Chapter 1: The Spine in the Sand
There was a bone in the desert.
Not white. Not brittle.
But black, metallic, and pulsing with a slow heat.
They called it The Dead God's Spine.
I called it home. Or what was left of one.
My name?
Doesn't matter here. They called me "Graveborn."
Born during the plague storms, raised on ash and metal. No parents. No history. Just the dunes and the dead.
Scavenger. Parasite. Dust rat.
I've been all of them.
And on that day, I was about to die being one.
The sun blistered above me, the air so dry it shaved skin with every breath.
My sled dragged behind like a dying dog, its wheels squealing with rust.
I hadn't eaten in two days. Water had been gone since sunrise.
And still I walked.
Because if I stopped, I'd become another skeleton in the sand—picked clean by wind, vultures, or worse.
Then I saw it.
Half-buried in the dunes.
Three meters long. Seamless black. Veins of faint blue light throbbed under its surface like it was still... breathing.
A spine segment.
From the old gods, they said. From before the Reset. From a time when men flew through the stars and carved cities from sound.
Bullshit, all of it.
But relics like these sold. Or got you killed trying.
I crouched. No glyph wards, no tribal marks, no scavenger tags nearby.
Untouched.
Lucky. Too lucky.
That should have been my first warning.
I unslung my bone knife and wedged it into the segment's side. The metal sizzled against the blade, sending a spike of heat through my grip.
I gritted my teeth. Kept digging.
Something clicked.
A hatch snapped open—dust and pressure vented out with a hiss like breath from a corpse.
Inside lay a core.
Round. Cold-gray. Faintly glowing. Like a heart removed too late from a dying god.
I reached in—
And everything shattered.
"Welcome back, Retrieval Unit 7-Delta."
The voice wasn't spoken. It detonated inside my skull.
Monotone. Genderless. Mechanical.
And painfully familiar.
I fell backward, slamming into the sand. My vision fractured.
Then came the images.
Screaming skies. Towers of glass melting under beams of light.
Soldiers in chrome-skin armor marching in perfect sync into a collapsing sun.
A symbol—three concentric rings folding into a black cube.
A city floating in the sky. A name whispered from a mouth that had no face:
"Echelon Prime."
And then—
I saw myself.
But not as I was.
Taller. Clean. Eyes that burned gold.
Wearing a black exo-frame laced with circuits I couldn't read.
I blinked, and he was gone.
The world slammed back.
Just sand. Just sky.
The only thing real was the core in my hand, pulsing like it recognized me.
My lungs heaved like I'd run for miles.
Was I hallucinating? Had the heat cooked my brain?
No.
Too clean. Too sharp. Too deliberate.
I clutched the relic to my chest, shaking.
A wind howled across the dunes. In the far distance, I could see the Obelisk Spires of Darsuun—tall slave towers casting shadows over the eastern wastes. I knew I had to move before the sun dipped. Before the raiders rode again.
But I couldn't stop thinking about the voice.
Retrieval Unit 7-Delta.
Who the hell was that?
Who the hell had I been?
They say memory is fragile.
But what if it's not?
What if it's locked?
What if the Reset didn't just erase the past…
It buried it inside us?
I stared at the horizon, but my mind was on the images. The tech. The war. The silence.
And the final, inescapable truth pulsing louder than my heartbeat:
This world is a lie.
And I—
I just became its glitch.
That night, I made camp inside the ribcage of the fallen spine. The heat had faded, but the relic still glowed faintly beside me—warm like a heartbeat, constant like breath.
Sleep came in fragments. Each time I closed my eyes, the visions returned. Cities burning. Orders given. My voice in someone else's mouth.
Before dawn, I heard it.
A crunch of sand.
Far off. Too distant to be wind.
I froze, barely breathing.
Another sound. Voices. Muffled. Male. Laughing.
Scavengers.
Raiders.
I killed the fire, grabbed the relic, and slipped into the shadows.
They hadn't seen me—yet.
But they were here.
And they were looking.