[Memory Imported]

Solaris Year 3,907 – Magnum Imperium Vires
8:04 AM, Central Imperial Time - Eryndor Bulwark
The first recorded event of the “Sunfall” occurred.

Aldric could not move.
He could feel this body that wasn’t his, see through its eyes, hear with its ears, smell the ozone-charged air, but control was gone.

An open field stretched out under a misty sky, barren but for the strange assembly that stood at its center.
A towering machine of bronze ribs and steel arteries, coiled around a central column clotted with too many components.

It wasn’t fully real, not yet.

Engineers swarmed around its perimeter, tightening bolts, scanning runes.

At the base, a glass chamber.

Inside it: a sphere of dark alloy, the size of a man’s skull, encased in ten overlapping rings, all spinning at slightly the wrong angles. The chamber hissed as vapor cooled the internals.

A group of armored figures stepped into the chamber. Two of them carried a sealed case.
Inside it: four crystalline stones, dark green, fuzzy, completely still.

Tenebriths.

The chamber opened. The crystals slotted inside the sphere, clicking in place.
Then without saying anything, they left.

And another man entered.

Not just any man.

Clad in ceremonial armor, immaculate, adorned with golden trims, its shoulder crests marked with a seal only those of Class 1A Authorization were even allowed to see.

His face was too confident. His smirk too constant.

“Pilot.” a voice came from the body Aldric’s mind was trapped in.
Tyrenor’s voice.
He was watching through three layers of shielding.

“Do it as practiced.”

The man in the armor didn’t even glance up.

“I’ve done it a million times already,” he said. “No need to say it again.”

“Hold the sphere for no longer than five seconds. The spike begins at six. Seven seconds is catastrophic. You understand that, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Then you wait for the signal. And gods help you—if it resists—”

The man stepped forward.

“It won’t. No gods. Just watch me make history.”

The air went cold.

8:02 AM, Central Imperial Time.

The chamber sealed.

Inside, the armored man knelt before the sphere and placed his hands on the top half, palms flush, fingers spread like a lover greeting their beloved.

Tyrenor watched from the panel.

Five indicators went green.

One flashed yellow.

The lights dimmed.

“Starting initialization,” Tyrenor muttered. “Tenebriths active. Commencing in five…”

But he was cut off.

Inside the chamber, the armored man slammed both hands onto the metal sphere’s upper half, forcing it down.

Inside the chamber, the sphere turned from soft blue to searing white.

The machinery noises stopped.

The world stopped.

Tyrenor slammed the override.

The doors did not open.

He screamed.

A deafening alarm blared as fail-safes broke, one after another, like a chain of dominoes breaking every law of safety the Dominion had ever conceived.

He saw it before it happened.

The core began to invert.

Magic wasn’t leaking. It was being swallowed. Unwritten.

The readings went blank.

Luminance levels, temperature, structural pressure,... all flatlined.

There was no data because the machine was no longer within the realm of measurable reality.

It was collapsing inward.

A Tenebrith core forming a recursive singularity.

Space folding, quietly, terribly, like a paper being tucked into itself.

Tyrenor didn’t think. He ran.

Sprinted down the steel corridor, past screaming techs and soldiers abandoning posts and sprinting for their lives, past a siren that was already too slow to matter. He reached the blast doors—
And inside—
That man was still smiling.

Tyrenor lunged, and yanked him out.

Too late.

He saw the man look at him.

“Tyrenor,” the man said. “This is going to be beautiful.”

8:04 AM, Central Imperial Time.

A boy named Aldric Valen, 4.3 kilometers away, witnessed the sky fracture.

8:05 AM, Central Imperial Time.

The singularity collapsed.

Tyrenor's last act was instinct.

He slammed his hand into the capsule on his hip and screamed the phrase:

“LIMINAL SHELL!”

His body flared with light, Luminance amplifying Essence. The barrier bloomed around him just as the chamber collapsed into itself.

Everything vanished.

[Memory Archived]

Aldric staggered back from the tablet.

The moment his hand left the stone, his mind exploded.

Aldric screamed.

It wasn’t a human sound.

He fell to the floor, convulsing, eyes wide with pure, unfiltered terror.

His voice cracked like shattering glass:

“NO! NO, NO, GET OUT, GET OUT—WHAT DID YOU SHOW ME?!”

The images wouldn’t stop.

The sphere.
The machine.
The collapsing light.
The man inside.
That grin.

It was still burned into his vision.

He stumbled.

Tripped.

His stomach twisted. His lungs seized. He gagged, vomited bile across the stone.

“I saw it. I saw it. I SAW IT!”

Blood dripped from his nose.

His nails tore at his arms, at his hair, at the floor, anything to anchor himself.

His teeth clenched so hard they bled.

“WHY DID I LIVE!?”

His eyes were wide, red-rimmed, forgetting to blink.

The world spun sideways. Color drained from his vision.

“Why was it—?”

He collapsed forward.

His body twitched once.

Then went still.

When he woke, he was crying.

He didn’t remember when it started.

He was lying on the bunker floor, arms curled against his chest like he was trying to protect something long gone.

Beside him, the tablet still stood.
Nine symbols, none repeated, surrounding a wheel.

And beside it sat Tyrenor.

His arms folded. His back against the wall.

He didn’t speak.

Not for a long time.

When Aldric finally sat up, dry-mouthed, bones aching, soul peeled raw, he managed to say one word:

“Why?”

Tyrenor looked at him.

Not with guilt.

With grief.

“This is called a memory tablet,” he said quietly. “It’s a gateway. One of the—”

“Why me?”

Tyrenor stared.

“I wouldn’t know.”

Outside, wind brushed over the hill like a breath no one had taken yet.

Veylor came inside the room, wearing no armor, and threw Aldric a waterskin.

Aldric drank all of it in a single breath.

Silence.

Aldric finally spoke, his voice less hoarse.

“…That man in your memory. The one who held the Solace core.”

Tyrenor didn’t look back. “Yeah?”

“Who was he?”

A long pause.

Then: “He didn’t have a name that mattered to you.”

“Was he insane?”

“What do you think?”

“You tried to save him.”

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

“Perhaps.”

A beat.

“Why did you show me that?”

Tyrenor slowly stood up, his gold eye clicking as it focused.

“Because you still think the world can be explained.”

Aldric’s throat tightened. “So? That’s bad?”

“No,” Tyrenor said. “But it’s dangerous.”

He crossed the room in slow steps, then stopped a few feet from Veylor.

“You needed to see what happens when you’re right. Completely right. But still not enough.”

Aldric looked up at him.

“Then what’s the point?”

Tyrenor didn’t smile.

“There isn’t one.”

The words landed like a stone in Aldric’s chest.

He turned away. His hands gripped tighter.

Outside the bunker, the wind howled harder.

No, Aldric thought. Not again. Not like this.

He stood abruptly, boots scraping against steel.

“There has to be something,” he said. “Some reason. Some meaning. If all of this—Eryndor, Tomas, the Church, Solace... If it’s just a broken machine with no purpose, then—then why do we even fight?”

Tyrenor looked at him with that tired, mechanical eye.

“You want it to matter.”

“I need it to.”

“Then give it meaning. Don’t wait for it to hand you one.”

Aldric was breathing hard now.

Veylor stepped forward. “That’s what Sovereigns are supposed to do.”

The word slipped out like a spark from dry flint.

Aldric turned slowly.

“…What?”

Veylor didn’t flinch. “I said—”

“I heard you.” Aldric’s voice dropped. “You said Sovereigns.”

He looked between them.

Neither moved.