The stars were burning. Or maybe it was just the remnants of the battlefield.

  He drifted through the broken hull of a forgotten capital ship, its once-gleaming Orokin alloy blackened by corrosion and war. His Warframe, battered and nearly crumbling, clung to his scarred body like dead skin. Static crackled in his helmet—ghosts of squadmates long since gone. Their echoes whispered, accusing and forlorn, beneath the symphony of silence.

  He had failed them all.

  The Tenno—what was left of him—floated in the graveyard of the Wars Old and New. There was no one left to fight. No one left to save.

  His fingers curled tightly around a fractured blade, its edge still humming faintly with void charge. It had once cleaved Sentients, shattered Grineer armor, protected the weak. Now it trembled in his grasp.

  "Is this it, then?" he murmured, voice hoarse and cracked. "After everything... is this all I am?"

  A tear—not of sorrow, but fatigue—fell and vanished in the vacuum, boiling and instantly freezing.

  And the Void... answered.

  It was not a voice. Not truly. It was a feeling—an awareness older than stars, deeper than entropy. It pulsed behind the veil of space like a heartbeat in reverse, pulling at the tattered pieces of his mind.

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  We remember.

  His vision fractured—realities folding inward. The Void showed him fragments of timelines: victories that never were, comrades who never fell, lives untouched by his failure. A thousand choices that could have been.

  Do you wish to be forgotten?

  Or will you rise, little flicker?

  He had nothing left. No reason, no hope. Only the weight of memory and the ache of what had been lost.

  "Go.. Away..."

  Tsk... So Impatient... when I am so, so bored.

  Would you like to go back, little morsel?

  “…Do it,” he breathed. “If I’m to be your entertainment... then let’s see if fate can be rewritten.”

  How... Amusing....

  The stars twisted.

  There was no pain—only cold. A hollow unmaking. A silence so profound it cracked time itself. Space folded. The Void took him, like a seed cast into the past. And the void tossed in a piece of it with him.

  Neo Era — Outer Colonies, Skel Terminus

  The air was hot. Unfiltered. Real.

  He gasped awake, lungs struggling against unfamiliar pressure. No Warframe. No armor. Just a half-grown body—lean, augmented, aching. Muscles burned with residual trauma. His skin was pale, faintly shimmering with strange fractal veins. Not cybernetic—something deeper.

  Metal clanged in the distance. Shouts—sharp Orokin commands—echoed across the facility.

  He staggered to his feet, disoriented, shivering.

  “Subject 17-0X-Helminth… initial grafting scheduled. Bring him to the cradle.”

  The voice was cold. Aristocratic. Ballas.

  He blinked rapidly. The Neo era? Axi? These uniforms—these primitive energy conduits—they were ancient, even by Orokin standards. The empire had not yet ascended. The Zariman hadn’t left. The Solar Rails were mere sketches.

  He was… in the past.

  An Orokin Scientist stared at him through mirrored ocular implants. “Welcome back Subject 17. You look like you saw the Seven.”

  You have no Idea. He thought, and promptly fainted.