“Not all prophecies speak of the future. Some only echo what we refused to remember.”

  The Whisper Grand Chamber was not built.

  It was breathed.

  A colossal atrium carved from living stone, suspended high in the luminous core of Caelyth’Varn, it pulsed with an ancient rhythm, like the inhalation of a slumbering god. The walls curved in spirals, etched with glyphs that shimmered faintly, alive with a light that wasn’t reflected, but remembered.

  The ceiling was a vaulted dome of transparent crystal vein, opening into the heavens like an iris. Above it, stars wheeled across the veil of night. Below it, mist curled and danced across a floor of mirrored obsidian, so perfectly polished it made the entire room appear to float.

  Twelve great pillars encircled the chamber, each formed from a different element: one of mist, one of bark and leaf, one of raw stone, one of flowing water, and so on, each representing the Twelve Echoes of Ithariel’s soul.

  At the centre, upon a raised dais of woven aetherglass and silverroot, stood a single figure.

  Athrion.

  He was tall, like all of his kind, but there was a weight to him, a density of presence that made space fold inward. His robes were white, woven with sunmetal, pulsing faintly with golden glyphs. His skin, the same silver-blue hue as Sael’Ri’s, bore deeper, older marks, runes etched by time itself. His hair, long and pale, was bound in silver cords that floated slightly as if air parted for him out of reverence.

  His eyes were not blue.

  They were white-gold, like dawn frozen mid-birth. They did not merely look. They remembered.

  Behind him, seated upon thrones formed of elemental essence, were the Twelve Elders, each distinct, each bearing the marks of their Domain. Some whispered to each other in harmonic resonance. Others sat in perfect silence, watching.

  Adam stepped forward. His new robes, woven from the ship’s morph-state, caught the chamber’s light like liquid memory. DeadMouth hovered behind him, unusually silent. PAW walked at his side, head bowed.

  Athrion’s gaze pierced him.

  “The Veil returns,” he said, voice like a melody played on wind and stone. “And with it… the boy not born of Ithariel, yet marked by its breath.”

  Adam’s voice did not waver. “You knew I was coming?”

  “We did not know,” Athrion replied, “We remembered.”

  One of the Elders, cloaked in flowing robes of copper flame, leaned forward. “The Severing has already begun. The Mist no longer flows. The Varnak grow restless. They blame us.”

  “The Ny’Thren are losing faith in us,” another hissed, his form coalescing from pure light and wind. “And now your presence awakens old echoes.”

  Adam glanced at Sael’Ri, who remained just behind, silent.

  “I don’t understand,” Adam said. “The Veil… that’s my ship. Are you saying it told you I’d arrive?”

  A murmur passed among the Elders.

  Athrion tilted his head, curious. “You believe that…” he gestured toward the Eon Veil, visible beyond the crystal wall “ is the Veil?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No, child. The ship bears its name. But you… You carry its breath.”

  The chamber fell silent.

  “You were marked long before you boarded your vessel. Before you knew words. The Mist has been severed, but not extinguished. It echoes in you. As it once did in us.”

  Adam felt a stirring. A weight in his chest, like breath caught between grief and revelation.

  DeadMouth finally broke the silence. “So, uh… translation: Adam is a walking prophecy?”

  “No,” Athrion said, eyes narrowing. “He is a reckoning.”

  Another Elder stood, their voice as brittle as frost on glass. “We must decide. The Mist is gone. The balance with Verios crumbles. War approaches. And yet… this child arrives, carrying memory in a mortal shell.”

  Adam stepped forward again, defiant. “I didn’t ask to be part of your myths. I don’t want to be anyone’s prophecy.”

  “You may not want it,” Athrion said. “But something brought you here. And if the Mist still breathes within you, you must decide how it will be used.”

  “Used for what?”

  Athrion turned, gesturing toward a crystalline mural that rose along the chamber’s edge. It shimmered to life, depicting a time long before, when the two planets danced in harmony, connected not only by gravity, but by spirit. The Mist flowed freely. The Veil, whatever it was, bound them. Then came the Severing. A great rift. And silence.

  “You must understand,” Athrion whispered. “There was unity, once. Before the Varnak fractured from the light. Before we stopped listening. You may be the last voice the Mist will answer.”

