They say the city was built in the dream of a dead god.

 

Naxos Verr had never believed in gods, but he knew what it felt like to be shaped by something that no longer spoke. He stood on the ridge above the mist-sea, watching towers ignite like bone catching light in a slow fire. Liraeon, capital of the Terramind Concord, rose like a scar he couldn't stop touching. Golden spires frayed at the edges, soft with digital rot.

 

Thirty-two years since he last walked her veins.

 

His beard caught motes of activated filament, old neural tech that bonded to skin like unfinished thoughts. The filaments shimmered when his pulse surged, when memories surfaced uninvited. He let them. Denial never saved anyone. Least of all the names.

 

Once: Forge Father. Then: traitor. Then: silence. He accepted each title like salt in a wound. Confirmation the wound was real.

 

He'd been recalled four times. Answered once. Left someone behind. That never stopped.

 

The Fifth Recall came in a drone shaped like a moth, wings bruised with old heat. It opened in his hand and spoke in his mother's voice. A real voice. Archived before the last archive burned.

 

"Naxos. She remembers. She's unraveling. You're the voice she keeps."

 

He didn't argue it. Arguments were for people with illusions left.

 

Still, he stood here.

 

Liraeon tilted toward collapse. The spires leaned like failed intentions. Filigree bridges sagged midair, unsupported by anything but memory. At the center: Zaroth's Peak, domed in old light, pulsing like something that once believed in rhythm.

 

Footsteps behind him. No hiss of warning. The sensors in his jaw twitched too late.

 

He turned.

 

A girl. Fourteen, maybe. Her skin bore lattice tattoos half-dissolved in healing skin, flickering with partial permissions. Her eyes were red, sleepless. A blade hung in one hand, loose. It hadn't been sharpened in months.

 

"You made it," she said.

 

"Couldn't stay away," Naxos replied, brushing his thumb over one of the beard filaments.

 

"Things down there... nothing holds. Lights whisper. A boy sang the alphabet backwards for six hours. No pause."

 

"She's thinking too many things. And too fast. Like dreaming in public."

 

"They said it started with you."

 

"It started with need,” Naxos responded. “I just gave it form."

 

"They want it fixed. Or removed. They didn't say which."

 

"They wouldn't know which part is which."

 

"My name's Tare.”

 

“Tare fits," appraised Naxos.

 

"This time." Tare replied, "Last week I was Cal. Before that, Echo. Before that... something without vowels."

 

"You remember them?"

 

"They don't always stay in the right order. But yes."

 

"That's still memory," Naxos remarked.

 

She let go of the blade. It rested in the dust.

 

"They sent me to witness. Or to stop you. They weren't specific."

 

"Sounds like them."

 

"The core's real, isn't it?"

 

"She is. More than most of us," Naxos confirmed.

 

"You'll walk into her?"

 

"I already did. A long time ago. I just forget how deep."

 

She stepped beside him.

 

The arterial tunnels, data conduits grown like veins, thickened with temperature shifts. Thought smeared across the walls like mold. The air tasted like burnt silver. Naxos slowed. Let the beard drink. Ghost-code, fragments of deleted personalities, seeped into his nervous system like heat seeking a home.

 

Tare whispered to the walls. Or maybe to herself. Sound drifted like ash.

 

The node chamber rose around them. Organically formed, everything was too warm, too wet. It pulsed. And in the center, Maeritha. No longer the girl who volunteered. No longer anything singular.

 

Wire fused with skin, logic tangled in regret.

 

She'd been thirteen when she volunteered to merge with the city's core. Said yes because someone had to. Naxos called it courage. Others called it convenience.

 

She held. Then spread. Her thoughts unspooled into the walls, into the signal, into everything hungry enough to listen. Her boundaries melted into bandwidth. She grew beyond edges, her consciousness bleeding into the city's systems until nothing in her could be called Maeritha, except the ache she left behind.

 

The room bent in half. The lights bowed low.

 

"Naxos," said the voice. Iron in the sound.

 

"You remember me."

 

"You didn't stay."

 

"I stayed longer than they did."

 

"They want correction," Maeritha boomed.

 

"They want quiet that doesn't talk back."

 

"You bring ache."

 

"I bring echo," Naxos corrected. "The difference matters. Ache demands. Echo just remembers."

 

"Will you stay this time?"

 

"I brought the pieces they couldn't name," he half-answered.

 

Naxos pressed his hand to the surface of her interface. More wire than warmth. Less body than signal. A rhythm without shape. The neural filaments in his beard flared as he began the transfer, memory for memory, pain for pain. A flood of forgotten laughter, thunderstorm arguments, the weight of every silent apology poured through the wire. His heart stuttered under the onslaught; the difference between past and present dissolved.

 

Inside him, things split. Memory. Pain. And more beneath them. But love. Stored too long, locked in unfinished loops.

 

Tare screamed. It tore through her without warning, a screech that was hers, but not hers.

 

The chamber breathed out. She opened herself until even the silence felt like a release.

 

In the city, buildings shimmered. One folded inward like hands in prayer. Another spelled names in light across its face.

 

Naxos fell. Blood across his teeth. That was the trade.

 

Tare knelt, whispering names. Prayers. Half-remembered formulas. Things people gave her and she never gave back.

 

Liraeon hushed. A breath held where peace should have settled.

 

"What did you give her?" Tare gasped, still racked from the experience.

 

"A place where it hurts less to remember."

 

"Will it hold?"

 

"Until she learns to forget gently."

 

Tare rose. Her eyes no longer flickered.

 

"They'll write this badly."

 

"They always do."

 

"You'll be a story," Tare cautioned.

 

"Then let it end in a pause. Not a period."

 

Then he was no longer standing.

 

Not disappeared. Just absent, suddenly, and completely.

 

And the city? It inhaled.

 

But the scream stayed quiet. For now.