The doors didn't open.
Not for protocol. Not for threat. Not even for the Rift-marked man who had stabilized the sky.
Reven stood in the centre of the cold chamber, the light buzzing faintly overhead, and stared down the woman who had calmly declared him obsolete.
Kaela moved first. Her blade came halfway out of its sheath before the walls responded, pulses of energy shimmering through the floor tiles like coiled muscle beneath skin.
Lirien dropped into a low stance, her wings flaring slightly as a pair of Curated guards emerged from the side alcoves, silent, perfect, mirrored, and utterly non-hostile.
They didn't raise weapons. They didn't need to.
"We're not here for a fight," Reven said flatly.
"That's not up to you anymore," the woman replied. "It never was."
Reven's gaze held steady. "Then why invite me in?"
"To give you a choice," she said. "The same one we gave everyone else."
Kaela's voice was sharp. "And if we say no?"
The woman smiled. "Then you'll understand the cost of dissent."
They didn't attack. Not physically.
The test came in pressure. A wave of psychic noise that bloomed outward from the walls, subtle at first. Low frequency. Unnatural. It pressed behind the eyes, bent thoughts sideways. Like the Rift, but colder. Not truth. Interference.
Lirien staggered slightly and drove the butt of her spear into the floor, grounding herself.
Kaela bared her teeth, hand tightening around her hilt. Reven didn't flinch. The pulse increased. Not pain, but forgetting. A fog. A thinning of meaning.
He felt memories slip around the edges. His mother's voice. Kaela's laugh. The feel of his blade's hilt in his palm during the fight in the Vault of Embers.
They weren't being hurt.
They were being rewritten.
"No," Reven muttered, jaw clenched. "You don't get to take this."
The shard harness on his back flared, dim, but real. A flicker of heat against the cold static of the room. And the pressure stopped. The guards halted mid-step.
The light stuttered. The woman took a measured breath. "So you did keep part of it."
Reven straightened. "I kept enough."
"You've resisted longer than any projection," she said, sounding more impressed than disappointed. "But eventually, everyone sees that peace isn't built on memory. It's built on forgetting."
Kaela's blade fully cleared its sheath now.
"You keep talking about peace," she said. "But all I see are cells."
Lirien rose, her voice quiet but clear. "And prisoners who think they're volunteers."
The woman's expression hardened. The performance ended.
"You've made your position clear."
The doors opened behind them.
"Then leave. While it's still permitted."
They didn't speak until they were miles from the outpost, the moon pale over broken steel roads and fractured earth. The world here hadn't begun to heal like the Ember Valley had. It was colder. Hungrier.
Kaela spat into the dust. "Permitted. Like they're doing us a favour."
Lirien glanced at Reven. "What happens when they stop permitting?"
He didn't answer right away.
Because he already knew.
The Rift hadn't won. But something else had slipped through the crack it left behind. Not destruction.
Carefully constructed peace built on sanitized minds and removed memory. A new order for a world that was still reeling.
"They're not cleaning up," Reven said. "They're setting the table."
Kaela frowned. "For what?"
"For whatever comes next."
That night, Reven dreamt of fire.
Not from war.
From ceremony.
He stood in a ring of robed figures wearing mirrored masks. Their voices didn't echo. Their words didn't carry. But they each held a shard of something, fragments of light.
Not Riftlight.
Human memory. Burned. Purified.
He stepped forward to stop them.
But when he looked down, he was holding a mask too.
He woke before dawn, eyes burning.
Lirien sat across the low fire, watching him.
"Another one?" she asked.
"Worse," he said. "Familiar."
She nodded once. "They're getting closer."
"To what?"
"To knowing how to break you."
Reven stared into the fire for a long moment before answering.
"Then we break them first."