  Adam stepped closer to the mural, and for a moment, the etched lines pulsed faintly, mirroring the pattern of his heartbeat.

  “Then I have questions,” he said softly.

  “And we,” Athrion said, stepping down from his dais, “have answers. But not all will bring peace.”

  He extended a hand.

  “Walk with me, Adam of the Veil. There is much to show you before the skies burn.”

  * * *

  Athrion stood before the ancient mural, light from the Veil spilling through the crystal dome above, painting the chamber in a trembling blue.

  He raises his hand, not as a leader, but as a witness to a fading truth.

  “The Mist was once boundless. It flowed between our worlds like breath between lungs. It nourished both Ithariel and Verios, two hearts of a single body.

  But the Varnak… they grew jealous of its rhythm. They wanted to possess what could only be shared. They built machines, great engines of flame and steel. They caged the Mist, fed on it, turned it into fire and weapon.

  And so, the Mist withdrew. It recoiled from their violence.

  It fled back to us, though wounded, and in doing so, the bridge between our worlds cracked and fell.

  That was the Severing.”

  He steps closer to Adam, eyes burning, not with anger, but grief fossilised into belief.

  “We did not choose separation. We chose survival. The Varnak’s hunger forced our hand. And now the Mist is only a shadow… enough to sustain us, not to heal us.

  But you… The Veil speaks through you. It calls across the silence. If there is to be any reconciliation, any renewal of the Covenant, it must begin with you.”

  Adam remains silent. A part of him hears the sorrow. But another part, deeper, feels a wrongness in the tale. Not deceit. Distortion. A half-truth painted as a whole.

  Athrion continues:

  “Before you cross the void to Verios, you must see the truth of who we were. You must stand within Asiris.

  It is the root of our memory. The living history of the Ny’Thren, etched not in stone, but in Mist. The walls there breathe, Adam. They remember. And if you are to carry the Veil’s will, you must walk among them.”

  A long pause followed Athrion’s final words. Not silence, no such thing existed in Caelyth’Varn, but something deeper. A hush, woven into the breath of the chamber itself.

  Adam stood motionless beneath the crystalline dome, light and memory spiralling above him like slow galaxies. His mind urged him to speak, to ask the questions gathering at the edge of his thoughts: Why him? What does the Veil want? Why does this place feel like a memory wearing someone else’s face?

  But his mouth stayed still.

  His eyes just watched.

  His soul… listened.

  There was a strange peace settling into him. Not comfort. Not clarity.

  But resonance.

  Like a frequency beneath the world had finally matched his own.

  He should have felt awe. Overwhelm. Suspicion.

  But instead, he felt a kind of homecoming.

  Like he’d wandered too long and finally crossed the threshold of a forgotten house.

  The rooms were different, but the scent, the gravity, the pull, unchanged.

  The Veil hadn’t brought him somewhere new.

  It had brought him back.

  * * *

  When he finally turned and left the chamber, the doors, woven mist made solid for his passage, parted without sound.

  And there she stood.

  Sael’Ri.

  Bathed in the soft glow of evening Mistlight, she was stillness wrapped in silver. Her robes shimmered faintly, echoing the chamber behind him, as if she, too, carried its breath.

  Her eyes met his, not with urgency, but with recognition.

  “You are quiet,” she said.

  Adam paused. “I don’t know if I’m speechless or just… remembering in reverse.”

  A faint smile curved her lips, sad and knowing. “Asiris will not answer you. But it may remind you of what you never asked.”

  She turned, the path unfurling before her like fabric in the wind.

  “Come, Adam of the Veil.

  It is time you remembered what they buried in light.”

  They walked in silence for a while. The crystal pathways of Caelyth’Varn curved upward like ribbons in the sky, gently rotating underfoot, held by currents of will rather than mechanics. The city never truly stilled; it flowed, adjusting itself as though breathing in anticipation.

  Ahead, a wide open platform unfurled like a blossom on the side of a towering spire. Mist trailed off its edges in lazy curls. It overlooked a vast valley of floating meadows and radiant waterbridges. The air shimmered.

  And there, perched upon the edge like living statues of divine whim, were the Ephios.

  Winged giants, six-limbed, feathered with iridescent scales and transparent veins of glowing thread. Their wings were like stained-glass cathedrals stretched on breath, refracting the Mistlight into an ever-changing aurora.

