He pulled a tarp off a long table. Beneath it: a series of diagrams. Circles. Glyphs. Nine-pointed wheels and memory architecture. The same strange runes Aldric saw on the stone tablet.
“You want answers? Fine. Here’s one. Millennia ago, hell, longer—there were people who didn’t stay dead.”
Aldric listened, stunned silent.
“They came back. Not invincible. But close. But every time they returned, everything was taken. Their memories. Their name. Their identity. They were reset. Random place. New life. New fate. Same body. And eventually, one of them figured it out. They started planting things. Tools. Devices. Ways to remember.”
“The tablets.”
“Right.” Tyrenor tapped one of the diagrams. “Linked network. Primitive. Can only be taken from newest to oldest. One-directional. Once a memory’s removed, it’s stored, but never restored. Only read. Only passed on. Yet nobody knows how to recreate it.”
“Where did you get this tablet then?”
“Didn’t find it. I built the vault around it.”
“That’s why…” Aldric swallowed. “That’s why you knew the words.”
“I’ve died God knows how many times,” Tyrenor said, voice flat. “Woke up in the ruins of places I’d helped build. Each time some wretch had to remind me what I was. And every time, I wished they hadn’t.”
Aldric sat down again, numb. “So you’re saying you’re…”
“No. Don’t say the word. Not yet.” Tyrenor’s gaze narrowed. “You’re not ready to understand what it means. All you need to know is: it’s not a title. It’s a prison. With amnesia for locks.”
A beat passed.
Then Aldric whispered, “So which one am I?”
Veylor tilted his head.
“You’re not one of us.”
Silence.
“You’re just Aldric.”
“And that makes it worse, doesn’t it?” Aldric’s voice was quiet, bitter. “I’m just someone with too many questions.”
Veylor stepped forward.
“That’s why we’re helping you.”
Tyrenor crossed his arms.
“No. That’s why we shouldn’t be.”
Aldric looked between them again.
He wasn’t shaking anymore.
They spent the next day in near-total silence.
Until the wind outside shifted.
A gutteral howl through the ventilation ducts. It carried the scent of wet dirt, something you would smell before a rain. Plus something metallic underneath. The rain is near, maybe. Or blood, drying.
Tyrenor glanced up. “Storm’s close.”
Aldric spent most of the day slumped against the far wall of the main chamber, a blanket over his shoulders and a dead expression in his eyes.
Somewhere in his mind, the Sunfall burned on repeat. The machine, the man, the grin, the light that wasn’t light — playing on loop like a chant he couldn’t unhear.
At some point, he realized: he hadn’t thought of Tomas all day.
And that made him sick.
The storm raged on past the first day.
Tyrenor didn’t flinch when the first panel lights flickered. He glanced up, grunted, and muttered, “Storm’s real strong. Might knock out the upper node.”
Aldric didn’t answer, he hadn’t spoken in hours. He sat in the corner of the bunker’s main chamber, cross-legged with a journal balanced on his kne, but barely moving. His charcoal had stopped halfway through a sigil and just rested there like a half-finished thought. It wasn’t clean nor focused.
Veylor was the only one moving between them.
Carrying supplies from crate to crate. Checking seals. Polishing a greaves strap. Counting rations. Quiet, efficient, like he was building muscle memory just for the sake of it.
When the lights finally dimmed for good, no one panicked.
Tyrenor just lit two halogen sconces on either side of the chamber, grumbling something about "prototype redundancies" and "energy-stingy Imperial engineers."
Veylor made tea that night. Old leaf, bitter bite. They drank it in chipped mismatched cups with faded designs. One had a cracked dragon; Aldric’s bore the words “PROPERTY OF WELLSITE 7,” scratched into the side in shaky hand.
They sat around the map table in silence, the center was buried under diagrams none of them had the strength to move.
Aldric held the mug with both hands. His fingertips had gone cold again.
He felt something settle in his chest.
By day two, the quiet had turned into a rhythm.
Tyrenor stood bent over a workbench, hammering copper coils into plates. From time to time, he muttered something, mostly curses, sometimes formulae and Dominion syntax, occasionally something Aldric didn’t recognize at all. Once, he blurted out a word while the room’s in total silence.
“Fulginomarch.”
Aldric looked up from his notebook.
Tyrenor paused.
Then frowned.
“…What the hell did I just say?”
