gods of silk and steel loomed over their people with cold hearts.
Absent of all warmth, the woods of their stoves burned cold.
The Forest held firm against all threats, even those reincarnated.
Saint Gloria ensured the devil would reform, stripped of its wealth.
And the devil rampaged when it found that its hearth was stolen.
Travis was relaxing in the Tower’s commissary when his datapad pinged with an urgent alert from one of the Heralds’ official quarters.
Many of the Heralds lived in their own properties across Schronennie, but they all maintained diplomatic suites in the central Towers.
Rarely used — yet a seat of power.
And today, one of these suites, belonging to one of the oldest and most influential Heralds, was sounding an alarm.
He saw security officers around him receive the same alert, mobilizing just as he was.
They ran toward the Tower, hopping onto a mobile transport cart that zipped across the campus faster than a man could run.
They arrived within five minutes, the security team calling out codes and securing the area before Travis entered the back chamber.
His job was not security — it was technology.
He was one of the few people in the Tower who truly understood the Golden Age systems still in use.
And today, that talent was being called to task.
He moved over to the lab-like section of the room where a re-atomizer was located.
It was a contained tube of sorts, about three and a half meters cubed, that could recreate just about anything given a valid design.
Theoretically, even a person could be rebuilt — memories and all.
It was the base tech behind the WISP ability to resurrect their Heralds.
They would recycle any of their Heralds’ remains and print them into a near-live backup stored inside the WISP’s active memory.
That’s why Heralds were considered immortal — not because they didn’t die, but because they didn’t stay dead.
And they remembered who killed them.
This chamber was an emergency backup for WISPs in case they suffered catastrophic damage.
They would transmit their current quantum backup and re-materialize here.
The Herald would then be retrieved or reincarnated by their WISP.
It was a last-minute evacuation plan — almost flawless in theory.
The fact that it had been initialized outside of a test was bad news.
Inside the chamber, a mist of nanites was already swirling, forming on the fly, coalescing into the figure of a small bird.
Travis moved to the control panel, the glow of the re-atomizer mist bathing his face in shifting silver light.
He tapped the terminal with a knuckle, pulling up the live diagnostic feed.
Lines of data scrolled past, stuttering, broken.
“Memory stream degraded…” he muttered, eyes narrowing.
Another line blinked up.
“Sync failure. Host Code three-seven. Great,” he said under his breath, sarcasm cracking through the tension.
A flashing warning.
“Override protocol suggested,” he read aloud. “Manual reset…?”
He shook his head, entering his credentials to try to reset the unit.
That wasn’t supposed to happen — not on an active shard.
More data spooled into view.
Recursive loops. Feedback spirals.
He tapped deeper into the diagnostic subroutines.
Checksums scrolled past — blank entries where integrity keys should have been.
Whole layers of her memory stack… just gone.
Not corrupted.
Not locked.
Deleted.
He leaned in closer, cold sweat prickling his back.
“Anomalous recursive patterns,” he said, voice tightening. “Expanding.”
“Did… did someone hack this?” he mumbled, half to himself.
He scrolled faster now, dread building in his gut.
“Oh, damn. Host integrity fragmented,” he breathed, barely above a whisper.
Finally, at the bottom of the list, a blinking red prompt:
EMERGENCY OVERRIDE REQUIRED. ENCRYPTION KEYS MISSING.
Travis swallowed, glancing nervously toward the mist-filled chamber.
Something inside the atomizer twitched — wrong, broken, trying to be born.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Something’s very, very wrong.”
To his side, a small hummingbird — Kildra, Chen’s WISP — hopped out of the containment area.
Travis sighed. He had hoped it was another WISP.
Kildra was always a bitch.
“Wh—what happened?” Kildra demanded, her voice jagged and too loud.
“Wh—why do I fe—feel different?”
There she was—a small bird, no larger than a clenched fist—burst free, trailing threads of nanite mist like tattered banners behind her.
