They stood before it—the Myth Engine—a celestial device of impossible architecture, hovering above the ruins of the forgotten world once called Zephra Prime. Aiden could feel its pulse in the marrow of his bones. It didn't run on electricity or quantum fuel. It ran on stories.
Lira stepped forward, her voice hushed. "This is where their power comes from. Not from machines. From the control of narrative."
Aiden nodded. The Architects hadn't merely enslaved species—they'd rewritten their histories. Erased triumphs, inserted obedience, made myths of freedom vanish like dreams at dawn. But now, with the Earth awakening, the balance was shifting.
He walked toward the Engine, each step sending ripples through the tapestry of memory surrounding them. Isaiah followed, weapon at the ready, though both knew that in this place, bullets and plasma meant little.
"This is your domain now," Isaiah said. "Your battlefield."
Aiden closed his eyes.
Instantly, his consciousness split into layers:
One layer was the boy on the ship, trembling.
Another was the dreamer who warned cities of future floods and fires.
Another was the myth—half-formed, barely believed.
He drew them together.
And the Engine responded.
It bloomed open like a flower of possibility, petals made from lost tales, each one glowing with scenes: rebellions erased, leaders unsung, loves unspoken.
A chorus echoed around them.
The Remembered had followed. Not physically—but through the dreamline, the shared memory-stream now connecting millions. Their belief in Aiden, in the war against forgetting, flowed into him.
The Myth Engine roared to life.
The sky split. Stars blinked out as the Architects retaliated, hurling conceptual weapons—paradoxes, causality bombs, silence spheres.
But it was too late.
Aiden had become something else.
He was no longer a single life. He was continuity.
From the Engine's heart, Aiden projected a new myth: the story of Earth fighting back, of dreamers waking, of children turning trauma into power.
The Architects' palaces cracked.
Across distant galaxies, enslaved worlds began to remember their names.
The tide had turned.
Lira cried out as the narrative storm engulfed them. She clung to Aiden, tethering herself to his signal.
"Can we survive this?" she asked.
Aiden smiled, eyes glowing with the mythfire. "We don't have to survive. We have to persist."
He lifted his hand, and for a heartbeat, all stories converged.
The Engine sang.
And the universe began to rewrite itself.