Chapter 9: Dead zone east

Silence lay heavy across the northern scar.
No birds. No wind. Only white ash falling like snow.
Aya stood at the edge of a crater deeper than memory.
A graveyard, not of bodies, but of forgotten machines.

Below her feet were shattered engines shaped like beasts.
Steel skulls half-buried in frozen dust, eyes dim forever.
They weren’t made for transport or peace only war.
This was where the giants had fallen, and been erased.

The boy knelt and traced ancient symbols in the dirt.
He wasn’t speaking much anymore. Something inside had broken.
Aya didn’t press him. She felt it too.
A pressure that said, “Turn back,” but gave no reason.

Lightning forked in the sky without sound.
The clouds were wrong shaped like spines and twisted limbs.
Ahead stood a lone tower, collapsed, leaning into the earth.
It looked like it had tried to crawl away before dying.

Inside, bones. Human and not. Arranged like prayer.
Each rib cage carved with numbers, some still glowing faint.
They weren’t just soldiers they were test subjects.
People who had held the second disk too long.

Aya found a name among the dead.
It wasn’t hers, but she knew it: Jorah Talem.
Once a commander, once a traitor, once a father.
His story was banned, but here it waited, bleeding through.

The boy screamed, and a door opened underground.
No mechanism. No key. It just wanted them to see.
They descended down a staircase made of rusted memory.
At the bottom: silence thick enough to drown in.

In the center, a pedestal. On it, the third piece.
Black stone, cold to the touch, humming with something alive.
Aya didn’t reach for it she remembered the warning.
One saves. One destroys. But neither can be undone.

“I’m not ready she whispered, but her voice shook.
The boy stood back, tears dried into his cheeks.
“You were chosen before you were born,” he said.
His voice wasn’t his. It was someone else's memory.

The pedestal pulsed like a dying heartbeat.
As Aya stepped forward, everything around her changed.
The walls turned to mirrors. The mirrors showed her worst fears.
Zair burning. Her mother erasing her own name. Herself alone.

She fell. Not from force but from truth.
This was never about saving the world.
It was about deciding which version of the world survives.
Peace without memory. Or truth with eternal war.

She picked up the stone.
The tower roared. The ground split open like a mouth.
The Cradle’s core awoke, miles beneath their feet.
And something old began to rise toward them.

She turned to the boy except he was gone.
Not vanished. Replaced.
In his place stood a stranger with the same eyes.
“Not all of us were ever children,” he said coldly.