The ground had stopped shaking. The screams, the tears, the battles… all now seemed to belong to another era, another world.
They had been gathered without understanding, escorted into a heavy silence toward a massive airplane — a survivor of forgotten technology. It loomed in the center of the clearing, deployed like an ancient beast. The sky had opened, not to freedom, but to suspended expectation.
Lior and Dean had disappeared into the crowd. He had not seen them again. And in the chaos, he hadn't called out.
He had no name. Not yet a form. He was a void between two states.
And it was there, in that void, that the Codex awakened.
The vessel hummed beneath the weight of absolute silence. Onboard, faces were frozen, thoughts adrift. Some prayed. Others cried silently. They all understood that the old world was gone — but none yet knew what the new one would be.
In a corner of the craft: him. The one still called "The Nameless One."
But that title, now, was too small for what he carried within.
His gaze was empty. His hands barely trembled. The Codex rested on his knees like a slumbering beast. It pulsed softly, as if breathing. He opened it slowly, with the solemnity of someone who knows they will not return.
A soft, unreal light emerged from its pages, caressing the features of his face like the palm of a forgotten god.
A question, simple and abyssal, bloomed in his mind:
"What do you choose to sacrifice to create?"
He searched — in his pockets, in his memory, in his soul.
He had nothing.
So he whispered:
"I sacrifice all memory tied to the writer I once was."
The Codex trembled more violently. An unseen wind swept through the cabin. And a voice — ancient, benevolent, and cruel at once — responded:
"What you offer is like the priest who devotes his life to prayer and finally meets his god. It is the dreamer who, eyes fixed on the stars, finally touches them. What do you desire in return for this sacrifice?"
He didn't hesitate. He had known it all along. A truth buried, not forgotten.
"I want a book that records everything I do. Everything. From the smallest motion to my final breath. I want nothing to escape me. Not even a sigh in my sleep."
The Codex opened by itself. A golden quill appeared, suspended between two worlds.
It waited.
He reached for it, took it, and wrote — line by line, with a precision almost sacred:
> — Let every action, every blink, every tremor, every choice — even the unconscious — be written in the Book.
— Let the Book bind itself to me, follow me, observe me, and never abandon me.
— Let this Book be my mirror, my twin, my silent Judge.
When it was done, he closed the Codex.
He stood.
The silence in the aircraft turned absolute.
All eyes turned to him — as if something invisible had just occurred, as if everyone felt, without knowing why, that a new center had just formed amid the chaos.
He drew a breath.
His back straightened. His lungs filled.
And when his voice rose, it was calm, steady — but immense:
"Pleased to meet you. My name is Alphan Trystan."
A collective breath passed through the cabin.
Modigeur laughed, caught off guard:
"Pleased to meet you, my friend."
Leonardo raised an eyebrow, intrigued:
"Your name is… unique. Did you just invent it?"
Alphan Trystan smiled. A sad smile, but a true one.
"Who knows?"
Derrick, the cyborg, stared at him for a long moment, as if trying to glimpse a possible future within that new name.
Émilie opened her eyes for the first time in hours. Her dark gaze seemed to flicker with brief light.
Leira, the spectral one, floated slightly higher, her azure eyes glowing with silent emotion.
Vichir looked down, murmuring something in a forgotten tongue.
And then, in a solemn gesture, the Codex closed. The quill vanished. A mark appeared on Alphan's forearm — invisible to the naked eye, but searing in the soul. A signature. A pact.
In this aircraft, hovering between the remains of fate and the birth of something new, a spark had been relit.
Alphan Trystan was no longer an empty name.
He was now a statement.
And history could begin again.