  The one nearest turned its great eye toward Adam. There was no malice. No command. Just… presence.

  Sael’Ri stepped closer, her voice soft.

  “My father is stubborn. He sees history as scripture. Immutable. Pure. But the world is changing, and the Mist doesn’t flow like it used to. Not because it is dying, but because it is becoming.

  He thinks purity means preservation. But I believe purity is merging. The end of this divide. Not Ny’Thren. Not Varnak. Something more.

  I don’t know what it is… not yet. But I feel it like a name I used to know.”

  Adam looked at her, and for a breathless second, knew exactly what she meant, but couldn’t say why.

  She smiled faintly and placed a hand on the side of the Ephios beside her. The creature hummed, literally, a resonance so deep it rattled his bones like a welcome. Sael’Ri climbed atop it with a dancer’s grace.

  “Come. We ride.”

  Adam hesitated only a moment, then mounted his own—sleek and luminous, the size of an elephant but moving like woven silk. PAW leapt with feline precision, perching behind him. DeadMouth hovered, mumbling:

  “Oh sure, let’s just trust the ten-ton mystic air-butterfly. What could go wrong?”

  The Ephios took one step. Then another. Then…

  They fell.

  And then rose.

  The wings opened.

  And the world bowed.

  The ride was not flight. It was rising through memory.

  The Ephios didn’t flap so much as conduct the wind, and the wind listened. Water in the air shimmered in response. And where wind touched water, Mist was born in delicate streams, wrapping around them in spirals of power.

  “They say the great ones, the wild Ephios, don’t follow riders. Their wings command the sky. And when they fly, the Mist is born anew.”

  “So they create life,” Adam whispered.

  “No,” Sael’Ri said. “They remind it how to live.”

  As the Ephios ascended, the land of Ithariel unfurled below like a thought mid-formation.

  From this height, Adam saw not a world, but a soul in motion.

  The rivers did not flow. They searched.

  Veins of liquid light and memory, twisting through fields of glass-hued grass, then bending, changing course entirely, as if sensing a new need, a new sorrow. They were alive. Reactive. Carriers not just of water, but of intent.

  Mountains rose and fell like breathing.

  Some emerged slowly, pushed upward by forces unseen, towering with ancient purpose, only to dissolve minutes later into rolling meadows or lakes that shimmered with recent memory. A peak here. A valley there. Then gone. The planet was sculpting itself in real time, like a dream unsure of its shape.

  “It changes,” Adam murmured, unable to look away.

  Sael’Ri nodded. Her hair danced in the wind, the Mist curling around her in delicate ribbons. “Ithariel does not decide what to be. She feels what must be. And she becomes it.”

  “Isn’t that chaos?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied. “It is listening. She does not hold a single shape because she honours all of them.”

  The Ephios cried out, a deep, melodic note that trembled through the air like a cathedral bell. Below, the landscape answered. A cluster of trees bloomed in spirals. A lake shifted hue. A waterfall rose upward.

  It was not flight. It was witness.

  Adam stared downward, heart pounding, not with fear, but with the ache of knowing.

  He had seen this before. Not in memory. But in essence.

  This was not a new world.

  This was a forgotten one.

  And somehow… it was waiting for him to remember it too.

  The trees below responded before the Ephios even began to descend. Their massive trunks bent gently, leaves folding inward like bowed heads. Branches pulled away, reshaping the forest canopy until a perfect circle opened, a landing space not made, but offered.

  The Ephios glided downward, their wings folding like woven dreams. When their feet touched the earth, the Mist swirled upward around them in reverent spirals, as if even the wind bowed to their presence.

  Adam dismounted slowly, heart still pounding from what he had seen above, but what lay ahead stole the breath from his lungs.

  Asiris.

  It wasn’t a structure. It wasn’t a ruin. It wasn’t anything he had words for.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  It was a doorway into the cosmos.

  Set between two crystalline monoliths, the “portal” shimmered with a darkness deeper than the void. Not emptiness, but infinity. Through it, he could see stars. Nebulae. Galaxies. turning in slow, impossible spirals. Planets he didn’t know the names of. Civilisations that had never been born, or perhaps had long since died.

  It wasn’t light that filled the portal.

  It was everything else.