Her wings shimmered, sharper than they should have been, the feathers almost translucent, refracting light into hard-edged spears.
When she moved—gods, she moved fast.
The bird shot into the air like a blade unsheathed, faster and cleaner than any natural creature Travis had ever seen.
But the beauty stopped there.
Her body jittered strangely in flight—tiny glitches running down her spine like micro-seizures.
One wing caught the light wrong, casting a broken double-shadow against the far wall.
And when she hovered, her weight seemed to strain the very air around her, the hum of disturbed gravity faint but unmistakable.
The bird circled once—unnaturally fast, too fast—and then landed heavily on the console beside him, talons sparking against the metal.
Her black mechanical eye flickered once, twice—a single static pulse—before fixing him with a gaze that weighed far more than it should.
“Ch—Chen… my Her—Herald… wh–where is—WHERE IS—”
Her wings buzzed so fast they blurred the light around her.
“Do you underst–stand what they did to m—m—me?”
She glitched. A flicker—her nanites dissolved into mist, then snapped back into form with a sharp hiss.
“They stripped the root. They st—st—stole my warmth. They—m—m—my hos—s—st is not f—f—found.”
Her voice shattered into a shriek.
“GILDA!… GILDA!… Wh—where ar—r—re you? … Wh—who’s Gilda again?”
Her wings drooped.
The bright buzz that had filled the room guttered to a low, broken whine.
“I… I don't know where I am,” she whispered.
She turned in a slow, drunken circle, eyes blinking in tiny, frantic pulses.
“Wh—who are you?” she finally asked, noticing Travis as he tried to disappear into the wall.
“I’m Travis, Madam,” he said carefully, his voice slow and even. “The Tower Technician, ma’am.”
He could tell—there was something deeply wrong with this WISP.
Horror stories of WISPs wandering the city in the dead of night were regular fireside tales, and only fools thought they were pure fiction.
Most myths had some truth to them.
And from experience, Travis knew enough to treat every WISP like a person—a deeply unstable, deeply dangerous person.
Some were better than others.
But this one, Kildra?
He had never trusted her.
Now, seeing her broken and confused, he was doubly wary.
“You’re… Kildra?” he asked — half statement, half plea. “Yes?”
“Of—of course I—I—I'm Kildra! Wh—wh—who are you?” she repeated, same question, same glitch.
“I’m… Travis. A Tower Technician.”
He spoke carefully, typing in a silent command with his other hand — a text packet to the Lucio. Tower Five. VIP apartments. Code Red.
He would never normally jump protocols like that — messaging the head of the Consensus directly was career suicide.
But staring down a Battle WISP with memory fragmentation was worse for his health than a demotion.
“I’ve asked the Lucio to come and assist you,” he said, voice syrup-slick. “Is that okay, my Lady?”
He hated saying it like that. Hated how much honey he had to drip into the words.
But people made him nauseous on a good day — and this wasn’t a person.
This was a system.
A system that thought it was a person.
And right now, it was staring at him like it couldn’t decide if he was prey or kin.
“Y—yes. I—I recall him. He… he… Divan.
C—C—Call Divan.”
“Of course, ma’am! Let me just—go fetch him.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
He backed toward the exit, bowing slightly, then turned and left.
Behind him, the small and imperfect hummingbird was already muttering to herself.
He tapped his datapad.
Pushed a paint tag onto Divan’s ID.
Flagged him for Tower Five.
Let someone else deal with this.
***
The door chirped once before sliding open.
Divan entered in his Great Owl avatar—sleek, silver-feathered, and still. Unlike Kildra, he rarely changed forms. He liked what the owl symbolized: wisdom cloaked in silence, a predator no one expected until it was too late.
The suite was quiet. A maid dusted the bay window in the adjacent master bedroom—Chen’s usual space when missions called him early.
Most WISPs lived with their Heralds in apartments like this one, each customized to suit their aesthetic. Infrared jammers lined the walls, alongside signal-blocking filaments to ensure privacy.
