It wasn't about ownership anymore.
That illusion had burned away somewhere between the Vaultseed's first bloom and the soft return of names once unspoken. The Driftroot didn't belong to Kye. Nor to the System. Nor even to the Chronicle.
It belonged to those who had no claim.
And that made it everyone's.
Kye stood atop the station's observatory ring, the shielded dome open to the stars. Not for air. For memorylight.
Above him, the Interstitia glimmered not with trade lanes or battle markers, but with the slow, steady flicker of stations answering Driftroot's call. One after another, beacons lit—soft and pulsing—across old corridors of exile.
Some were decades old. Others predated the Chronicle itself.
He watched a single flare rise from the Luma Belt—what once was a mining colony reduced to silence after a failed rebellion. Now, it whispered a name.
Not of its founder.
Of its cook.
The Vaultseed shimmered.
Zeraphine's voice arrived through the longwave band again, softer now, contemplative.
> "They've stopped asking what this is."
Kye nodded, though she couldn't see it.
"They've started becoming it," he said.
He touched the edge of the deck's framework. Ivyroot, born of memorylight and interface alloy, curled gently around the steel. It grew without permission. That was the point.
The Chronicle flared.
Not through his wrist.
Through everything.
It didn't ask.
It included.
> ARTICLE THIRTY-EIGHT: When no one owns the future, it can finally grow.
Kye stepped back inside.
Children now played in the converted cryopod halls, their laughter echoing where stillness once ruled. One paused to tie a red thread around a stanchion—no ritual, no meaning.
Until the Vaultseed pulsed.
And wove the gesture into light.
No One's.
And therefore: Everyone's.