  And as he stepped toward it, a pulse shuddered through his hand.

  The glyph on his forearm, ever dormant, ever silent, came alive.

  It did not burn.

  It called.

  Lines of liquid light surged along his skin, curling outward in perfect spirals, matching symbols etched into the surrounding stones. The glyph pulsed faster, matching something deep in the Mist, in the planet, in himself.

  And then, he heard them.

  A thousand voices. Not whispering.

  Calling his name.

  “Adam!”

  “ADAM!!!”

  “Do you hear that?” he asked, breath shallow.

  Sael’Ri looked at him, her expression pale, not with fear, but something more vulnerable.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “But… I don’t think they’re calling me.”

  Behind him, DeadMouth hovered with a hum of pure discomfort.

  “Oh, no. Nope. Noooope. Please don’t pass out on me now, man!

  I’m not riding that cathedral-sized butterfly solo and PAW bites!”

  PAW, sitting stoically at the edge of the clearing, blinked once. Then slowly opened its mouth in a wide, utterly toothy yawn.

  Adam didn’t laugh. He couldn’t.

  Because the voices weren’t stopping.

  They were growing louder. Closer.

  And from within the portal… something was waiting.

  Adam stepped forward: slow, deliberate, as if the gravity of the cosmos itself had found him and wouldn’t let go.

  The portal shimmered, stars dancing behind it in erratic spirals. Not chaotic, just… uncaged. Like the logic of reality paused for reverence.

  The voices didn’t stop.

  They swelled.

  A thousand. More.

  Men. Women. Children. Others: ancient, alien, spectral, unnamed.

  Some called. Some sang. Some screamed in languages not born of sound, but of memory.

  And still, they did not hurt him.

  They completed him.

  Each syllable that struck his soul filled a gap he hadn’t known existed. Like scattered puzzle pieces returning to their place, not in mind, but in essence.

  DeadMouth hovered a few feet behind, spinning nervously in small, glitchy circles.

  “Oh sure, go full space-zombie on me now. It’s fine, I’ll just be here talking to mist particles and regret.

  Adam! Hey! Wait up, man!”

  Adam didn’t turn. Couldn’t. The pull was too deep.

  Sael’Ri placed a hand gently on DeadMouth’s casing.

  “Too late,” she said, her voice calm. Resigned. “He hears it now.”

  DeadMouth flickered. “Hear what? Where the hell’s he going?!”

  Sael’Ri watched as Adam stepped closer, the Mist beginning to spiral up his legs like silk drawn by reverence.

  “Not where,” she said, smiling faintly.

  “Who.”

  * * *

  The moment Adam stepped through the portal, he was not pulled or transported; he simply arrived.

  There was no violent shift, no tearing of light or sound. One step, and the breath of Ithariel was replaced by the dry warmth of a world long buried in guilt.

  He stood once more upon the black-sanded planet, that cursed world, that grave of choices, where he had once failed so completely that even memory recoiled from the details.

  Only… it wasn’t cursed now.

  The ash that once coated every ruin was gone. The air, once dry and rasping, now carried the sweet tang of fruit and freshwater. Verdant foliage spilt across the landscape, curling around stone ridges and crawling up the bones of mountains. Rivers shimmered in the light of twin suns, their surfaces dancing with silver-tipped waves.

  To the east, the colony rose like a breath that had never been lost.

  The domes were still there: small, modular habitats fashioned from the early days of survival. Solar arrays stood beside them like guardians of light. But where once it was a cold grid of function and desperation, now it thrived. Gardens grew in the spaces between structures, vines climbing supports as if embracing the past. Walkways of woven plasteel had been etched with murals, stories painted in broad strokes and bright colour, depicting moments of unity, harvest, and laughter.

  People moved in a constant, purposeful flow.

  Clusters of children darted between domes, shrieking with joy, chasing orbs of floating light that changed colour when touched. Their clothes were mismatched, hand-stitched, colourful in a way no uniform had ever been. There were games, chants, the occasional fall and scraped knee, followed by laughter and hands helping one another up without pause.

  Near the central structure, a large communal canopy had been constructed, part shade, part gathering space. Beneath it, long tables were filled with people sharing food. Bowls of steaming grains, fruits sliced and passed between hands, jugs of something bright and fermented. They laughed, clinked cups, and leaned close to whisper secrets. The air was alive with belonging.

