Nothing should have survived the Aether Gate.
Kael's body convulsed in a thousand directions as light tore across his mind—colder than space, sharper than thought. It was as if the laws of the universe had briefly forgotten he existed, and were trying to remember how to put him back together.
And then… breath.
He dropped to stone. Solid. Cold. Real.
Kael groaned, rolling onto his side. His robe was scorched in places, his fingertips bleeding fine streams of silver. His eyes stung, his vision doubled—then corrected itself. The floor beneath him was smooth obsidian etched with constellations that shifted when he blinked. Above, a dome stretched overhead with no ceiling, only stars.
Endless, vivid, and wrong.
This wasn't the monastery. It wasn't even in the galaxy.
---
> "Vitals unstable. Neural link damaged. Codex shard active."
The voice echoed inside his head, metallic and monotone, like a machine trying to speak through water. Kael jerked upright, eyes scanning the chamber. There was no one here.
> "Remain still. Assimilation incomplete. Memory architecture not yet aligned."
"Who are you?" he croaked.
Silence. Then…
> "You are Codex Host. You are Kael."
"I am the Echo."
A shimmer in the center of the chamber condensed into a humanoid figure—faceless, draped in starlight robes that floated without motion. It wasn't real. It wasn't alive. But Kael could feel it pressing into his thoughts, threading through memories he hadn't touched in years.
He stepped back. "Get out of my head."
> "Your thoughts are a gate. Your memories are locks. The Codex cannot awaken without them."
"I didn't ask for this!"
> "Neither did the galaxy."
---
Kael's heart thundered in his chest. He'd escaped death only to be trapped in some ancient vault, speaking with a hallucination made of stars. He closed his eyes, trying to breathe, to focus, to remember anything normal.
But when he opened them, the chamber had changed.
Walls peeled away like curtains.
Now he stood in the void.
A projection? A simulation? No—more. The stars were too real, the cold too deep. He floated over a map of the known galaxy, ancient routes etched in gold through space—trade lanes, collapsed wormholes, and drifting dead worlds. At the center of it all, the Codex symbol pulsed faintly.
> "Twelve fragments," the Echo said, gesturing across the starmap. "Twelve truths. Scattered when the Codex fell into silence. You carry one. You must find the others."
Kael's voice was quiet. "Why me?"
> "Because you bled when no one should. Because the Rift remembered your name."
The galaxy below flickered, and hundreds of crimson marks blinked into existence—Inquisitor fleets, Voidborn rituals, black holes shaped like screaming mouths.
> "They will hunt you. They will call you heretic. They will burn entire moons to stop you."
"And what happens if I fail?"
> "Then the stars will go silent."
---
Kael woke again—this time in a cold metallic chamber. A different one.
The simulation was gone. The Echo was gone.
But in his palm, a glowing fragment of star-glass pulsed faintly—etched with the Codex symbol. ✦
There was no going back now.
Only forward.