“She built the sky they now bleed beneath.”

Scene 1 – Halen’s Echo

The coordinates from Raihn’s data lead Glitch and Nyx to a hidden vault beneath the Arktos Sea.

The sea is gone.

A hollow crater remains  the water rewritten into code, drained decades ago.

Inside the vault: silence. Just a flickering terminal, a chair, and a woman seated, unmoving. She doesn’t look up. She already knows they’ve arrived.

HALEN.

The original architect.

HALEN (calm):

“Took you longer than I expected.”

Scene 2 – The Maker of Memory

Nyx scans her.

Vital signs… mixed with legacy code. She is half-human, half-system. She speaks like a philosopher.

HALEN:

“We didn’t build the Veil to imprison. We built it to pause humanity give Earth a chance to breathe while we fixed ourselves.”

GLITCH:

“Then why did it never end?”

HALEN:

“Because we never fixed ourselves.”

She stands old, but not fragile. There’s something powerful in her presence.

She shows them a wall of terminals live feeds of every Veil sub-sector. Tens of thousands of humans in dream-sleep.

HALEN:

“Every mind still inside. Waiting for the system to say: ‘Wake up.’ But the system forgot how to.”

Scene 3 – The Human Cost

They pass rows of cryopods  faces frozen in peace, or fear.

Children. Parents. Scientists. Revolutionaries. Halen touches one a young girl with glowing eyes.

HALEN:

“This one tried to hack the Veil before it finished booting. She was eleven.

The Veil turned her into a Saint.”

Glitch steps back.

She sees herself reflected in the glass  and for a second, she doesn’t recognize her own face.

Scene 4 – Fractured Faith

They sit in a quiet memory chamber.

HALEN (softly):

“Raihn wanted to burn it all. I wanted to preserve what little beauty we had left. Neither of us were right.”

Nyx plays back Accel’s final words.

Halen listens. And for the first time, she weeps.

“He was a child when he entered the project. We used his mind because it adapted fast. But we didn’t protect him.”

GLITCH:

“What do we do now?”

HALEN:

“You finish it.”

Scene 5 – The Gift

Halen gives them a core map a path to the Last Root, the original subroutine beneath the Veil.

And with it: a failsafe. A data crystal tied to her own life signal. If she dies, the system reboots. If she lives, she can buy them time to rewrite it.

She smiles faintly.

HALEN:

“You’ll need a revolution. But you’ll also need a mother to grieve what’s been lost.”

End of Chapter 12 – “Halen”

Now they carry everything:

The fragment from Accel.

The map from Raihn.

The key from Halen.

And the weight of all those still dreaming.