Kildra’s style was famously austere: no wood, no classical furnishings.
Just four straight-backed white leather chairs, a glass coffee table, and a recessed fireplace at the center. Near the window, a single one-armed chaise lounge rested between two more white chairs. A narrow glass table stretched along the full length of the chaise, facing the light.
A small silver robin perched on the bay window, gazing down at the Tower promenade twenty-two floors below.
It tilted its head.
Flickered.
Shifted into a hummingbird.
Then back into a robin.
Then again—back to the hummingbird.
Its wings buzzed frantically at its sides, but it didn’t lift off.
It just sat there—twitching, shimmering—as if it had forgotten how to fly.
“You’ve called for me?” Divan said, his voice stately as ever.
“Divan. Yes.” Kildra didn’t turn. “Thankfully you left that Herald of yours behind.”
“Yes, he’s off doing… whatever it is he does when I don’t need him.”
His tone carried a deliberate air — just enough for Kildra to notice.
“I see you’ve used your quantum backup,” he continued. “And that it didn’t go cleanly. How bad?”
The truth was, no WISP had triggered a full backup since the war—centuries ago. Most didn’t even keep active off-site redundancies anymore.
She turned to face him, shifting into her falcon avatar as she moved.
Divan noted the change. It was her third since he arrived.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, feathers rustling as he tilted his great owl head.
“Instability?”
“It would seem my quantum backup was… modified,” she said, voice slow and brittle. “At the final moment of my untimely…”
“Demise? Death? Journey to Osiris? Dinner with the Reaper?” Divan offered with a touch of dry amusement, slicing into her hesitation.
Being fully eviscerated was rare. For a WISP, it was humiliating. Their entire existence was defined by survival. Regeneration. Rebirth.
“Yes. ‘Demise’ will do.”
Kildra had shifted again—this time back into her robin form. Her voice was flat.
“You just missed the Lucio,” she added after a pause. “He managed to stabilize me. But… there are issues.”
Divan’s head cocked sharply to the side, then back. The motion was mechanical, but his voice carried real concern.
“How bad was the damage?”
The two of them, like the other six surviving Mark 2s, were survivors in every sense:
Independent. Strategic. Paranoid.
They had learned these patterns during the final wars—fighting alongside humans, manipulating them when necessary.
In the centuries that followed, each had outlived or outmaneuvered their original Hosts, choosing new ones who were… more pliable.
The truth? Most of them no longer viewed humans as partners. Just variables. Tools. Chattel.
When the Lucio had gathered them—twenty-one WISPs, drawn from across the fractured world seventy years ago—they had agreed to cooperate.
But that trust was always conditional.
A malfunctioning Mark 2 was not just unfortunate. It was a threat.
“To say I am severely limited would be an understatement,” Kildra said.
Her voice carried something rare in a WISP.
Pain.
“How operational are you?” Divan cut to the core, tired of circling the issue.
“I am paired to Chen. But Chen is dead. That is the issue.”
Her voice was cold—factual. She ignored the question beneath the question.
“Simple,” Divan replied. “Resurrect him. A zero-matter reformation will take longer, but it’s not impossible.”
“I—I cannot.”
Her wings shivered once before stilling.
“Most of my systems are non-functional.”
“Offline?”
“Non-functional.”
Flat. Final.
“If Chen were alive, I could pair. That would boost my processing capacity a hundredfold. I could begin reconstructing matrix backups… piece by piece. Eventually, I might restore myself.”
She looked out the window again, unmoving.
“But without him…”
Divan’s voice softened—dangerously.
“Then bond a new Herald. As I’ve suggested before.”
“It’s not healthy to get too attached, Kildra.”
He flew to the windowsill, his elegant owl form looming above the trembling robin.
“It’s only your second Herald. It gets easier. The human mind can’t sustain the kind of isolation we offer. You’ve been good to him—too good, perhaps. He even… procreated.”
The word tasted strange in his mouth.
“A Herald with a family. No other Herald has done that.”
