The snow whispered around him.
Kael's boots crunched across the frostbitten street as he moved through the lifeless city, the Memory Core pulsing faintly against his chest like a second heartbeat. Buildings loomed like grave markers — silent, watching, empty.
His breath misted in the freezing air.
Each step felt heavier.
"Guardian Vault…" he muttered, glancing once again at the holographic map burned into his memory. "Delta-Seven is… weeks away on foot."
He paused near a rusted bus crushed beneath ice. The street around him warped and cracked — not physically, but in a strange, impossible way. The air shimmered. The Core buzzed violently.
Then—
Everything shattered.
Like glass breaking, the world around him dissolved.
Kael gasped. He stood… nowhere. Or everywhere.
A vision.
But unlike the first one, this wasn't just a recording.
He could feel the heat of the sun.
Yes — the sun.
It blazed above him, golden and alive, warming his skin for the first time in his life.
He turned slowly.
He was standing in a vast city made of glass and light — Solara, perhaps — a memory of the world before the eclipse.
People laughed in the streets. Flying machines soared overhead. Children danced through glowing parks.
And then—
A voice.
Not the AI. Not Sol.
Something deeper. Timeless.
"Kael. Do you see now?"
He turned toward it.
A figure stood atop a staircase of light — cloaked in flowing white, face hidden behind a cracked mirror mask.
"You carry the last dawn within you. But dawn is not light. It is change. It is the moment the dark must yield."
Kael took a step forward. "Who are you?"
"The world was not meant to die. It was rewritten. By him."
Suddenly, the sky darkened.
Flames erupted across the city. Screams. Light twisted into shadows. And from above, descending like a god…
The Architect.
He was not a man. Not machine. Something between. Cloaked in living circuits, with a crown of rusted metal and a face of shifting void.
He raised a hand — and the sun exploded.
Kael fell to his knees, blinded by the blast.
"This is what he stole," the voice said. "And what you must take back."
Kael jolted awake.
He was back in the real world, gasping, sweat freezing on his skin.
The city was still dead. Still dark.
But the Core glowed brighter now — steady. Waiting.
He stood.
He didn't have all the answers. But now he had a name. A memory. And a fire inside him that even this dead world couldn't smother.
Far away…
Sol stood at the edge of a blackened lake, watching his own reflection ripple.
He felt it too.
A pulse in the Void.
A stirring in the dark.
"The Dawnbearer remembers," he whispered.
He looked up.
"Then the erasure must begin."
End of Chapter 4