The world had stopped—but the ashes didn't know. They danced, soft and restless, like forgotten memories refusing to settle.
A red thread floated between them.
And An Khai, breathless, watched memory take shape.
When his fingers touched it, the world didn't shatter—it whispered.
ACCESS GRANTED. MEMORY LOCKED UNDER TOKEN: '緋'
Pain surged behind his eyes.
Twin moons. Her hands stained in his blood.
She pressed the carved hairpin into his palm as he bled out.
"If I fail, remember this. If I kill you… find me again."
The words came not as sound but as weight—a feeling only memory can carry.
The cliff was silent. The sky above cracked like ice. They had just run, just fought, just bled.
She had been crying—not from fear, but from knowing what was about to happen.
Not because she wanted to, but because she was chosen to.
She had knelt before him, shaking. The blade was still wet with his blood.
And the hairpin—the one she always wore hidden inside her sleeve, carved not from jade, but from a piece of his broken sword—glowed faintly.
"I was made to end you. But I chose to leave something behind."
Then—darkness.
His knees buckled. The memory burned. And in his hand, the hairpin pulsed—not as ornament, but as key.
He opened his palm. The hairpin split into pieces of glowing code and hovered.
A single line pulsed from the air:
REDACTED SEQUENCE: UNLOCKED
MEMORY SHARD: 'The First Betrayal'
His eyes trembled.
He didn't just lose her.
She was made to forget him—by her choice, under their command.
But the hairpin survived. A ghost in the system. A thread that refused deletion.
The soldiers stirred.
"Secure the entity—!"
He vanished.
⸻
Now: atop the Fault Wastes.
The wind here was wrong. It carried echoes instead of sound.
The sky shimmered like a broken user interface—patches of black static cutting through stars.
He stood high above a dead forest, his figure lit by stormlight fracturing the void.
He stared at the projection of the hairpin. It rotated in midair, displaying a symbol—their shared vow.
Not carved by system, but by hand. Her hand. Once trembling. Now erased.
"The system remembers my death, but not her tears," he muttered.
A presence flickered behind him.
A construct floated into view, humming with system energy.
It wore her voice. But none of her.
"You are anomaly 472-MAI-01. Cease access to forbidden archives. Return to containment."
He didn't turn.
"Did she choose to forget, or was she made to choose?"
"Subject 07 initiated memory suppression protocol after Authorization Level Alpha."
He clenched his fists.
"Why does that still hurt?"
Silence.
Then his voice—low, almost breaking:
"If love must be deleted to maintain order… then this world isn't worth saving."
He paused.
"Not because it's broken—
but because it dares to be perfect without pain."
The construct processed.
"Love is not a sanctioned variable. It disrupts predictable outcomes."
"So do revolutions."
The projection glowed.
The construct's code faltered—tiny flickers around its face.
"That token is prohibited."
"Then you're afraid of love."
The construct's voice cracked.
"Emotion detected. Resetting voice protocol."
He dropped the fragment.
The world glitched.
Lightning carved the sky.
Code fluttered.
He vanished again.
⸻
Elsewhere. The Hall of Eternal Blue Flame.
She stood before a mirror that didn't reflect.
Not a person. Not a shape. Just… potential.
The thread appeared first.
Then the boy.
Then—nothing.
Her hand lifted.
Not by will.
But by ache.
She touched the mirror. The thread pulsed.
A prompt surged through her spine like a whisper:
"Foreign Emotion Detected. Would you like to delete this?"
[YES] / [ ]
She didn't move.
The room darkened. Fire dimmed.
A voice echoed behind her:
"You are stable. Do not falter."
"Then why do I dream in red?"
No answer.
Another pulse. A second prompt.
"Would you like to override suppression?"
[ ] / [NO]
Her lips moved.
But the system muted them.
And in the silence—
the mirror shattered.
But only on her side.
⸻
The system did not like being disobeyed.
An Khai didn't need the wind to know he was being traced.
The glitch he left behind would last only seconds.
He sprinted through fractured terrain—this was not land, but discarded architecture, ideas that were once worlds.
He leapt over a collapsed altar, then vanished mid-air.
Reappeared inside a sunken chamber of forgotten logic—symbols half-loaded, rooms folding into themselves.
No map, no sense of direction. Only static. But he moved like he knew.
Because he did.
He had been here before—when he died.
Behind him, another flicker: pursuit initiated.
Three constructs. One bore her voice again.
"Cease movement or neural lockdown will be enforced."
He didn't respond.
He turned sharply, led them into a corridor marked with void runes.
The kind even system protocol feared.
They hesitated.
An Khai didn't.
He walked into the dark.
⸻
At the same moment—
She sat alone in the room that monitored anomalies.
Her fingers hovered over the screen.
On it: the thread. A burst of visual static. Then the token. The hairpin.
She shouldn't remember it.
She shouldn't feel anything.
But her hands trembled.
And something inside her whispered:
"You carved that. Not as a tool. As a promise."
Suddenly—an alert:
EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY DETECTED IN SUBJECT 07
LEVEL: UNSAFE
INITIATE SANITIZATION PROTOCOL?
A cursor blinked:
[YES] / [NO]
She stared.
"I shouldn't hesitate," she said aloud.
But she did.
Long enough for the screen to timeout.
The protocol didn't run.
And in that moment, two things happened:
– Somewhere beneath reality, An Khai stepped into a space that shouldn't exist—and was welcomed.
– And above, inside her, something locked for eons… began to hum.
It wasn't a memory.
It wasn't a command.
It was a song she'd never heard—
but somehow, had been aching for all her life.