  Beyond the base, to the far west, fields stretched toward the horizon: vast and golden, speckled with stalks of alien grain and clusters of purple-rooted crops. Dozens of workers moved between rows, some harvesting, others planting, some kneeling to inspect the earth as if listening for its needs. It was not labour, it was ritual. A harmony between skin and soil.

  Everywhere he looked, there was motion. There was life. But more than that, there was joy.

  And then, near the steps of the central dome, he saw himself.

  Not a memory. Not a ghost. Him. Whole. Solid. Smiling. Engaged in conversation with three colonists, two men and a woman, while cradling a child no older than five. They laughed as the child tugged at the lapel of his jacket, demanding attention, and he gave it freely, dropping to one knee to speak directly to them.

  This Adam, the one they revered, was nothing like the fragmented soul now watching.

  He was not haunted.

  He was home.

  Adam watched in silence, his chest aching with something that had no name. The glyph on his arm still pulsed with light, though now it felt less like a signal and more like a heartbeat, one he had forgotten was his.

  He stepped forward, slowly, his boots pressing into soft black sand that should have remembered only death… and yet welcomed him like a long-lost son.

  The scent of cooked food reached him, mingled with lavender and firewood. The laughter of the colonists was low, honest, constant, a background hum to a world that should not exist. Children ran past him, their forms flickering faintly as they brushed against him, unable to see him, perhaps… or perhaps choosing not to. Their feet left no prints in the sand.

  He passed a man shaping stone into blocks near a kiln, whistling an old Earth tune Adam didn’t remember but somehow knew. A woman nearby sewed vibrant thread into a long sash while teaching a girl to weave patterns into the fabric of tradition. Others danced to no music, just the rhythm of wind, heat, and muscle.

  This wasn’t a vision. It wasn’t a simulation. It wasn’t punishment.

  It was a memory he had never lived.

  Or maybe… had once lived, and had torn from himself.

  And still the voices called, soft now, not in warning but in welcome. The portal had not led him to a destination. It had led him to the moment he lost everything, but not as it was.

  As it could have been.

  As it should have been.

  And in the far distance, beneath the shade of a flowering tree, a shape sat waiting.

  Not moving. Not rushing. But waiting.

  For him.

  Adam moved without thought, drawn to the figure ahead like a moon to its tide. The people around him blurred: their laughter, their movement, the vibrant harmony of a world reborn fading into peripheral haze.

  His eyes locked on the man before him. Himself.

  Not just a copy, not an illusion. It was him as he once was, before the fracture. Tall, assured, surrounded by love and loyalty, but now standing utterly still, gaze lifted to meet his own across the impossible rift of time and memory.

  Their eyes met. And the world paused.

  The other Adam, this golden echo of what had been, stepped forward slowly, his expression calm but unspeakably deep. A sadness hung at the corners of his mouth, and something ancient shimmered behind his gaze.

  He reached out, not to touch, but to anchor.

  And then he whispered, a single word that cracked through the illusion like thunder beneath silk:

  “Remember.”

  The moment shattered.

  Colour died. Sound became echo. And the warmth of life was ripped from the air like breath from a corpse.

  Adam blinked, and the world was rotting.

  The black sand beneath his feet had turned brittle, dry, cracked in great fault lines that bled steam and sorrow. The sky was sick, grey-brown and heavy, hanging like smoke from a dying fire. The vibrant domes were fractured, half-collapsed, their surfaces charred and gutted. Nothing moved with purpose anymore, just desperation.

  Crying echoed across the valley, quiet and unending.

  Figures moved through the gloom, hunched and slow, dragging bundles of salvaged material toward a makeshift hatch, a passage underground. The air reeked of iron, sickness, and grief. The gardens were gone, the fields hollowed. A child stumbled through the dust, coughing violently, blood flecking the sand.

  The colony was dying.

  But worse, they were dying slowly. As if something inside them had turned against its own host, devouring them from within. Their skin was pallid, marked with lesions and strange fractures. Their eyes, those who still had light in them, looked not to the stars for salvation, but to the earth, as if begging it to open and swallow them whole.

  Adam’s heart thundered. His hands trembled.