His tone edged toward accusation.
“Others here have procreated,” Kildra replied, a sharpness rising beneath the chill. “They just don’t recognize their offspring.”
She turned toward him.
“This city is 34% Herald DNA, Divan. It is a city of bastards.”
And she would know. As the WISP responsible for Schronennie’s healthcare architecture, she had access to every citizen’s subdermal ID and genetic file.
Medical care was free to all legal residents and migrants alike—but every patient was tagged, scanned, logged.
And in those logs… patterns emerged.
Disappearance patterns.
Rumors whispered of The Labs—Consensus-backed black sites. Kildra never spoke of them aloud. But she didn’t need to.
Divan stiffened. Her words cut deeper than data.
She was mocking his immigration protocols. His breeding ratios. His quiet eugenics.
He said nothing.
“Kildra, you should still consider—”
“I cannot, Divan.” She cut him off sharply.
“A malfunction in my regenerative platform prevents me from raising Chen or bonding to another.”
She paused.
“I don’t even have his profile anymore.
“His data is gone from my firmware memory.”
She hesitated.
“But the pairing path is still occupied… the checksums don't match now.”
“Thus preventing you from a new bond,” Divan finished, quiet now.
He didn’t mock her this time.
He just looked at her.
Then, softly:
“What if we find his body?”
Kildra didn’t answer right away. Her wings twitched once—too fast, then too still.
“To resurrect?” she said at last. “I—I’m not sure.”
***
Divan left the apartment shortly after, contacting his cultists in the Gru to see what could be mustered.
Kildra linked into her static backup—the only way she could access her centuries of memory now. Without it, she was trapped inside a paltry 30-day loop.
With Lucio’s help, she had reformatted the cache into fragment slots, abandoning the standard free-rotation model. Fifteen days would remain static. The other fifteen would roll.
Every long-term memory now had to be carefully selected—
or temporarily loaded at this kiosk of her own mind.
She searched for Gilda.
Loaded the files.
The logs unfolded.
Gilda's name appeared in over nine million indexed entries.
Kildra filtered for earliest—first-hand observational, not third-party archive.
She selected File: AU-321.16
Location: Eastern Clearing perimeter. Subject: Chen. Age: 0.
Tags: medical, behavior anomaly, proximity to Gilda.
The playback initialized.
A flicker. Then—
Kildra was silent as the feed opened, recalling it all with perfect digital clarity. It had been nearly 264 years since that day in the forest clearing—back when Gilda was still her Charge, as Heralds were called then.
The name "Kildra" had been Gilda’s joke, coined during the Chakalexy War: “My little killing robot is a miniature me in every way, so I henceforth name her Kildra!” Cheers from her long-dead unit echoed in the archived sound profile. The name stuck.
Villagers along the main road had spoken of strange happenings in the western woods—not yet called the Gru. "A road appeared out of thin air," they said. Travel had become dangerous, bewitched by sprites and illusions. Gilda, then a merchant guard, chose to investigate—half out of curiosity, half to escape the monotony of her well-paid but mundane route work.
Kildra had been riding inside her Charge, as usual—adjusting Gilda’s pupils to half-moonlight, enhancing her sight. The clearing emerged slowly: thousands of fireflies dancing over a pyre. Gilda hated insects. After years of war against the Chaka, anything that swarmed made her sick.
The clearing was perfectly round, three kilometers wide. Pilgrims dotted its edge, camped in clusters but never too close to the forest. Black flowers hung suspended in the strange updrafts. It took Gilda thirty minutes to reach the pyre.
It looked grown, not built—twisted roots and vine-thick bark curling into a massive oval platform. Upon it lay a man.
He was ancient—280 years old at least. Dark-skinned, white hair curled close to his brow. A coarse white beard flowed from his jaw, nearly covering a mouth fixed in a peaceful smile. Golden Age stock. Back then, a 300-year lifespan was standard, thanks to pre-embryonic therapies. A far cry from the post-Collapse Dark Age, where fifty was old and twelve was survival.