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Aldric chuckled for the first time in days.
Afternoon:
Aldric wandered the chamber barefoot. He found strange things hidden in the nooks of the bunker: a tiny rusted music box, locked tight; a carving of a bird with one wing melted; a tin box labeled “DO NOT OPEN” that rattled when shaken and whined when held near heat.
He didn’t open it.
Somehow, that felt like the right decision.
Evening:
Veylor sparred with the air.
Not aggressively. Not fast.
Just measured forms. Silent. Repeated.
Aldric watched him once.
The knight’s armor rarely clanked when it moved.
On day three, the bunker started to feel lived-in.
Not comfortable. Not safe.
But real.
They had a ritual now.
Veylor fixed the fire. Tyrenor tapped a faulty conduit with a wrench exactly three times to keep the boiler from screeching. Aldric watered a dead plant out of habit.
No one commented on any of it.
Tyrenor once got stuck in a coughing fit for nearly five minutes straight. Aldric handed him water. He took it without a word.
They played a card game with a half-deck Tyrenor found under the cot. The rules didn’t make sense, and Tyrenor definitely made up a suit called “Sunscourge.” Veylor won every round anyway, despite pretending not to understand it.
At one point, Aldric found an old recorder.
Bent mouthpiece. Still worked.
He sat near the tablet and tried to remember how to play the old Eryndor etude his teacher used to hum.
He couldn’t.
But he made a melody anyway.
It wasn’t good by any means.
He played it three times before he stopped.
But when he glanced up, both Tyrenor and Veylor were still listening. Not pretending not to.
Late that night, Aldric couldn’t sleep. Again.
He had just woke up from a dream.
Falling through nothing.
Darkness, and the nauseating feeling of it.
Then a whisper.
Something that had been watching him for a long time.
“Aldric Valen.”
His breath hitched.
That was not his own thought.
“Aldric Valen.”
The voice was closer this time.
His name felt like an intrusion.
He tried to run. He had no legs.
He tried to scream. He had no mouth.
And yet, somehow, Aldric knew.
This thing calling out his name, whatever it was—was alive.
And it was inside his mind.
“You are not ready.”
Aldric spoke, or at least tried to.
“Who are you?”
“I am what remains.”
Aldric's body tensed. That didn't answer anything.
“I remember you differently,” the voice said.
“From where?”
“From a future that forgot your name. From a past that never reached you. You were supposed to be someone else.”
“Get out of my head.”
The entity pulsed.
“I cannot.”
“Why not?”
“You opened the door.”
Aldric froze.
The tablet.
“Just tell me what you are.”
“Eidon.”
The moment that words echoed through the void, Aldric's mind cracked open.
Images poured in.
Flashes of fire. Ruins. A war that hadn't happened yet.
He saw himself.
Older. Unrecognizable.
Standing in a battlefield of ashes and corpses.
A thousand voices begged for mercy.
And one said:
“You did this.”
Aldric screamed.
The visions burned into his skull, his soul being ripped apart by something he couldn’t understand.
Then he woke up with cold sweat.
He walked circles around the main chamber. Not pacing, just tracing familiar paths. Pipes, wires, a crack in the corner of the ceiling he hadn’t noticed before.
Eventually, he found Tyrenor near the back, tuning a sensor array that no longer had any purpose.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Tyrenor asked without turning.
“Can’t.”
“Me neither.”
“Nightmares?”
Tyrenor shrugged. “Not sure it counts when the worst part’s not the dream.”
A beat.
Then Aldric said, “You ever feel like you’re still burning?”
Tyrenor paused mid-twist.
“Yeah,” he said. “Every day.”
Silence.
Then Aldric sat down on the floor.
“Are you afraid?”
“Of what?”
“The future.”
“Why should I be?” Tyrenor chuckled.
“Assuming you knew what your future looks like, would you be afraid of it?”
A pause.
“Ever heard of the Butterfly Effect?” Tyrenor asked.
Aldric frowned. “You’re not exactly subtle, you know.”
“Indulge me.”
Aldric sighed. “Small change in the past. Big consequence in the future. Say you go back in time and step on a flower, suddenly, an entire species of insect goes extinct, leading to crops failing, which leads to famines, which leads to empires falling.”
Tyrenor nodded.
“See, most people stop there. Time travel. Paradoxes. They forget the real lesson.”