  And then, a flicker of light, weak and uncertain, from one of the ruined domes. It pulsed like a dying heartbeat. He turned toward it, stumbling now, feet heavy with guilt and recognition.

  Inside, he saw himself again. This time, hunched, wild-eyed, desperation, carved into every line of his face.

  He was crouched over a table, fiddling with a comms panel, a crude, old-world radio rig, cracked and buzzing with interference. Sparks flew. A voice cut in and out.

  “No!” Adam—that Adam—shouted into the receiver, slamming his hand against the table. “You can’t do this! We need help! You left us here, dammit!”

  Silence answered him. Cold. Final.

  He stared at the device, chest heaving, then slumped back into the chair like his spine had been snapped from within.

  Adam, the one watching, took a slow step forward, breath ragged. The air in the dome felt wrong, heavier than death. The walls around him were paper-thin. He could feel them quivering.

  And then his double whispered, almost too soft to hear:

  “We were worth saving…”

  The lights flickered once. Twice.

  And everything collapsed into darkness.

  The darkness didn’t end; it folded.

  With the silence still ringing in his ears, Adam blinked, and the world shifted again. Gone was the collapsed dome. Gone was the ash-thick sky and the cries of the dying.

  Now… the hangar.

  He knew it instantly. Sleek, metallic, humming with latent power. A narrow launch bay carved into the cliffside near the edge of the colony, just wide enough for a single departure vessel. The pod: small, silver, and scarred with use, sat trembling on its struts, its hatch open, waiting.

  And there he was again.

  Himself.

  Not the leader in light. Not the broken man in the shadows.

  This was the in-between.

  Clad in survival gear, arms shaking as he loaded emergency supplies into the pod, jaw clenched hard enough to shatter bone. His breath was fast, shallow, like someone preparing to run headfirst into a storm and unsure if they’d come out the other side.

  Behind him, a voice, strained, raw, familiar.

  “You’re really going?”

  Adam turned. And there she was.

  A woman, early thirties, features worn by struggle but never diminished by it. Her hair was braided back, her eyes fierce, not with anger, but with love sharpened by desperation. She stepped toward him, placing her hand flat against his chest, right above the glyph that hadn’t yet awakened.

  “If they don’t listen… make them, Adam,” she said, her voice trembling at the edges. “Make them! I can’t… I can’t watch another child die in this forsaken place. I can’t dig another grave. We don’t have time. You have to make them understand. We need help. We need to leave. All of us.”

  He froze for a heartbeat. Then reached up, cupping her hand over his heart, his thumb trembling against her fingers.

  “I’ll come back,” he said, voice thick with weight. “I swear to you, Ariana. I will save them. I will return.”

  Tears welled in her eyes, but she nodded once. A soldier’s gesture. A mother’s prayer. A woman holding the world together with the threads of one man’s promise.

  Adam, the one watching, took a slow step back, his chest tight, a cry caught behind clenched teeth.

  Ariana…

  He didn’t remember her name when he’d arrived on the Veil. Didn’t remember the feel of her skin, the shape of her voice. Not until now. Not until this.

  And now that memory had returned, so had the promise.

  The launch siren blared. The past self climbed aboard.

  The hatch sealed.

  And everything went white.

  * * *

  Adam opened his eyes to cold steel and sterile light.

  The Eon Veil. Its hangar, massive and gleaming, filled with life, too much life. Technicians raced between consoles, voices echoing from comm channels. Uniformed officers stood in tense knots near command stations. Medics barked orders to aides while carrying crates of sealed canisters and bio-isolation units. Engineers climbed scaffolding. Soldiers lined the walls, expressionless, armed but unreadable.

  The place pulsed with urgency, but not panic.

  This wasn’t a rescue.

  This was containment.

  Then he saw himself.

  Across the hangar floor stood the other Adam: furious, animated, alive with desperation. His jacket was torn. His hands bled. His voice, at first muffled by the roar of memory, rose in volume as Adam stepped closer to the moment that ruined him.

  “You son of a bitch!” the other Adam screamed, voice cracking. “You’re dooming all of them!”

  He was facing a tall man: clean, severe, dressed in black command robes without a single wrinkle. His skin was pale, his face an expressionless wall. Eyes like polished obsidian, utterly still.

  “You’re prepared to let an entire colony vanish? Just like that?!” Adam shouted, stepping forward again, his body trembling not with fear, but with disbelief.

