> Fate could be shattered.
Time could be rewritten.
He just had to live long enough to do it.
He gazed out over the city once more.
Somewhere out there,
between shadows and skyscrapers and smoke…
Dante waited.
Not hiding.
Watching.
Always one step ahead.
Always calm.
But Riven had changed too.
He wasn't that boy anymore,
the one who had screamed
in The Foundation's cold white labs.
He wasn't the cowering child
pleading for freedom through shattered glass.
> He was something different now.
Something deadly.
---
The wind changed.
A chill shivered down his back.
Not from the cold—
but from the sense that something was approaching.
Riven stepped back from the edge of the tower
and exhaled slowly. His gaze, once soft and uncertain, was now hard and burdened—
carrying the weight of memory, of war,
and of the unspoken reality no one dared to speak out loud:
> He did not flee the lab. He carried it within him. Certain nights,
he would wake up still gagging on smoke and screams. Other nights,
he would listen to the ticking—
the crunch of time shattering,
falling on him
like a thousand broken mirrors in silence.
But tonight was different.
> Tonight felt like the eye of a hurricane.
The last breath before the world shifted again.
----
Riven gazed at the sky.
The moon was half-hidden in clouds,
its pale light stretching out long shadows across the city.
He felt the strands of time around him—
drawing, distending, whirling.
Something was shifting.
And it began with him.
---
He reached into his coat and pulled out a small, battered photograph.
Two boys—smiling.
Side by side.
No chains.
No experiments.
Just sunlight and freedom.
> Riven.
Dante.
Back when they were just kids.
Before the labs.
Before the betrayal.
Before the silence.
He stared at it for a long time,
then folded it and slipped it back into his coat.
> "I'm not running anymore, Dante."
His voice was quiet, but certain.
> "I'm coming for you."
Not for revenge.
Not for closure.
> But since only one of them could walk away from this shattered tale.
And if fate had penned a tragic conclusion—
Riven was prepared to reprogram the code.
---
He faced away from the city.
Somewhere in the darkness,
they were pursuing him.
The agents.
The Foundation.
The broken echoes of the empire
that once attempted to dominate him.
> Let them come.
Riven's broken power thrummed dimly beneath his skin.
Time itself seemed to be holding its breath.
The past still cried out.
But now… so did he.
---