She kissed him goodbye, knowing he wouldn’t remember her tomorrow.

Her lips brushed the corner of his mouth like a falling thread of light. Revek tried to see her face, but it blurred—soft around the edges, dissolving the harder he focused. Her body shimmered pale and translucent, all outline and radiance, as if carved from moonlit reflection rather than flesh.

“You won’t remember me,” she said gently.

Her voice fractured into eight thin layers—echoes of itself, each drifting a split-second out of sync. The sound rippled through him, beautiful and unsettling. The echoes tightened, weaving themselves into a whispered verse:

White stone of silence,

hold what the heart won’t say…

Revek’s breath stalled.

Those weren’t her words.

That wasn’t her voice.

A second echo rose beneath it, soft but insistent:

Bury the echo, bind the day…

Her outline brightened, losing what little shape it had left. She leaned close once more—not warm, not human, but luminous.

“Let go,” she whispered, even as her final echo shattered like glass:

Witherite, keeper of the hidden way…

Light folded inward.

She vanished.

Darkness swallowed everything.

He woke hard on the cold floor of an Ordis maintenance corridor, lungs seizing as though he had fallen from a great height.

Fluorescent lights flickered overhead.

Distant alarms pulsed.

And in his mind, clear as breath:

Witherite, keeper of the hidden way.

Revek pushed himself upright, palms flat against the ground—then froze as he felt something clenched in his fist.

A stone.

Smooth.

Cold.

Pale as frost.

A thin white filament pulsed once inside it, like a heartbeat.

“Witherite,” he whispered, the name rising unbidden.

He stared at it.

He had never studied mineralogy.

Never heard that poem.

Never held anything like this.

Yet the lines glowed in his mind while everything else around them dissolved into static.

He tried to summon the minutes—or hours—before waking. A meeting? A briefing? A walk down this very corridor? Every attempt to grasp the memory made his vision tighten at the edges, as if a sealed door stood between him and the truth.

Revek pushed to his feet, feeling a strange lightness in his body and a heaviness everywhere else. The maintenance corridor was empty, too empty. The hum of machinery echoed down the steel-lined passage. No signatures on the scanners. No sign anyone had passed through recently.

Yet he felt watched.

Not stalked—observed, as though the air itself had taken an interest in his next breath.


He forced himself toward the main wing, trying to walk normally. The overhead displays flickered with mission updates:

CSD teams prepping gear.

Shuttle diagnostics finishing.

His name on the manifest—Commander Revek: Clearance Alpha.

Good. Routine. Predictable. Everything he had built his life around.

So why did each status line feel like something slipping out of his grasp?

Passing by a reflective panel, he paused. Not consciously—his legs simply stopped. His own reflection stared back at him: strong posture, crisp flight suit, glacial green eyes steady and focused.

Except they weren’t.

For a brief moment, the reflection’s eyes flickered—

lit from within by an unfamiliar white glow.

Then normal again.

Revek stepped back sharply.

His pulse hammered.

The stone in his pocket cooled further, as if trying to hide.


A pair of engineers approached at the far end of the hall, chatting idly. Revek straightened, masking the unease in his features.

“Commander,” one said with a respectful nod as they passed.

“Engineers,” Revek replied, voice steady.

They continued on, none the wiser.

Good.

He needed to appear normal.

Whatever had happened here—whatever he had forgotten—he couldn’t afford for anyone to see it on his face.

He reached the lift for the launch bays and stepped inside. The doors closed with a soft hiss, and for a moment the hum of the rising platform lulled him into stillness.

Then the lights dimmed.

Just a fraction of a second.

But in that fraction, he heard it again:

…keeper of the hidden way…

A whisper so faint it could have been imagined.

But it wasn’t imagined.

He felt the vibration of it travel down his spine.


The lift opened onto the shuttle corridor, alive with movement. Crew members loaded crates, voice-comms buzzed with last-minute updates, and the overhead rails clattered as mechanical arms adjusted fuel lines. Everything was orderly, chaotic, technical—perfectly Ordis.

Yet Revek felt as though he were moving through it from a great distance, an observer in his own deployment.

The weight in his flight suit pocket pulsed once.

Warm.

Warning.

Awake.

He forced his legs to keep moving.


The shuttle waited, engines rumbling in pre-launch cadence. Crew moved around him with clipped efficiency, voices blending into indistinct static. Revek paused at the threshold, brushing the inside of his suit where the stone rested. The material was too thick to feel anything through—yet he felt it anyway.

A faint warmth.

A presence.

A memory that wasn’t a memory.

The engines vibrated through the deck. The warmth sharpened—thin, bright, insistent.

Then the world fractured.

For an instant, the launch bay dissolved into a crystalline forest drenched in violet haze. Soft filaments drifted through the air like living threads. A winged figure stood between the trees—gleaming, opalescent, watching him with eyes far too gentle for the cold blooming in his chest.

And beyond that figure:

her.

The echo-woman.

Unfocused.

Impossible.

Reaching toward him with a hand made of light.

A thousand emotions slammed into him—fear, recognition, longing, loss—none of which he could name. He tried to speak, but the vision snapped shut like a door in a storm.

The launch bay returned in a rush.

Engines humming.

Coolant in the air.

The stone cooling rapidly, as if hiding everything it had just revealed.


Revek swallowed hard and stepped aboard.

The shuttle doors sealed behind him with a hiss that felt too final.

He took his seat, exhaling slowly. He pressed two fingers to the front of his flight suit one last time, feeling—not through logic or discipline, but through something deeper—the faint residue of a kiss he could not recall and a vision he could not justify.

He would not remember her.

He could not remember her.

But the ache left in him…

that remained.

Outside the shuttle, clamps disengaged. The vessel drifted free from the dock.

 toward a world that somehow, impossibly, had already seen him.