POV: Audrina Cromwell
Location: Sector 13 — Internal Affairs Sub-Bureau 2F
Time: 16:04 local | Weather: "unnaturally still"
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The fluorescent buzz in the room wasn't loud, but it was persistent. Like the world humming its teeth together in tension.
Audrina Cromwell sat still at her desk in Internal Affairs Sub-Bureau 2F — wrapped not in silence, but in the quiet pressure of too many closed files and not enough answers.
Her fingers wrapped around a chipped "Sector's Best" mug of lukewarm tea. She hadn't warmed it. Bitterness was easier to trust than comfort.
Beside the keyboard, the silver locket lay inert.
No glow.No hum.Just metal.Dormant. For now.
She'd spent the last two hours combing through MIRAGE's Internal Affairs bypass logs—buried layers of flagged recursion triggers and sanitization protocols.
Most of what she found had been scrubbed to comedy: long strings of
"[REDACTED]"
"Incident Never Occurred."
"Subject Cleared of Non-Existence."
But buried in the civic alert logs, a low-priority mirror-case flickered open.
[AUTOSUPPRESS NODE – ARCHIVAL DUMP // CIVIC ALERT QUEUE // SECTOR 9-SOUTH]
→ [SUBJECT: YULA / AGE: 9]→ [GRIDLINE DISTORTION: MINOR THREAD BLEED]→ [CONTACT NODE: UNREACHABLE]→ [CASE STATUS: RESOLVED – SYSTEM FLAGGED "NO CAUSE"]→ [APPROVAL: Lt. V. Hale — Timestamp Missing]
Another file followed. Then another.
→ [UNIDENTIFIED CHILD / THREAD INTERFERENCE: CLASS U]→ [CASE CLOSED: NO INVESTIGATION – MIRAGE CLEANSE PROTOCOL 7.9B]
Audrina leaned back. Frowned. Her HUD blinked in soft warning.The locket buzzed once. Subtle. A murmur only she could feel.Not alert. Not warning.
Recognition.
Then—her cursor stuttered. A deeper layer unlocked itself.
Ghost File K-73.
No header. No access tag. No timestamp. No author.
Just scarred script and six lines of dread.
Just a scan. Handwritten. Not even catalogued by modern systems.
"Kaelen Ashworth — Flamebound Echo // Anchor Status: Anomalous Inheritance"
"Last seen near Divinity Vault remnant — Pre-collapse, Psalm Lattice 7"
"No body recovered. Recursion persisted 8.3 sec post-erasure."
"Tethered to incomplete vowline via legacy sync"
"Order: Suppress invocation. Anchor field unstable."
"DO NOT SPEAK HIS NAME DURING EIDOLON PHASE INTERFERENCE."
Audrina sat back in her chair. Eyes locked to the screen. Her breath had turned shallow without her noticing.
She said it aloud.
"Kaelen."
Nothing happened.
Then—
The locket thundered.
A violet pulse ignited across her desk like lightning beneath glass. Her HUD didn't trigger. Her datapad didn't vibrate. But her pulse didn't feel like her own anymore.
For just a moment… she was watching herself.
From inside.
From elsewhere.
The locket clicked again. Mechanically. Wrong.
Audrina leaned forward. Whispered it again—this time, not aloud.
In her thoughts only.
"Kaelen."
A pulse.
Then two.
Then a whisper:
"Kaelen…"
Not in her voice.
Not in any voice.
It sounded like static trying to become a name.
[Eidolon Locket: Private Sync Log Triggered]
[SYNC ERROR: MEM-LOCK BREACH OUTSIDE HOST VOLITION][PLAYBACK FILE: 003-ECHO – CLASSIFIED]
Audrina stared at the alert.
And tapped "Open."
The locket projected a broken feed into her retinal lens—a field of ruined black armor, a sky bleeding recursion light.
There he was.
Kaelen.
No crown. No sword. Just a tattered cloak.One shoulder bare.Right arm wrapped in unstable vowburn.
He stood alone.
And looked directly at her.
He spoke.
But the audio was corrupted.
[AUDIO LOSS: 94%]
Still—her lips trembled. Because in that soundless flicker, she could read his mouth:
"I remember you."
Audrina tore the lens off.
Gasping. Trembling.
The air in the room felt too still.
Like time wasn't quite certain it should continue.
She opened her unsent field journal — analog, hidden, analog for reasons she never questioned.
She wrote:
"Kaelen's name doesn't need to be spoken to be heard."
"The locket knows him."
"So do I."
"But not now. Not yet."
"He looked at me like I had failed."
Then she paused.
And wrote one more line:
"Or maybe I hadn't failed yet."
---
That night, she did not dream. Not in the usual sense.
She stood in darkness without dimension.
Not night.Not void.Just the absence of boundary.
And ahead — a single flame burned through the void.
Not bright.
But… undeniable.
She reached for it—and her hand passed through.
Then from across the dark—
Her voice. Echoing. Unbidden.
Calling a name. Not loud. Just inevitable.
And from the void, something older than memory whispered it back:
"Ash… war… en."
---
She gasped awake.
The locket lay silent beside her on the nightstand. No glow.
But when she reached for it—she felt a pulse.
Not light. Not words.
A resonance.The shape of a name trying to survive.
And somewhere in a Federation secure node far below Sector 13—
MIRAGE flagged her file.
[AUDRINA CROMWELL – FLAG: CATEGORY D ANCHOR-ANOMALY]
[VOWLINK STATUS: PARTIAL // LEGACY THREAD INHERITANCE][RECOMMENDATION: REDLIST UNDER REVIEW]
The world did not scream.
But somewhere deep below the grid, a memory screamed for her.
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"Some names are not remembered—they are rehearsed by the world until someone is born to carry them again."
— Fragment 9A, Psalms of the Hollow Line
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