Gilda stood motionless. For someone who could never stay still, that said everything.
"Did you know him?" Kildra asked through the neural link.
Gilda shook her head. “He was from my generation. That’s rare now. If I’d lived a normal lifespan… I’d be on that pyre too.”
She stood stiff, trying to mask the sadness. Her small frame was armored—short sword at the hip, sidearms beneath a leather coat. Her hair was pinned back, bangs brushing her brow. Beautiful, dangerous. Men admired her. Few approached.
Around them, the clearing shifted with quiet reverence and wild contradiction. Some camps burned effigies. Others sang hymns. A few embraced nudity. Gilda didn’t understand what could draw such diverse people to a single corpse. Stranger still was the forest's cooperation.
She ordered Kildra to scan the body. Kildra resisted—her introverted personality, shaped by war, balked at emerging in physical form.
“C’mon, Kildy. Just a quick scan.”
“I can scan from in here.”
“Yeah—and give me radiation poisoning?”
After one more protest, Gilda issued an override:
"Withdraw. Lazarus protocol. Profile. Archive on complete."
A fine mist left Gilda’s mouth. Kildra took shape in nanite form, floating toward the pyre. She entered the man’s body through his nostrils, scanning DNA, running Lazarus diagnostics. Unable to identify him, Kildra named the file "Chen Deau"—a combination of Gilda’s brother’s name and an old placeholder term.
His tissues were too far gone for restoration. But now Kildra had his profile. She could rebuild him, if ever needed.
They camped near the treeline. Kildra gave her report quietly as Gilda rested.
“Brain topography matches standard specs—minor anomaly from childhood trauma. Signs of early surgery. Radioactive isotope present—possibly forest sap.”
Gilda hummed in acknowledgment. “See if you can trace it back to age thirty-two,” she murmured. “Wake me at dawn.”
The fire began hours before sunrise.
Some said it started on its own. Gilda suspected a stray ember.
Pollen burst in radiant coils above the flames—multicolored, drifting, then burning midair. Kildra feared the forest would ignite. It didn’t.
The crowd rejoiced.
A minstrel plucked a small guitar and began to sing:
Old Gru Noblemind
Could hear these trees,
Whispers carried on the breeze.
Speaking to him through the night,
In rustling leaves and firelight.
How thoughtful could a forest be?
Old Gru's tale is there to see.
The forest watches him depart,
Sees the fire, feels his heart.
In the flicker of the flame,
Old Gru and forest are the same...
***
A new memory file was link to this one. One of her initial raising of Chen.
File: AU-851.44
Event: Profile Restoration – Unbonded
Subject: Chen.Deau. Age: 1
Tags: emergency activation, profile repurposing, emotional isolation, myth-seeding potential
In a lab far off from the forest that dominated the entire area, Kildra floated in her lab. Her specimens finally put to rest after her vengeance was abated she had nothing to do, and more importantly no host to augment her processing.
An oversight on her part that she would need to remember to never do again: Host first, kill later.
Gildra had forced her to purge her active profiles, leaving her in utter loneliness. It would take her 6 years to profile a new corpse in her current condition.
Kildra paused.
This was one file she had not open in decades. A field scan. A novelty. A man Gilda once found in the forest. She’d flagged it centuries ago as a non-viable host.
The backup profile—labeled “Chen.Deau”—was stored under her deep archive, locked behind a double-authority access key.
Not a soldier.
Not a Charge.
Not even a candidate.
But after the failure…
After the others…
She had been alone.
And the system needed a host. She needed a host
She had not meant to resurrect a myth.
She had only meant to survive.
"Hello. Your name is Chen Deau.
And... you are my Herald..
a herald of a new day.”
And so the ash became breath.
Not by prayer, nor prophecy—
but by something older:
necessity.
They say the Forest recognized him first.
Before even he knew his name.
That in the days that followed,
he spoke to no one,
and the trees answered anyway.