Page 64 of Aïdes the Unseen
The dog.
The stir in the soil.
The flare of the core flower—Regrowth, yes. But alsoreturn.
She hadn’t remembered me yet, but the earth had.
Mara returned twenty-two minutes later.
She didn’t knock. She never did. Her presence announced itself the way frost does—without noise, but with consequence.
“The anomaly scan’s complete,” she said. “Nothing new in her immediate surroundings. But two of the older tether-nodes just spiked in correlation with her current signature.”
I looked up. “Where?”
“One in Prague,” she said. “The other in the dead sector of Node Archive Nine. A corrupted memory vault.”
My chest tightened. “Nine? No one’s accessed Nine in decades.” Longer.
“I didn’t say it was accessed,” she said. “I said it reacted. The pattern was dormant until her interaction withRegrowththis morning. Then something… ignited.”
Mara crossed the room and pulled a black data shard from her coat pocket. Thin as a blade. “I extracted the last stable memory from the corrupted sector.”
I took it, fingers brushing hers. Even through the glove, her skin was cold. She was always cold.
“I don’t like it,” she added. “That it’s waking now.”
“Neither do I.”
I crossed to the viewing alcove and inserted the shard into the auxiliary reader. The room dimmed. A shimmer flickered into shape before me—a memory reconstruction. Flickering. Scarred.
Then—clarity.
Memory Fragment:Paris, 1795
She was calledÉlisein that life.
A poet’s daughter. Pale and ferocious. Her hair was black as burnt sugar, her laugh sharp as a blade. She walked the ruined alleys of post-revolution Paris like she owned the bones beneath it.
The echo began with her running.
No.Fleeing.
A back street. Rain. Blood.
She was clutching something to her chest—a book, or perhaps a mirror. A distorted reflection of herself flickered in the object, and for a second… her faceshifted.
Not Élise. Not Irina.
Persephone.
Wide-eyed. Terrified. Glowing faintly with a light not meant for that century.
Behind her, a figure moved through the rain.
No face. No features. Not even a name in the records. The simulation had failed to tag it. Only darkness wrapped in mortal skin. A god, perhaps. Or something worse.
She turned into a doorway—but the door never opened.