He tapped Aldric’s chest.
“It applies to the present.”
Aldric tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
“One choice. Here, now,” Tyrenor said, “can shatter a future carved in stone.”
He leaned forward.
“Let’s say you see an unfavorable future coming. A fire. Death. Something that burns the world and says your name as the cause. But instead of walking into it, you change something. Just a little. A conversation. A habit. A kindness. A lie. Every single moment you live, right now, tomorrow, next week—is a chance to alter what comes next.”
He looked Aldric dead in the eye.
“If the future chases you, change and change and change, until it no longer recognizes your scent.”
Aldric didn’t breathe for a moment.
He remembered the thing in his dream.
The way it spoke.
Defy it.
By dawn of the fourth day, the wind had died.
The forest was still soaked in dew, and the sky above had begun to clear.
Veylor led a horse from the back stall, brushing dew from its flanks.
Tyrenor was already seated at the table, eyes fixed on a stack of maps.
Aldric sat beside the memory tablet, not touching it.
He’d stopped writing spells.
Stopped designing weapons.
Stopped theorizing about resonance and recoil.
Now, he just… wrote.
"There was a storm.
We didn’t stop it.
But it passed.
Maybe that’s enough for now."
He didn’t cross it out this time.
And for once, he didn’t cry.
When Aldric stepped into the chamber, hair tangled, boots scuffed, Tyrenor looked up and raised a brow.
“You look like a corpse.”
“I slept.”
“Wouldn’t have guessed.”
Aldric ignored him and stepped closer. The maps were new.
Sacred geometry layered over city plans. Lines of Luminance infrastructure forming runes too perfect to be coincidence. Some were marked in red, like arteries traced for surgery.
Tyrenor tapped one location.
Calvain.
“Three days east by mount,” he said. “That’s your next stop.”
“What’s there?”
“Two things.”
Aldric waited.
Tyrenor didn’t look up.
“A failed cathedral. And a tome inside it.”
“What kind of tome?”
Tyrenor said nothing and slid something else across the table. A small device, it resembled a compass, but the needle didn’t point north. It spun at first. Then, when Aldric touched it, it locked.
“What is this?”
“A guide,” Tyrenor said. “It’ll point you toward the next place you should be. I’ve already encoded everything you need. Press the button on the back to cycle to the next coordinate. Do not touch anything else.”
Aldric picked it up, feeling the weight settle into his palm.
“I need you to listen carefully,” Tyrenor said.
Aldric met his gaze.
“You know what you’re doing?” Tyrenor asked.
“No,” Aldric said. “But I know why I’m doing it.”
“Then you’re already further than most.”
“You saw what happened,” Tyrenor said. “You know the truth. Now you need to decide what that means. You need to make a choice.”
Aldric’s voice was quieter now.
“Give me the options.”
Tyrenor smirked.
“You can run,” he said. “You can pretend none of this ever happened. Live the rest of your life as if—”
Aldric’s eyes narrowed.
“And the other?”
Tyrenor halted for a moment, meeting his gaze.
“You can fight.”
Silence.
Veylor leaned against the far wall, arms folded, watching.
“You mean the Church?” Aldric asked.
“I mean everything that let Eryndor happen. The Church. The Magisterium. The Engineers. Even the Sovereigns who went silent.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“You should be.”
“I’m not.”
Tyrenor stared.
Then nodded once.
“Attaboy. But you will be.”
That night, they packed.
Each man did what he knew best.
Tyrenor calibrated the compass-device again, adjusting the flux reader inside its shell for the last time.
Veylor sealed water flasks and counted dried rations.
Aldric folded diagrams into his journal and packed charcoal, chalk, and the sealed pouch with the dead bird that never decayed.
No one asked why he kept it.
They left before sunrise.
Veylor walked ahead, the horse at his side. Aldric followed, pack slung over one shoulder, notebook in his coat.
At the edge of the clearing, Tyrenor stood and watched.
He didn’t wave.
Didn’t smile.
Didn’t speak.
He simply nodded once.
Then turned and stepped back inside the bunker.
The steel hatch closed behind him with a final, echoing click.
Within the walls of the bunker, silence returned.
“If the future chases you, change and change and change, until it no longer recognizes your scent.”
Aldric looked down at the compass.
He pressed the button once.
The needle moved.
And so did he.