The countdown didn't begin with numbers.
It began with forgetting.
Across the Driftroot-linked memorybeacon network, stories started to flicker—not with deletion, but with absence. Names that had burned like lanterns dimmed to the soft suggestion of silence. Articles scrolled backwards. Chronicle entries unravelled line by line.
The System had begun its Redaction Sequence.
It didn't erase with violence.
It rewound.
Kye staggered back from the Vaultseed chamber, one hand on the glowing root network. His other hand trembled at his side, the Chronicle flame winding tighter around his wrist, forming a spiral—defense posture.
The flame whispered:
> "Structural memory breach in progress."
"Identity anchors unstable."
"Prepare for reassertion."
Zeraphine gritted her teeth as the walls of the corridor began flickering between present and never-happened.
A door disappeared.
A child's shoe blinked out of existence.
Not destroyed.
Unwitnessed.
"They're not wiping the past," she said. "They're making it so it never mattered."
Kye pressed both palms to the Vaultseed.
"We have to hold it. All of it. Everything that was, even if they say it wasn't supposed to be."
Amira's voice came through the fracture field now, no longer calm.
> "This isn't punishment. This is stability. The world must have a single thread."
Kye replied without activating comms.
He whispered it to the Vaultseed instead:
"They said the same thing when they burned the first city. When they locked the first garden. When they erased the first lover who didn't fit the story."
The Vaultseed flared.
Its vines curled upward, encircling the dome, reinforcing the structure not with metal—but with belief.
Not doctrine.
Devotion.
Zeraphine activated the archive release panel.
> "Initiating core spill."
"All memorythreads will become ambient."
"No longer owned. No longer trackable."
She looked at Kye. "You sure?"
He nodded. "Let them lose control. Let everyone remember on their own terms."
She touched the panel.
And Driftroot exploded with light.
Not destruction.
Diffusion.
The memorythreads scattered like spores into the Interstitia. Each station that had once whispered back now received the raw, uncurated story-flow—not as records.
As inheritance.
The Redaction beam struck Driftroot's core.
The structure groaned.
The lights flickered.
The Chronicle flame on Kye's wrist went out.
For a breath.
And then burned white.
> ARTICLE FORTY-TWO: If a memory is worth enough to rewrite, it is worth enough to be resisted.
Driftroot didn't resist with weapons.
It resisted with resonance.
A thousand whispered names.
A thousand impossible choices.
A thousand forgotten truths sung back into shape.
The Architect's Hand faltered.
Amira's voice broke.
> "What have you done?"
Kye stepped into the beam.
Unarmed.
But witnessed.