  The tall man didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. He stared back as if Adam were just another diagnostic error to be noted and discarded.

  Then, from the side, a woman entered—mid-forties, white coat stained with weeks of crisis, data pads strapped to her belt, her eyes hollow with exhaustion and guilt. Her voice was shaking, but she spoke like someone who had already rehearsed this speech a hundred times and died during every one of them.

  “Adam, please,” she said. “You have to understand. This is out of our hands. The pathogen—it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It’s not just killing them. It’s rewriting them. If we bring them back, we don’t just risk the Veil. We risk everything. Humanity. What’s left of it.”

  He stared at her like she’d betrayed not just him, but language itself.

  “You think I don’t know what’s happening down there?” he snapped, voice rising with every word. “I held a child in my arms yesterday who couldn’t blink anymore. Her muscles had forgotten how. You know what she said to me before she stopped breathing? She asked if the stars would remember her name.”

  The tall man’s silence didn’t break.

  The doctor flinched.

  “Earth is gone, Adam,” she whispered. “This ship is all we have left. You know that. If we break quarantine, we don’t save the colony. We lose everything.”

  Adam’s voice dropped to a rasp, barely a thread:

  “They trusted me…”

  No one answered.

  He looked around, at the soldiers who wouldn’t meet his gaze, at the technicians suddenly too busy, at the medics who had already packed up the hope and sealed it in cryo for easier disposal.

  And finally… he looked at himself.

  The Adam now standing there, watching this unfold through time’s shattered glass, felt the ground tremble beneath him.

  He remembered this moment.

  He remembered the silence that followed.

  He remembered walking away, not because he agreed, but because the only thing left was to walk away.

  “I will come back,” he had said. “I will save them.”

  But he never did.

  He left them there.

  And now the past had returned, not to haunt him.

  But to ask: What are you going to do about it now?

  Adam turned from the chaos. The arguments. The silence. The cowardice.

  Somehow, across the hangar, past the command consoles, the sealed cryo crates, the gaze of soldiers too ashamed to look him in the eye, he saw it.

  A door.

  Far in the rear, set into the wall as if forgotten. Unmarked, unnoticed. A sliver of light outlined its frame: cyan, soft but pulsing, like breath held too long.

  Drawn by instinct, by something deeper than memory, he walked toward it.

  Every footstep was thunder in his bones.

  The Veil had not led him here.

  It had waited for him to arrive.

  His fingers met the metal. Cold. Familiar.

  He opened the door.

  And the light rushed to meet him.

  The Viewing Room.

  He knew it instantly: sleek obsidian floor, seamless glass wall, stars stretched endlessly beyond. The chamber was meant for reflection. For communion. It was where the Veil showed what couldn’t be spoken. Where a soul was weighed against the cosmos.

  Outside, the planet, that planet, the colony’s final resting place, the place of broken promises and dying children…

  Was collapsing.

  Its crust cracked, then folded inward like paper soaked in fire. Mountains buckled. Oceans steamed away into nothing. A final flash of violet light burst from its core, and then…

  Dust.

  The planet disappeared.

  No sound. No rage. Only absence.

  Adam sank to his knees.

  He didn’t weep like a man crushed. He wept like a man emptied.

  Tears slid down his face in silence as he stared at the place where an entire future had once existed, gone not by accident, but by decision. His own. Theirs. All of it.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t know… I didn’t…”

  But the Veil didn’t forgive. It only remembered.

  A shadow moved behind him.

  Footsteps.

  Then a voice: low, tired, scorched at the edges by years of silence:

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

  Adam turned slowly.

  Behind him stood himself.

  But not the idealised version. Not the noble leader or the desperate rebel.

  This was the Adam after it all.

  Eyes hollow. Shoulders burdened.

  The echo that walked the Veil’s halls for years, hiding behind missions, lost in silence. The ghost that hadn’t been exorcised.

  “I know,” the other Adam said, voice barely above a whisper. “I had to live with it for so long.”

  He took a slow step closer, kneeling beside him, one hand on the ground, the other hanging limp.

  “Now…”

  He looked him dead in the eye: no rage, no vengeance, just that brutal stillness of a man who had surrendered too late.

  “Now it’s your turn.”